At that time, going back 1.7 billion years, there was far more natural uranium in the crust than there was now and U235 was almost 3%. Just add water and fission occurs. This is what happened in what is not Oklo, Gabon in Africa. These suckers were uncontrolled fission for 500 million years or MORE. The water would evaporate, thus un-moderating the nuetrons, killing off the reaction. Then it would get wet again, etc, ad infinitum until the uranium deposit was burned up.

The WHOLE POINT of this is that the total left over ‘waste’ never, in a billion years, “moved” relative to other areas of Gabon, thus proving the ability, and safety, of geological storage of wastes.

left-atomics

Would you be so kind as to let me ask you the following questions:

A. How often does a radioactive atom emit radiation? Your choices for the answer are: 1) All the time; 2) Once in a while according to half-life; 3) Once; 4) Never; 5) I don’t know.

B. If you were forced to choose between putting five atoms of Uranium (long half-life alpha emitter) or five atoms of Bismuth-197 (short half-life alpha emitter), which would you choose?

These two questions are basic, elementary questions about how radioactive materials work. The answers have profound implications on the risk (or lack of risk) from radiation. If you cannot answer them correctly, then unfortunately you have been poorly educated about radiation. Note: this does not imply that you are dumb or stupid. Au contraire. It just means no one taught you how radiation works and how our bodies handle radiation effects.

There is a large fear in our society about radioactive waste disposal, but when one understands the implications of the above questions, the fear goes away. If you would like me to expand on this, let me know.

FYI: For my entire career, I’ve been associated with the safety aspects of radiation use in medical and academic settings (I have no nuclear power or weapons association). I teach radiation safety and risk.

The answers to the questions are:
A. #3, a radioactive atom only emits radiation once. The rest of the time, it is behaving like a normal atom.
B. The long half-life nuclide (Uranium) as the odds are the five atoms will never emit their radiation during your life-time.

So, was this before the Borh seeded the earth, or after Von Daniken’s ancient astronauts?

Nuke wastes, made by most conventional reactors- will take tens of thousands of years to decay- with certain byproducts much longer.

So, which radionuclides you have in mind when you say that?

It is of course clear that I’m pro-nuclear. Nobody’s asking the anti-nuclear energy people to be any less obvious.

I don’t work in the nuclear energy industry nor do i have any commercial interest in it.

The radioactive waste generated from the nuclear reactors at Oklo, two billion years ago, didn’t have containers that could rupture or rust.

a) Nuke wastes, made by most conventional reactors- will take tens of thousands of years to decay- with certain byproducts much longer. The only place to store them is in isolated caves. But, earthquakes, or water seepage can rust and rupture containers so that waste can get into soil, water tables etc.

It’s nice to see that the pro-nuke lobby is spamming TMV, though.

But, couldn’t you be a bit less obvious?

If that shit gets into the environment it

can do as much damage or more than global warming.

It’s not just climate change and carbon dioxide. Air pollution – the vast majority of which is caused by coal and fossil fuels – contributes to the deaths of 30,000 people in the US alone every year. Does radioactive waste do that?

After all, a few hundred Chernobyls, run by men who put profit ahead of safety, is as scary, or more so, than Katrina, or melting Greenland ice.

Nobody in the world will ever build – or has ever built, except for the Soviet Union, a reactor designed like the Chernobyl RBMK reactor.

This is true for the power generation part, but there is a tremendous carbon and pollutant footprint for the mining and refining of uranium for the reactor itself. It is still better than gas or coal but far more than what it is for wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable energy technologies.

This is false. If you want to look at analysis across the whole of life cycle, in terms of grams of CO2 per kWh generated, nuclear energy is far better than solar photovoltaics, and is on par with energy systems such as wind and geothermal – up there with the best of them.

How anyone who is conscious of ecology can suggest that millions of tons of poisons be stored for tens of millions of years w/o having a deleterious effect on the economy is simple ignorance.

Tens of millions of years? The numbers that people quote for these time scales seem to keep going up, and up, and up! It’s quite obvious the numbers are simply made up.

The radioactive fission products that constitute radioactive waste from nuclear energy will remain radioactive and dangerous for about 500 years.

100% wrong. There is no way to detoxify nuclear waste. Period. And sticking them in abandoned salt mines is not a solution. Period.

There’s a foolproof way to detoxify radioactive materials – in fact, it detoxifies itself with no intervention at all – it’s called radioactive decay, and all it takes is time.

In fact, I am. And, as stated, there is no foolproof way to dispose of nuclear waste material. Period.

