Could we not fill abandoned oilfields with nuclear waste?

I'm not sure the toxic waste would be more dangerous than the oil (if we hadn't used it up) in a few thousand years so we'd simply be replacing one danger with another.

 

Key word "Producer"... not user. The Chinese know exactly where they get the most bang for the buck. They gladly sell things they would rarely consider using themselves. So it selling imperfect technologies, of minimum value to the righteous weenies that will buy it, is "getting it right", then I agree with you. They are laughing all the way to the bank...smoke stacks blazing.

The way I see it is we don't have to store the waste for thousands of years, just until cost/pound of achieving orbit drops to levels at which commercial spaceflight is viable. All we have to do then is ship the waste to orbit, strap a booster onto it and point it at the sun/one of the gas giants.

The radioactive halflife of spent nuclear fuel is really really long. I forgot the exact number, but I recall something like 25 000 years for ²³⁹Pu . It will be more dangerous than oil for a long time. And you can't guarantee that it would be concealed down there for as long as it takes or that the knowledge that nuclear waste is dangerous will be around at that time either. After all, high civilizations and their knowledge disappear all the time from the face of the earth and digital storage isn't really all that durable. Doesn't a CD break in ca 30 years and becomes unreadable? One reason why the digitalization of the world's literature isn't really preserving it for the future because you would have to constantly copy the  data to keep it available. A library with real book in it is much more practical in the longrun. I do like projects like "Projekt Gutenberg" because it is convenient to be able to download alot of literature right on my PC, but I love to go to the library as well. One good thing is that books will probably survive a few thousand years - at least archeologists in the future have a chance to find them. Wether they understand what they find is another question. It is an interesting field in semiotics.

Wow. You assume too much for my liking here. And it is very risky to bank your hopes on future developments of technology to solve a problem that you create but can't solve yourself at the moment. What if that development doesn't come? Or if something goes wrong and the whole damn thing explodes on its way to orbit? Be that as it may, alot of nuclear waste is produced already so we do need a solution for that even if everybody were to stop using nuclear energy at once around the world.

Eh.. it probably has lot to do with prestige as well. They like to show that they are the greatest nation on earth by doing projects like that stupid 3 gorges dam they built for which the government forcefully resettled a few million people. Not to mention all the ecological problems it creates. And the Chinese are a kings of plagiarism, but the quality really sucks most of the time.

That's assuming that there would be an equal amount of both.

I don't think the nuclear waste of one power plant is as dangerous a find as all the oil that would be needed to produce the same amount of electricity.

 

Nobody has to guarantee it. The knowledge will come to future humanity after the first few thousand deaths, just like it did to us.

That number is still a lot lower than the number of people we would lose if we didn't have access to the electricity or, presumably, if we keep producing CO2 by burning oil instead of using nuclear power.

Aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered and I understand they saved thousands of lives after the tsunami.  Did a single use of nuclear power here save more lives than all the nuclear waste from reactors will ever cost?

Do you know the impact of Chernobyl? It was 56 direct deaths and approx. 4000 cancer deaths (in 600,000 people exposed) over their lifetime.

I doubt that a nuclear waste site is more dangerous than an exploding power plant.

And I guess that a lot more than 4056 lives were saved in the Soviet Union because the country had access to nuclear power.

 

Well, thanks to Obama and his cutting of NASA space funds (note, I understand he is increasing their AGW funds), that may be thousands of years.

I never argued against finding a place to reliably store current nuclear waste, just over the length of time it would have to remain sequestered there. Obviously launching this material to space will require new systems to prove themselves before we put any waste up in them, but in the mean time we can utilize vitrification processes and reactors designed to consume nuclear waste as a fuel.

It is completely unreasonable to assume that the cost of spaceflight will never drop below what it is today. Currently it costs between $10,000 and $40,000 to launch one kg of material into orbit. The Falcon9 rocket, scheduled for its maiden flight sometime early this year(http://www.spacex.com/updates.php#Falcon9Update081507), has a listed price of $49,500,000 for 10450kg or about $4736.84/kg for a launch from Cape Canaveral(http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php). Obviously, this is still ridiculously expensive compared to the cost of transporting the material across continents to an underground depot, but it is a stepping stone toward cheaper rocket based launch systems while other, less explosive methods for achieving orbit are explored.

Of all the manned flights performed by NASA, I can only find one catastrophic failure during liftoff resulting in explosion mentioned, or a 0.64935% chance of failure resulting in explosion, which to me is an acceptable percentage for launches.

Yes well, I'd rather have ZERO chance of the equivalent of a nuclear bomb exploding in low orbit. One human error or maintenance oversight, miscalculation or otherwise could cause a huge accident that would probably cause alot of radioactive fallout. It's like detonating a bomb. 100% security is hard to achieve though.

Dumping the whole meess into the sun would be nice.

