Posts
Nuclear Energy is not Clean Energy
10:19 AM Posted In ecology , energy , environment , science Edit This 1 Comment »The biggest problem with the mini nuclear reactors is the nuclear waste. The units would require refueling every 7-10 years, indicating that waste would be produced. Considering our current method of disposal is encasing it in cement and burying it and pray that in the next 1,000 years it doesn't leak or accidentally become unearthed, the mass sales estimated by Hyperion would produce large amounts of radioactive waste which we would simply bury.
Bronn said that our technology tends to develop only once a need arises (a.k.a. "necessity is the mother of all invention"), and we would come up with a better method. It is dumb and irresponsible to create radioactive waste on these levels before having a viable solution for dealing with the waste.
And no, we can't shoot it into space either for a number of reasons.
1 comments:
I have to side with Bronn on this one. While I agree that simply burying waste is irresponsible, I've never understood the paranoia bout launching waste to space. For starters, the overall mass of this stuff is incredibly low (comparatively), so it is economically viable. Second, it can in theory be safely done. This article (http://www.thespacereview.com/article/437/1) does a good job explaining it, but basically the idea is that, since we can subject nuclear waste to as much acceleration as we want, we can fire it into space using ground based launch systems that are extremely dependable, but as yet unused because they would smash people and equipment to jelly. Add in small, shatterproof containers used by NASA to prevent contamination from nuclear fuel used in deep space robe launches (http://www.universetoday.com/2008/07/24/project-lucifer-will-cassini-turn-saturn-into-a-second-sun-part-1/), and we can easily shoot nuclear waste into the sun, in little pellets weighing ten pounds or so, with practically no chance of failure, and even then the amount in any particular launch would be small enough to cause negligible damage when dispersed over a huge area. It's certainly worth investigating, as this is an alternative energy plan that can be implemented NOW, while research into truly massive scale solar and wind energy is still ongoing.
~Reave
Post a Comment