There is a foolproof way to isolate radioactive waste from the environment for hundreds of years while it decays.

We’re going to do exactly the same thing that Nature did with its radioactive waste from nuclear reactors two billion years ago. But we can do it even better.

But, I’m far less sanguine about our ability to dispose of and deactivate the waste, even if $ is removed from the equation.

Global warmin has changed the equation a bit, so local, long-lived, and radioactive polution is better than global (atmospheric), climate-changing pollution. So the inevitable slips, spills and stains are winning the cost-benefit race, perversely.

About waste: an advanced fuel cycle to reprocess waste and fast-neutron reactors can greatly reduce radioactive waste. But the more you fuck around with waste, spills and accidents become that much more likely.

Which brings me to my main concern: human error. As a big, fat pinko, I have so very little faith in our heroic private enterprizes to not cut mad corners and drip that icky yellow uranium water all over the place in order to save their Lord and Savior $$$.

So I have a really dim opinion of people who just up and call wind and solar uneconomic or impractical. We’re not putting in the effort to see how well they can integrate into the energy system. We can expand subsidies and tax credits, put federal research money into these technologies, and see where we get in a few years. We can really pressure people to conserve, and see how much energy we actually need. But to just dismiss wind and solar is about as silly as calling nuclear uneconomical. We’re talking about the actual inputs to make our society function at the basic level. We’ll make them somehow, assuming we haven’t let private corporations dismantle our infrastructure and sell it to the Chinese for scrap. The question is, are we going to make the effort to persue every avenue, or just sell out to the next power- and profit-hungry group who can buy enough legislators? Are we going to demand actual humans get elected? Or are we going to keep playing with the two parties, acting like they have any substantial ideas to be “moderate” about, while it’s the same old corruption at the end of the day?

Yet, the fact remains that there is no safe way to get rid of nuke waste, and the only arguments for it are relative cheapness, monetarily, vs. the startup and R&D costs for alt sources.

Ain’t greed wonderful?

First of all I will admit my bias – I am definitely interested in making money from my investments of time and money into the atomic business. However, I do not think that being an atomic entrepreneur qualifies me as a “shill” for anyone else – if I get paid for my work it is because someone values what I am already saying, not because someone has managed to pay me to say what they want me to say.

I initially earned my atomic understanding as a submarine engineer officer. I then spent the better part of three years worth of free time in the library and in engineering classes refining my understanding of the existing technology and refining an idea I had for a refinement to that technology that is intended to alleviate some of the current cost, schedule and flexibility disadvantages that large, conventional reactors have. If you want to learn more about that search for Adams Engines.

Atomic energy is clean, abundant, potentially low cost, reliable, and it is a serious competitor to oil, coal, and gas.

Any energy source clean enough to be sealed inside a submarine full of people is worth considering and anything safe enough to put on a floating city full of young American sailors is at least as safe as our existing power sources.

One thing that my technical and political research has shown me is that a major reason that people have so much misunderstanding of the potential benefits of the technology is that it is a huge economic threat to the fossil fuel industry. Anyone who seriously studies human history – especially in the period since the Industrial Revolution – will understand that the control and distribution of fossil fuels is an intricate part of that history. Most of the world’s power brokers have at least some involvement in the industry.

Uranium is a fuel with unique qualities – a handful costing about $90 contains more energy than 30 tanker trucks full of petroleum worth more than half a million dollars. Converting the uranium to electricity does not release any pollution to the environment because it can be completely sealed up, but burning 30 tanker trucks full of oil produces a lot of deadly waste that must be dispersed to the environment.

Reactors do not have to be big, they do not have to cost billions of dollars, they do not even have to be limited to producing electricity. The fossil fuel industry and its associated industries (railroads, pipe manufacturers, banks, shipping companies, and many others) do no want you to learn about atomic energy. They prefer to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the only competitor that poses a proven threat to their market share and profitability.

Feel free to visit Atomic Insights to learn more.

Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights

1. Mr Moderate stated “Each one of these reactors cost $6 billion. Do you know how many windmills you can buy with $6 billion? More than enough to generate the gigawatt of power that the same nuclear reactor generates.”

