Sweden, the public & Nuclear Power

[stoatsngroats]

I'm surprised, and encouraged, to see that....

"Public acceptance in both towns hovered around 80 percent."

...regarding the choice of a repository for nuclear waste.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090603/tsc-sweden-picks-site-to-bury-nuclear-wa-c2ff8aa.html

I feel that this is the kind of thinking we need here.......

 

[Mr Pig]

I feel that this is the kind of thinking we need here.

I feel that we should've thought a little harder about whether we really wanted to create material that was going to be dangerous for 100'000 years in the first place.

 

[stoatsngroats]

I feel that we should've thought a little harder about whether we really wanted to create material that was going to be dangerous for 100'000 years in the first place.

It'll be nice to hear you thoughts about the longevity of the more common fossil fuels, going forward....

 

[marinyork]

I don't see the relevence for the UK. The UK has a certain number of nuclear power stations that are falling in number. Whenever anybody wants to build anything new people in the media are dumb and dramatise it is "expanding" when infact quite often the number of proposed stations by the time they were built would constitute keeping things static/slight fall/big fall/slight gain. This happens with coal too. This goes on and on and never seems to focus on other important issues like our overpopulated planet, overconsumption and climate change.

 

[Night Train]

I feel that we should've thought a little harder about whether we really wanted to create material that was going to be dangerous for 100'000 years in the first place.

I often ask pro nuclear supporters what the cost of monitoring the waste for the next 100,000 years will be and who will be paying for it.

 

[stoatsngroats]

I often ask pro nuclear supporters what the cost of monitoring the waste for the next 100,000 years will be and who will be paying for it.

 

[ufkacbln]

I have a major problem at work last week,

There was no Molybdenum available due to a number of factors includingthe closure of the Chalk river reactor in Canada.

That means that some 20 cancer patients were delayed treatment and may have it put back another week still as we cannot perform diagnostic scans

There are too few reactors (5 in the world) capable of producing medical radioisotopes, and those that are vary between 40 - 50 years old.

There is a real need to invest in nuclear reactors for medical purposes if nothing else.

 

[Mr Pig]

I often ask what the cost of monitoring the waste will be and who will be paying for it.

And how do you know for sure the containment measures will work for that long. What if the rock erodes, shifts or cracks? How do you know that the containers will last that long without corroding away? Put simply, we don't and I don't think we should have created a problem that was beyond us to fix.

The point about fossil fuels is irrelevant. Had we not gone down the nuclear road would would have put more effort into alternatives and should the coal run out we'll do likewise. Nuclear energy was always a bad thing as removed the necessity to look for a better solution.

And who says we need a solution? What if there was less electricity available? We are always being told to use less power, well why don't they just make less? If electricity cost twice as much as it does now people would consider usage more carefully and use less. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Why is progress always measured in having more of everything?

 

[stoatsngroats]

Why is progress always measured in having more of everything?

 

[Night Train]

And how do you know for sure the containment measures will work for that long. What if the rock erodes, shifts or cracks? How do you know that the containers will last that long without corroding away? Put simply, we don't and I don't think we should have created a problem that was beyond us to fix.

The point about fossil fuels is irrelevant. Had we not gone down the nuclear road would would have put more effort into alternatives and should the coal run out we'll do likewise. Nuclear energy was always a bad thing as removed the necessity to look for a better solution.

And who says we need a solution? What if there was less electricity available? We are always being told to use less power, well why don't they just make less? If electricity cost twice as much as it does now people would consider usage more carefully and use less. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Why is progress always measured in having more of everything?

All good points.

The world we have made for us to live in uses so much more energy then can be sustainably supplied. We should be reducing our consumption of energy not finding even more energy to keep up with more energy hungry lifestyles.

Even sitting at home surfing the net is using more energy then it used to just to give the speed of connection that we are all told we must have.
Cars weigh 1.5 to 2 times more then they used to and use more energy running the huge electrical demand from the luxury items that are seen as essentials.

Perhaps each consumer of energy should have an energy ration that they had to live within. Once it is used up for the month there is no more until next month. A bit like one's salary. Just as a salary has a cost of living increase the energy ration could have a technology/life style advancement decrease. Every year the ration gets a little less as the consumer adapts to using less.

 

[Creamcrackered]

I used to work in this business and there are a couple of points worth making:
Whether you like it on not, the waste exists and we need to deal with it responsibly, not just leave it to the next generation to sort out. Equally, whichever way you look at it, it is safer deep underground than stored in buildings on the surface as it is at the moment, e.g., you can't bomb it or crash a plane into it and it isn't effected by hurricanes.
The containers are made from 50mm stainless steel and the waste is mixed with cement within them, however the safety case for the repository is based on the assumption that these containers will rust away after a couple of hundred years. Once the containers have corroded away, containment is provided by the bentonite cement that fills the repository. The cement holds the material, and because it is heavily alkaline prevents it going into solution and entering the groundwater.

 

[John the Monkey]

And who says we need a solution? What if there was less electricity available? We are always being told to use less power, well why don't they just make less? If electricity cost twice as much as it does now people would consider usage more carefully and use less. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Why is progress always measured in having more of everything?

Have you read David Strahan's "The Last Oil Shock"?

It's not the main point of the book, but one of the things he does argue is that humanity as a whole is, essentially, using up a vast, one off subsidy in the form of fossil fuels to sustain current population levels. (Not just in terms of providing big TVs et al, but far more fundamentally in terms of feeding all of us). Even if we drastically reduce personal mobility, the shortfall, once the oil runs out will be immense. If we don't have "more" of the alternative sources of energy, we'll have less population, and quite abruptly too.

Strahan does some calculation of the amount of wind power, solar power &c needed to sustain different levels of energy usage, and the results are not encouraging.

 

[zimzum42]

So we may as well just enjoy ourselves and stop worrying about 'future generations', since it's very unlikely they will ever get to enjoy our kind of lifestyle anyway...

 

[John the Monkey]

So we may as well just enjoy ourselves and stop worrying about 'future generations', since it's very unlikely they will ever get to enjoy our kind of lifestyle anyway...

I'd say that we need to think a bit more seriously about what's going to happen, personally, but your option is a possibility too

 

[Mr Pig]

humanity is using up a vast, one off subsidy in the form of fossil fuels to sustain current population levels..

I totally agree. If I were not a Christian I would be quite pessimistic. I find it hard to take in that people can be so short-sighted as to not not see that the way they're exploiting the environment is not sustainable.