How are nuclear waste and a more than 1percent chance of uninsured catastrophic faillure not a serious concernant?
I'm sorry. Your wording just struck my funny bone. Living here in Ecotopia, I sometimes forget that there ARE serious Environmentalists. I seem to be surrounded by the other kind. If there are any Environmentalists giving serious thought to nuke power, they have been drown out by their compatriots.
Though this is probably more of a me problem than an Ecotopia problem. If I lived in Mississippi, I am sure I would be complaining about rednecks.
As to your concerns, waste and uninsured catastrophic failure, well, let's look at them.
Waste. Yeah, this sucks. No question. But mainly because we are pretty stupid in how we deal with it. It's been a never ending circle jerk of temporary impractical solutions, and political hackery. There's nothing promising in the future, so long as we keep going down this path.
But it's not the only path. For instance, most plants store all of their waste on site, waiting for that regulated solution. It has worked for decades, imagine how much better it would work if that was the design, to permanently house the waste with the plant. No moving waste across the country, no NIMBYS, and the frankly shocking idea that the beneficiaries of power plants should shoulder some of the burden of their pollution.
Vitrification solves the solubility issue. Casting waste in glass makes it pretty chemically and physically inert. Just leave it in a safe place, and let time do what it does.
Radioactive waste still generates heat. Enough heat to require cooling. Or, thought of another way, even the waste keeps generating energy. If only it were possible to transfer heat, somehow, this might be thought of as a benefit.
We are building a coal plant each week. And coal produces more radioactive waste than nukes. It's not a choice between ideal solar thermal and nukes, it's a choice between coal, natural gas, and nukes. It sure looks like nukes win on the environmental front.
As to the catastrophe of a core melt down, it's scary, but not very scary. Let's look at examples.
Three mile island. Running at 97%of capacity, the system had a glitch, and went into auto shut down. Operators couldn't get a good grip on what was going on, so they dumped the coolant. The core overheated, and melted down. 0 casualties.
Chernobyl, this was the colossal Fup, all the way around. It's not surprising that it happened, it's surprising that it only happened once. Operators that didn't understand that there was a unstable lower limit to production from that style of plant. Test designers who also didn't. This wasn't an accident, it was clusters of incompetence.
But it was also a worst case. Explosion of fuel and graphite from the containment chamber. Other sites had a bit of radioactive steam, but Chernobyl was a whole other level. 30+ casualties.
Fukashima was a 9.0 quake on the coast and tsunami, with a 7.1, another 7.1, and a 6.8 follow up quakes. Over a thousand deaths and 4 reactors down. But those are separate numbers. There was an earthquake and tsunami, that killed a thousand people. The reactors withstood them. But despite evidence of high tsunami potential, nobody moved the generators up the hill. Running a nuke plant without power turns out to be disastrous. It seems that making a nuke power plant should incorporate a self powered shutdown, and enough back up energy to pull it off. Maybe finding sites off the coast would be a good idea. 0 casalties from radiation exposure, but many from the overall events. Hundreds of people exposed to elevated radiation levels.
Go to:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/informatio ... dent.aspx and scroll down to the map showing radiation levels, both at the time, and 5 years letter. Then realize that the orange red color, is roughly equivalent to the background radiation level of the Colorado Plateau.
Fukashima generated a lot of hype, but really, it seems less desastrous than the Exxon Valdez, environmentally.
So that's a total of 40 or so deaths and a few hundred cases of radiation exposure, over the course of 5 or 6 decades, worldwide. It seems that nuke power is far, far safer than lawn mowers. Or laundry detergent. Or every single chemical under your sink. The CDC has a database of this stuff, if you want to check.
These horribly technical, complex systems that are so uncontrollable, are plumbing systems. And the fuel handlers in the reactor chamber? They have nothing on any robotic arm on a modern assembly line. We can back up power for server farms, I'm sure we can get backup power for a nuke shutdown. I am certain that a secondary, fully redundant cooling system can be incorporated. I have a hard time swallowing the "too complicated, therefore it must fail" reasoning. It's just not that much more complicated than any other power station.
Waste is complicated. But it doesn't have to be. Currently, every American nuke plant has temporary onsite storage. But the whole plan is sketchy. Every bureaucrat everywhere has an objection to radioactive waste moving through every jurisdiction. So storing radioactive waste in steel drums below the water level next to a major river (Hanford style) seems out. But moving waste to a central storage facility also seems out.
But why not just store waste on site? The reactor core only lasts sixty years or so. It's set up for containment. Waste still produces heat, but it's a power plant, it can use waste energy. Just build the next reactor right next to it. Seal up the old one and monitor it from the new plant. Use vitrification when it makes sense to avoid risk with waste reactivity. Keeping all radioactive materials on the same site has other benefits. It's easier to simply secure materials on the same site that has nuke power security, anyway. No need to transfer waste, with incumbent risk of accidents. All the instrumentation to remotely monitor has already been installed. And build the cost of permanent waste storage into the cost to construct a nuke site. Eventually, it will be worth changing reactor types to reuse the waste stored onsite.
On the surface, there doesn't seem to be any problem with nukes that doesn't originate from fearmongering or regulations. It's hardly ideal, but certainly better than a new coal plant each week.