Wrong, sorry. First, each reactor is NOT $6 billion. That’s for the entire the plant…the plant has TWO reactors, ergo each reactor is up to $3 billion, not $6. It’s actually $5 to $6 billion for TWO and could be *cheaper*. So it is $6 Billion, at the high end, for…2700 MWs, or 2.7 Gigawatts, not 1 Gigawatt. But…buying that many windmills, say the most advanced which are 3.6 MWs, or about 750 windmills, would cost somewhat close to that. But what do you get? Do you get 2700 MWs of power 24/7 like you would with this ABWR? No, you do NOT get that. You get something about 1/3 of that amount of power since the windmills due to the fickle nature of wind only give you about 30% of the name plate capacity of the windturbine. So you’d actually have to build 3 TIMES that amount to get the same a the redicuously reliable and safe nuclear plant. So, dollars to donuts, the wind is more expensive.

2. Mr. Moderate stated another very common urban legend: “This is true for the power generation part, but there is a tremendous carbon and pollutant footprint for the mining and refining of uranium for the reactor itself. It is still better than gas or coal but far more than what it is for wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable energy technologies.”

My, my. Nope, wrong again. Carbon emissions from uranium mining and processing is nowhere near what it is for coal and gas. The fossil fuels are in the “thousands of times” more carbon out put that nuclear because of the huge energy density of uranium compared with Fossil. There is probably more carbon emitted from building a solar plant or wind farm than in nuclear. Most processing can be done by using energy FROM a nuclear power plant, ergo it’s totally free from carbon emissions.

3. domajot said something about not being please by automatic cutoff valves and the like. All these Gen III and III+ plants like the ones they will be building in Texas are “passive” safe-reactors. Meaning you could basically pull the plug on the sucker and the plants can come down to ambient temperature almost by themselves. GRAVITY provides cooling water, if needed, and can be released by multiple automatic OR manual valves, no pumps needed at all, no ability to cutout the ability to dump the water by a stupid engineer or operator. Control rods are GRAVITY inserted again with no ability to prevent them from insertion.

We also know they work because during the recent quake in Japan, everything worked completely smoothly: the Texas plants are evolutionary versions of 2 of the excact same plants in Japan. Both of which, BTW, were built under budget and ahead of schedule.

Left-Atomics
(on the far left and very pro-nuclear).

Again, your argument devolves to, Alt fuels cannot do it now, so let’s not even ramp up so in 20 years we need no nukes nor fossils.’ C’mon, you can do better than that.

It seems that readers are not aware of the quantity of electricity needed to replace fossil fuels such as coal. Wind and solar are great, but they just don’t generate enough power to meaningfully replace the tens of thousands of MW generated by coal. Nuclear energy provides the lion’s share of carbon emissions reductions.

These readers are also not aware that there have been recent calls for a phaseout of coal because of the climate situation.

I think the problem is that here in the United States, the liberal groups affiliated with Hollywood and with the environmental movement have always been anti-nuclear, whereas the conservative nutz have always been pro-nuclear.

This is a lousy type of partsanship for both sides.

It’s very different in countries like France, where lots of moderates who support things like socialized medicine also support nuclear energy.

I am very much a moderate in politics. I’m really disappointed in the right-and left-wing partisanship we have in the U.S. I’m sick of the innuendo and vitriol on talk radio that is mostly right-wing.

I support issues like national health care….but…there are also a few things the Bushies are OK on, such as No Child Left Behind.

Please, moderates, check out some blogs like Atomic Insights and ClimateProgress and inform yourselves about nuclear energy and climate change. The commenter who wants to retain the fossil fuel status quo is very misinformed about atmospheric CO2 and the climate.

***DLS, again: wind and solar do not pollute. Geo and hydro do far less than nukes, and their waste is far safer. There is NO safe way to dispose of nuke waste. You can tap dance all you want, but the facts remain.

Impractical? No. Simply, as I stated, ‘The truth is there is only one major downside to alternative techs- like geo, hydro, solar, wind, fusion, and that is the startup and R&D costs.’

DLS: ‘There is no foolproof, 100% elimination of risk to anything and nuclear is far less polluting and risky than the alternatives.’

Wrong, because one barrel of nuke waste can contaminate a whole valley, or even a larger swath of land.

DLS: ‘ Me: But thanks for admitting that nukes are unsafe.

I didn’t do this. Wrong again.’

Me: Read the above.

DLS: ‘And a pinprick-size fouling of the environment is not the same straw mountain you try and fail to conject.’

***You simply do not know what you are talking about. The worst flood cannot compare to the irradiation of large patches of land.

DLS: ‘I confess I know nothing about nuclear energy.’

***That’s like the Elephant Man admitting he was ugly.

DUH!

This will help. It is an on-line copy of one of two books by Bernard Cohen that I bought many years ago.

Also, about radwaste, probably the most sensitive political topic: This, this, and this are useful.