Not as much greens who oppose all things nuclear but joined with the nonproliferation movement which prevents us from building breeder reactors to burn up much of the problem waste for energy. Nuclear waste is a massive resource which we are wasting in cooling ponds while imagining trashing it underground, we could already be on a nuclear waste powered hydrogen powered economy if we only had the courage to end global warming.
Once again: All fission reactors produce fission products. If they âburnâ 100% of the fuel instead of only 10% (as the old-fashioned Fukushima type reactors do), they will make ten times as much fission product eventually.
And of course, everyone always starts harping about the carbon ⊠apples and vacuum cleaners.
If you want low carbon output, youâll stop bulldozing tropical forests to put in ârenewableâ biofuel plantations. And you will stop growing corn to ferment it for the ethanol. And stop supplying the worldâs belligerents with war weapons. etc. etc. etc. There are a lot of stupid things humanity does to increase the carbon content of the atmosphere, and nuclear is only tangentially related.
Bottom line is, we are going to use less energy in the future, and need to start organizing our thinking around that gorilla in the phonebooth.
I am so hard on the nuke industry because they need to repent. The last six or seven decades, they have been utterly arrogant and careless. When they really clean up the spew at Hanford and Sellafeld and wherever the Soviets had their evil labs, then they have a right to start selling their ideas. But if their only plan is to sweep it under the carpet and pretend it doesnât exist, then they need to be shut down.
Look, they spared no expense to separate one isotope from another back when they wanted to create a working pile. Well, they can bloody well do the same thing with their byproduct. In fact, there are uses for some byproducts . . . but just adding to the radiation load to all lifekind is not a good one.
Ahh, I was looking for something on dosages. So, if 100% I-129 adds up to 177 ”Ci, total body dose (and glossing over a number of units/time criteriaâŠ) then you probably wouldnât want your natural I-127 to be contaminated with much more than 3% or so of I-129. So thatâs a possible data point ⊠though of course all those dosage thingies from the MSDS in the labs tend to be guesses on the âconservativeâ side. Beware the dreaded hydronium hydroxide, eh.
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