I guess you haven't heard about  the secret cities and research reactor projects in the USSR where alot more people were and are exposed to toxic environments. In some places, they just dumped the whole lot in huge surface dumpsters like in Lake Karachay, where they had simply poured the waste from Mayak nto the lake. A unprotected person would recieve a deadly dose of radiation within a hour LINK  The Techa river is also heavily polluted with radiation, and that is just one example. People are sick and die all over the place due to radiation. After the accident/catastrophy in Kyshtym in 1957where a nuclear waste tank exploded in Mayak and many people were affected, the russian government didn't tell the people what happened (it was a secret research facility) and started to study the longterm effects on the population as in a huge experiment with human guineepigs. They are still doing it too. When asked, the health office for the region stated that there are no problems at all, that everything was just perfect.

Yeah - it's just like oil, no danger at all and only a few people died all in all. You assume that people would have the knowledge and knowhow to identify the threat in the future and also to have an idea how to stop it. Arguing that nuclear power saved more than it killed is not valid because we can't really estimate how the future will be affected and the balance could tip pretty quickly into the exact opposite of what you said. And because we don't know what will happen with nuclear waste, it is unethical to just produce more and more anyway with the hope that it will all turn out alright somehow. Thinking about all the nuclear threats as in sowjet nuclear subs rusting in the harbours like radioactive time bombs is giving me the chills - I avoid doing it too much and just pretend (like many) that nothing will happen because nothing happend so far.

No, it's not like detonating a bomb. You are confusing radioactivity with an explosion.

It is unlikely that the radioactive waste we'd send to the sun would be a bomb. (And by "unlikely" I don't mean that it's a possibility, I mean we would send _nuclear waste_ and not a bomb.)

And radioactivity does not cause explosions.

 

Well, if those cities are secret then perhaps I hadn't heard of them.

Or I didn't consider them part of the nuclear power infrastructure.

You seem to want to add any type of weird experiment or Soviet crime to the discussion as if it had anything to do with nuclear power per se. But in that case we could also dismiss solar panels because they could be used to hit people.

What's that supposed to mean: "I guess..."? Did you really run out of points and hence had to bring up a sarcastic straw man? It's like saying that getting hair cuts is bad because Hitler got hair cuts. GENERALLY hair cuts are a good thing.

Yes, the Soviet Union did bad things with nuclear power. But they also did bad things with almost everything else they touched.

 

If the argument is not valid then neither is the argument that nuclear power might kill more people in the future.

So what other arguments against nuclear power do you have, now that the number of deaths caused by using or not using nuclear power is not a valid argument and that I have pointed out that Soviet experiments have nothing to do with commercial nuclear power generation?

Your entire point was about the future and now you are telling me that since I have a different vision of the future than you we cannot use what happens in the future as an argument because the balance could tip over?

I see your balance tipping over and raise you a "neither of us knows what costs or saves more lives".

So it's down to all the other arguments for or against nuclear power, I suppose.

 

 

 

By size you probably mean area. 695621 km² (Texas) vs 357111 km² (Germany). There is technology to transfer energy over huge distances (from Moscow to eastern Siberia for example) without losing a significant amount of energy. It is called HVDC (High-voltage direct current). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

 

Thus size is not as much of an argument. Moreover: More area means more places to put wind turbines and solar panels.

 

Rethinking Nuclear Power.  http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4092

Smart grids and plug in hybrids.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSdnycHfLnQ

I think we could reverse that chart inside of 20 years without even touching wind and solar, and save this country money.

Structual batteries.

http://www.physorg.com/news184585514.html

Leauki, I didn't try to be very sarcastic. I think the Sowjet Union is a good example of what can happen if one acts irresponsibly and the amount of damage that can be caused, with long term negative effects for both man and the environment. I trust that the US and most european nations are handling their nuclear waste and also the power and research plants responsibly, but I don't trust Russia nor China nor India or Pakistan to do the same. And even here, accidents do happen.

Radioactive waste that explodes would be dispersed over a large area and as such irradiate a large area. It's not a bomb, no. But I still don't want a cloud of radioactive smoke over my head. And as the accident from Kyshtym showed, nuclear waste _CAN_ explode on its own if the right conditions are there, like a failed cooling system which caused everything to overheat. Can you really guarantee that no technical malfunction, no human error will occur? Because nothing below 110% certainty is acceptable for me with nuclear waste. It is a tragedy, really, that most decisions regardng nuclear waste are political and not scientific ones. You're trying to sell it as a only positive technological means toproduce cheap and clean power as well. Long term, it is neither cheap because you have to take care of the waste which is expensive nor clean because the waste is really toxic.

And whats with your exmple of haircuts? Nuclear energy  _always_ creates nuclear waste, there is no way to avoid it. Haircuts in this case are always bad. Commercial, civilian or military use, nuclear power creates waste that is highly dangerous. I don't have to have a _better_ argument than creating waste that we can't really deal with in the sense that we can't guarantee a safe repository for the next few tenthousand years right now and which can pollute and kill the environment and everything in it is dangerous and should be avoided if other means to generate power are available, which they are.

But we are discussing whether we, the US and Europe, should use nuclear power or not. We cannot stop Russia or Pakistan using nuclear power even if we stop using it.

 

The point was that a good thing (or a bad thing) can be used by bad people.