Nuclear plants are a thorny issue. Their thermal efficiency is lousy, too - all that steam coming out of the cooling towers represents wasted energy. But their pollution output is, arguably, close to zero per kilowatt-hour. Nuclear waste management seems to me to be a very simple issue that's only made complex by politics. But that still means it's complex, so you can't accurately estimate how much of a problem it actually is.
In a world run by rational people, you'd just leave the waste from 40 years of operation of a large nuke plant to cool inside the decommissioned plant for another 40 years - or longer, if you like - then finally truck it away in, oh, maybe ten standard shipping containers (each of which has had its volume halved by armour - that's really all the space it would take), drop it in a big geologically stable hole somewhere, and post ten guards to stop nuts from trying to steal it.
The waste from 40 years of equivalent coal plant operation would fill a fair-sized harbour. And it'd be radioactive, too - not radioactive enough that you should worry about it if you're not breathing it in (that's why fly ash collectors are such a big deal), but certainly radioactive enough that it'd be categorised as low-level waste and treated like Instant Death if it had come from a nuclear plant instead.
quite interesting i think.
No comments:
Post a Comment