You can't dismiss the waste problem out of hand given the environmental problems at places like Hanford [0] and the costs of safely decommissioning old plants, especially damaged ones like Fukushima [1]. There's abundant evidence that it's a costly, poisonous mess if done badly.
Personally I don't think this is the biggest problem with nuclear power, and it's certainly not in and of itself a reason to switch to alternatives. But it's not an issue to ignore either.
The output of a nuclear reactor isn’t waste, it is fuel for a different kind of reactor. If we built those reactors (called a breeder reactor) then we could safely and economically use that fuel, recycling so much that the actual waste would go from tons of material filling Olympic class swimming pools, to a few barrels. Nuclear power, done properly, is the cleanest source of energy we have.
Why don’t we? Politics and the lack of military uses.
As opposed to all those military uses of dams and wind turbines. Right. And of course, I wonder what the fuss is all about with Iran, then...
The reason nuclear is in decline is the track record of spectacular disasters: Three Mile, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima. Get at least a generation without massive failures, and people might be willing to give nuclear a chance; but there have been 3 in my lifetime alone!
(Plus, in any country not as big and isolated as the US, any plant is a massive weakness from a defense perspective...)
I mean, if you want to talk about safety records of power production, I'd like to point out that fossil fuels kill about 3 million a year, and biofuel (wood, dung) kills about 4.3 million a year. Those estimates are from 2012.
Nuclear is nowhere close to that over the past half century of use, even if you toss in fatalities caused by nuclear weapons, which is a whole different category.
Realistically, installation of solar and wind is actually more dangerous than Nuclear, because of falls.
What I mean is that the fuel reprocessing designs aren’t miniaturizable, so government money wasn’t spent developing them because they couldn’t be used in aircraft carriers or submarines. When civilian power plants were made, it was basically just scaled up military designs. The same contractors built both.
Also the fact that we use uranium instead of the safer and more abundant thorium is because you can’t make thorium bombs.
The reactors that have failed are these military derivative designs that lack safety features because there is no space for them in a submarine. No modern design has had such a failure, or could have such a failure since they have no reliance on active cooling and have safeguards to structurally prevent a core meltdown.
You can't bring up the externalities of Nuclear and then ignore the externalities of literally every other clean energy source. How many people in China were killed building Hydro plants, how many poisoned by heavy metals manufacturing solar equipment?
Nuclear has its issues, but everything else does too.
"how many poisoned by heavy metals manufacturing solar equipment"
Zero? How many people have died making manufacturing computers, tvs, toys, or appliances; all of which have all the same heavy metals as solar panels by virtue of being electronic goods? This is essentially FUD. A single PV panel can generate 5-10 Mwh over its service life, conservatively. On the low end that is equivalent to about 2 tons of coal. Since coal contains a broad cross section of heavy metals and they become more bioavailable when burned, I think you're better off with the panels.
Hanford is a cite of nulcear production for military use and there were problems with that.
It has little to do with nuclear waste for civilian use today and is in no way comparable to civilian nuclear waste and how it is stored.
Also, Fukushima is the exception of the exception, it is a bit of land that can not be used for long while its not a lot of land and its in a nuclear exclusion zone anyway.
I don't want to ignore the issue, but I will just say that the amount of time, ink and energy spend on it is way out of proportion to how much it matters
People keep making the argument that climate change is a existential issue but then saw, well, nuclear is not a solution because of this nuclear waste problem. That is insane reasoning in my opinion.
No, it actually is a problem. It has to be stored for millennia, and in a way that does not leak/contaminate surroundings (including ground water). Very little technology /materials can meet those requirements[0], and the current situation is a damn mess[1].
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (The same can't be said for coal waste - like just about everything else associated with burning coal, coal waste is an environmental diaster.)
Well, it's not, and there doesn't seem to be much focus by the DoE to do so. Therefore storage of waste is still a major problem if you want to generate electricity with nuclear power plants in the US.
The politics around nuclear waste are preventing the construction of reactor designs which exist today which could take waste that exists today and use it with an output with a much more manageable half-life than the waste we have just sitting around right now.
Right... The only technical problem, how to store waste indefinitely, is only a problem because there's a larger political problem that prevents the waste from being recycled/reused. Since the political problem is highly unlikely to be resolved within a few decades, that leaves us with the technical problem of how to deal with the waste as we are currently generating/storing it.
The amounts of hi-level waste generated are manageable and no one is claiming we are in danger of imminently running out of space. Long before this becomes a problem we will either recycle the waste or use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least.
Only if you don't use it. The intelligent thing would be to burn in in a subcritical reactor[0]. This would let you produce more electricity from nuclear "waste", turning it into different material that's safer to dispose of.
You'd think fossil fuels would have taught us the value of foresight wouldn't you? Even if you were aware of the consequence of excessive CO2 from the advent of the era, it could easily have been dismissed. 'Worrying about a bit of extra CO2 at the beginning of the industrial age is downright idiotic. There's a lot of atmosphere around our planet, and a bit of extra CO2 is good for the plants anyhow!'
There's a huge difference in nuclear going from a small chunk of our present day power generation to eras where some see it as being the primary generator for whatever exponential increases in energy we'll be using in the future. This change in scale really should affect how you look at things. Nuclear in particular has some pretty catastrophic fail scenarios, major decommissioning issues, and other problems. These can kind of be hand-waved away at current levels, but can't when you start talking about increasing operations on the order of magnitudes.
And when you start talking about things like this you're also implicitly alluding to breeder reactors, salt-water extraction, and other technologies that not only add substantial complexity (and side issues) but also greatly increase the costs relative to present day nuclear, which poses even more issues in terms of sustainability.
For all intents and purposes solar is pretty much a flawless method of energy production. The one issue is night time production, but there are countless ways to store energy even if we ignore more utopic scenarios like global high energy direct current lines constantly transiting energy to where it needs to go. Given the practically unlimited generation possibilities the loss of energy involved in either storage or transit are not really that big of a deal, and would not affect expected pricing the same way as dealing with nuclear's practical problems of scale will.
I am fully comfortable with that (not parent though) and have even done so on several occasions.
You do realize we can detect contamination by radioactive elements in quatities many orders of magnitude lower than could conceivably cause any harm right?
On the other hand, I live in Europe and our local government has yet to produce a complete environment monitoring fail such as the Flint incident in the USA.
I would consider Flint to be an infrastructure crisis rather than environmental. Lead piping and insufficient water treatment are due to infrastructure that is inadequate.
That doesn't change the amount of energy you receive from a radio tower at all...
You should be more worried about wearing sunscreen every day than the amount of energy you get from any wireless antenna. The sun puts out vastly more electromagnetic radiation than any wireless device ever will per cubic foot/meter/whatever.
http://www.deepisolation.com
They are a company to pay attention to IMHO.