While we don't agree with everything Chu says here by a fair margin, he does evince a desire to move theory into practice - a good goal for a government scientist. Right now, compared to conventional coal, it looks good - what are the lesser of two evils? But if we can reduce the volume and the lifetime of the waste, that would tip it very much against conventional coal. At a thousand years, even though that's still a long time, it's in the realm that we can monitor - we don't need Yucca Mountain.Īnd all of a sudden the risk-benefit equation looks pretty good for nuclear. So it goes from a couple-hundred-thousand-year problem to a thousand-year problem. Suppose instead that we can reduce the lifetime of the radioactive waste by a factor of 1,000. That's still a long time, and then after that the idea was that the very dense rock, very far away from the water table will contain it, so that by the time it finally leaks down to the water table and gets out the radioactivity will have mostly decayed.
THE SEEKER THE WHO NO NUKES PLUS
But the current best estimates - and these are really estimates, the Lab's in fact - is that the metal casings will probably fail on a scale of 5,000 years, plus or minus 2. The other thing is that storing the fuel at Yucca Mountain is supposed to be safe for 10,000 years. Well, we don't have three or four Yucca Mountains. So we need three or four Yucca Mountains. Why? Because if you take all the waste we have now from our civilian and military nuclear operations, we'd fill up Yucca Mountain. The technology of separating and putting the good stuff back in to the reactor can also be used to make bomb material.Īnd then there's the waste problem: with future nuclear power plants, we've got to recycle the waste. The real rational fears against nuclear power are about the long-term waste problem and proliferation. Right now about 20 percent of our power comes from nuclear there have been no new nuclear plants built since the early '70s. Should fission-based nuclear power plants be made a bigger part of the energy-producing portfolio?Ībsolutely. So what about nuclear energy and used fuel? Has Chu addressed these topics at length? In fact, he has, for example in this 2005 interview with UC Berkeley's Bonnie Azab Powell: It's an issue that has to dealt with regardless and without the deep swoons that often accompany the topic.Īnd one thing Chu doesn't seem to be, it's swoonish. We'd say, completely parenthetically, that coal has had an exceptionally bad couple of weeks.Ībout used nuclear fuel: closing all nuclear plants doesn't forestall having to deal with storage. And the Obama campaign made clear that increased reliance on nuclear power will require finding a “safe” way to dispose of radioactive waste. A big part of the Department of Energy’s job is to oversee nuclear weapons and waste storage. “The waste and proliferation issues still haven’t been completely solved,” he said.
That doesn’t mean nuclear power is much better. Chu says a typical coal plant emits 100 times more radiation than a nuclear plant, given the flyash emissions of radioactive particles. Worried about radioactivity? Coal’s still your bogeyman. Here's the Wall Street Journal's Keith Johnson buffing a legend that might alarm you a little: So let's see what legend is developing around Dr. And it can warp the truth rather severely. Once a legend develops, it can be devilishly hard to shake loose of it. Here's the question: Did Senator Ransom Stoddard begin his sterling Senatorial career and usher in statehood for Arizona by shooting bad man Liberty Valance? After we learn the truth, a newspaper editor sagely concludes, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." He had in mind the George Washington-cherry tree kind of legend, but it works equally well with, say, the Al Gore-internet kind of legend.
THE SEEKER THE WHO NO NUKES MOVIE
So how is Steven Chu playing as the purported candidate for Department of Energy secretary? Before we look at the developing narrative, let's remember the lesson of John Ford's movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
0 kommentar(er)
