No one said uranium did not put our enormous energy, we were talking about the dirtiness of handling it and other energy resources.
Right.
It's much harder to handle 3000 tons of waste than one.
It's much harder to clean smoke stack emissions than not having smokestacks at all.
The water used to condense the steam in the feedwater stage of a nuclear power plant is pretty much the same amount of water that would have to be run through the condensers of an equivalent output coal fired plant. And the water just flushed through and gets warm, especially in coastal installations.
Some more water is used to make up for losses in the steam cycles of the secondary systems, but...should be about the same for both coal and nuclear, because a steam plant is a steam plant and it doesn't care what's heating the kettle.
But, enormous, right?
There's a reason the US doesn't use more nuclear power. It's called Rodent-induced false hysteria and profiteering blood-sucking lawyers. I wouldn't have a problem living near a modern nuclear power plant. I really wouldn't want to live near a coal fired plant. That would be my least preferred fossil fuel energy source.
As for the longevity of the nuclear waste, there's always been two easy means of disposal, both highly effective and both freaking out the anti-nuclear Rodents. You must remember that Rodents are anti-nuclear not for any rational reason, but because they were programmed that way because nuclear power spent fuel processing is where we get plutonium.
Anyway, the two ways of disposing of radioactive waste are thus:
Bury it or drown it.
Put it in a secure cave deep in a mountain....Nevada is 95% (making things up as I go along...) useless desert, and we had a nice mountain the Nevadans were happy to take taxpayer money to prepare...all we need now is an American Senate that will tell the Hotel Union Senators from Nevada to shut up, we're using it. Be safe for the rest of human civilization, sure.
Or, quite simply, put the junk in well designed corrosion-resistant containers and sink them to the bottom of the Pacific Abyssal Plains. The environment there is stable, to the tune of not changing for a hundred million years. Eventually the cans are subducted and vomited out through volcanoes, but only after all the radioactives have achieved isotopic stability.
Then again, my preferred method in this day and age is to simply put it somewhere safe, but post signs all over the US-Mexico border stating that there is a radioactive waste dump within 100 yards of the border and all persons passing through will die horribly. Make sure the signs are in spanish.
I helped drill wells leeching uranium from shallow shale beds in South Texas. I know the tremendous amount of water that has to be used, and the resultant huge amounts of waste water contaminated that must be disposed of. It is an extremely 'dirty' process. Then comes the uranium plant cooling process which uses enormous amounts of water to cool. And then the handling of spent product.
Yeah, nobody would ever think of requiring that the processing water be retained and filtered to extract the radioactives to protect the environment. They haven't allowed the discharge of radioactive water in decades, not since before I was a raw Nuke. They even banned the obscene process of diluting the waste to meet the micro-curie/ml requirements.
The entire cycle of usage is what is important.
Yup. Coal mining pollutes ground water, too.
This isn't the 1970s any more.
Not just the end product like the enviro wackos wish you to look at for the renewable 'clean' energy.
Who cares what those religious freaks want, anyway? Their space laser in the California desert on the way back from Las Vegas is an abomination. The wind mills chop them up, this thing blinds them and barbeques them on the wing.
I'm just saying nuclear power is better. We should use the lawyers as self-propelled radiation shielding.
