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Post by MaybeNever on Mar 27, 2010 5:38:19 GMT -5
I'm a proponent of nuclear power, but handling the waste is absolutely a non-trivial problem. While I'm personally all in favor of flinging it into the sun, this is my position on a large number of topics and therefore may be of somewhat limited utility.
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Post by azolgar on Mar 27, 2010 5:57:15 GMT -5
While I'm personally all in favor of flinging it into the sun... Which is about as safe as shipping millions of tons of chemical waste across the atlantic in a canoe. The problem with nuclear waste is that this stuff will be around for millennia. It will continue to irradiate its surroundings for a dozen times longer than our entire civilization has existed so far. Using nuclear energy is just borrowing time and piling up problems for future generations. Not to mention that even uranium is limited. We (almost solely the developed nations) simply use up too much energy and there's too many of us. A stable population of a few hundred million in a handfull of different locations and humanity could keep going for millennia to come without a decline in technology. However, at the current rate we're starving ourselves of resources.
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Post by the sandman on Mar 27, 2010 9:12:24 GMT -5
Yeah, take the nukes and use them to build nuclear reactors. Creates jobs, and would probably help on your electric bill. It's not physically possible to use the fissionable material from a nuclear weapon to fuel a power plant. The material in a weapon is enriched about 90% or so, while that used in power generation is only around 10%. (I may be misremembering the specific numbers, but I'm almost positive that's real close.) Put that weapons-grade material in a power plant and you'd best have a really fast car and a rad suit.
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Post by canadian mojo on Mar 27, 2010 9:45:48 GMT -5
Yeah, take the nukes and use them to build nuclear reactors. Creates jobs, and would probably help on your electric bill. It's not physically possible to use the fissionable material from a nuclear weapon to fuel a power plant. The material in a weapon is enriched about 90% or so, while that used in power generation is only around 10%. (I may be misremembering the specific numbers, but I'm almost positive that's real close.) Put that weapons-grade material in a power plant and you'd best have a really fast car and a rad suit. I guess we'd just have to de-enrich it. That would make for some hideously expensive material. There are reactor models that use enriched uranium, although I don't think any use that level of enrichment. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the military models did since it would make for a very small and powerful reactor to stick in a sub or satellite.
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Post by safaraz on Mar 27, 2010 10:36:15 GMT -5
One slashdot a few days ago was a story about how a new design of nuclear reactor recycles it's waste fuel, and leaves basically no waste to be dumped etc, which is a huge step forward.
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Post by big_electron on Mar 29, 2010 6:28:55 GMT -5
It's not physically possible to use the fissionable material from a nuclear weapon to fuel a power plant. The material in a weapon is enriched about 90% or so, while that used in power generation is only around 10%. (I may be misremembering the specific numbers, but I'm almost positive that's real close.) Put that weapons-grade material in a power plant and you'd best have a really fast car and a rad suit. Take the weapon grade uranium, break it down into pellets that are much smaller than critical mass...
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