[email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> Any fission reactor LEAVES A MESS for future generations, including the > fast breeders. > That is true. Yet despite this, and despite the terrible problems at Fukushima, I still think nuclear reactors are better than fossil fuel alternatives such as coal and natural gas. I still hope the reactor in Georgia is completed. There is no doubt that fission reactors leave a mess for future generations but it will probably be less of a mess than alternatives because: The total mass of the mess is surprisingly small and it is concentrated in a small, well-defined area, rather than being spewed out in the air and over the landscape the way radioactive products from coal are. Nuclear power does not cause global warming. It is better to leave a pile of radioactive garbage than global warming. Posterity may be upset with us but I think they will be able to deal with the mess much better than we can. I hope they will have better technology. I am sure they will have robots far better than ours which are capable of doing the physical work of moving, packaging or burying the nuclear waste. It is conceivable that nuclear theory may improve and they will find a way to neutralize or "use up" the fuel to the extent that not much radioactive material is left in it. In other words, breeder reactors may improve tremendously hundreds of years from now. In the distant future, people may have something like an extremely reliable space elevator. I mean an elevator that handles millions of tons of freight and passengers and has not had an accident in over 100 years. With something like that, they might package up the nuclear waste, put it in orbit, and drop it into the sun or store it on the moon. This might call for an extra "strand" (elevator path) dedicated to dangerous or radioactive freight only. That would be a tremendous expense today, with a first generation space elevator, but centuries from now it might be a trivial expense equivalent to a few million dollars. I doubt there will ever be antigravity spacecraft and I do not think that rockets will ever become reliable enough to carry radioactive waste from earth to orbit, but we cannot rule out these possibilities. Rockets are extremely unreliable today despite 70 years of intense development. But if space elevators are not developed, perhaps rockets will become so reliable they go for decades or centuries without an accident. From the 1920s to the present day, airplanes went from being the most dangerous mode of transportation to the safest per passenger mile, despite the inherent danger of traveling close to the speed of sound 10 km above the ground. I would not want to transport nuclear waste on airplanes -- or rockets, no matter how safe they become. But perhaps some method of packaging the material can be developed that would survive a crash, or falling from orbit. We are talking about the distant future, in any case. I have read discussions about how we have to make sure people know that nuclear waste is dangerous thousands or tens of thousands of years into the future. I do not think this will be necessary. I expect that before thousand years have passed people will deal with the waste that we have now generated. A thousand years is not very long. There are many buildings, infrastructure such as roads and irrigation lakes, and institutions such as universities, and even a few Japanese companies that have continued for a thousand years. They have detailed records of what they did circa 1000 AD. They know where their ancestors put things, and why they put them there. - Jed
