One thing I've always wondered is why no one seems to have suggested
just sending it off into space?
M
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith
Hudson
Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2013 1:43 PM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; pete
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Washington State nuclear waste leak
At 09:12 24/02/2013, Pete wrote:
(PV) I disagree, in as much as problems at Hanford do not reflect
anything about the current state of nuclear technology.
Hanford is not a commercial power station, it is a federal research
establishment and part of the weapons infrastructure The closest
Canadian equivalent would be Chalk River, but there is really no
equivalent as we made no attempt to refine isotopes for weapons in
Canada.
(KH) Our equivalent in the UK is Sellafield with scores of waste tanks
(some
leaky) contaning radioactive liquids of long half-life that should
have been sequestered decades ago. One of the reasons why a solution
has not yet been found is the poor quailty of scientists and engineers
attracted to a career in nuclear projects. Whereas, 70 years ago, it
took dozens of the world's most brilliant physicists to construct the
nuclear bomb, today, most UK universities (201 out of 203) eschew
teaching nuclear engineering because they can't attract students of
any calibre. Our Nuclear Inspectorate has been under strength.
(PV) But Chalk River was a reasearch institute active during the
early years of exploring nuclear energy, and it also has great
warehouses full of hazardous materials.
We have learned much from the activities in these projects, and no
one today would consider storing nuclear wastes as liquids in tanks,
certainly not from power plants, which shouldn't produce such material.
Canadian heavy water reactors, which I might remind you, can run
quite happily on what is considered the spent fuel of a US light
water reactor, typically run on unenriched uranium, which requires no
exotic processing to prepare, and when spent, in a CANDU reactor, it
is really quite spent, and can be prepared as a solid waste block
encapsulated in glass, and stored underground in the same mines from
which it was extracted, nested in gravel beds in the Canadian Shield,
where there is zero risk of groundwater contamination nor exposure
via earthquakes or whathaveyou.
(KH) I didn't know the above, but the point is taken -- apart from "zero"
risk.
(PV) I don't have any really strong opinions about the adoption of
nuclear energy one way or the other, but most criticisms I hear of
the industry just aren't up to speed with the current state of the
technology. Pointing at 60 year old mistakes as a reason to dismiss
the current technology makes no sense.
(KH) One 60 year-old mistake is that no insurance corp has yet agreed
to cover nuclear reactors. Another fact of the last 60 years is that
no civil engineering firm that has been all too eager to design and
build a reactor has yet agreed to run them and to supply electricity
at the price stated on the tin (that is, the low price that
politicians keep on telling us is the real price) -- or indeed to run
them at all. What's more -- considerably more -- is that the cost of
sequestering radioactive wastes year after year, or rather century after
(Even glassified blocks, buried at very deep level has to be inspected
regularly so that its safety for hundreds of generations of humans is
assured.) The long and the short of both of the above facts is that
nuclear power has had to be subsidised before, during, and after
construction. We've never been given the true costs of nuclear-generated
