What the US does with its dangerous fossil fuel waste.

[NNadir]

Dumps it, with no restrictions, in Earth's atmosphere.

[Ozymanithrax]

1. That should be with "some" restrictions.

There are emission restrcitons throughout the U.S., though they are probably not strict enough.

[Javaman]

2. Please enlighten us as to what the US does with dangerous Nuclear waste? nt

[NNadir]

3. Right now it stores on site, where it has produce zero deaths, but a lot of

agonizing on the part of people who couldn't care less about what the US does with dangerous fossil fuel waste.

The nuclear industry is the only energy industry that can contain byproducts of energy on its grounds indefinitely.

However, it the nature of your question was to demostrate indifference to dangerous fossil fuel waste procedures, I am not in the least bit surprised.

It is the contention of 100% of the world's anti-nukes that nuclear energy is the only industry that must be perfect. In the anti-nuke industry's mentality, any form of energy can kill at will so long as nuclear isn't perfect.

My contention is different. I claim that nuclear energy need not be perfect to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else to, um, be vastly superior to everything else.

Get it?

No?

Well that's not my problem, is it?

[Javaman]

5. Yeah, I get it, bury it in the ground so some other people in the future has to deal with it.

good plan. :eyes:

[Nihil]

6. I suppose they could always follow historical precident ...

... grind it up really small and dump it in the atmosphere & the ocean
like people have been doing for centuries with the waste from the only
alternative high volume generation plants?

No?

You think that this might be leaving a problem that people in the
future (of when the pollution was created) would have to deal with?
Oops ... that sounds familiar ...

:eyes:

[Javaman]

7. Nice straw man instead of answering the obvious question.

You try to cast me as someone who still wants to use fossil fuels as your argument in answering the question.

Put words in my mouth much?

So what are we going to do with nuclear waste?

It doesn't reach its first half life for 200 thousand years. during all that time it's still deadly.

So again, we leave it for future generations to deal with.

[Nihil]

8. Didn't intend to "put words in (your) mouth"

> You try to cast me as someone who still wants to use fossil fuels as
> your argument in answering the question.

I was trying to draw an analogy to the "treatment" of fossil fuel waste,
both over the last few centuries and still going (stronger than ever) today.

I did not intend to suggest that you were actively in favour of this, merely
that it is an undeniable fact that reflects the truth of the situation that
we are in.


> It doesn't reach its first half life for 200 thousand years. during all
> that time it's still deadly.

Any component that "doesn't reach its first half life for 200 thousand years"
is most certainly not "still deadly" as it is emitting so s-l-o-w-l-y.

The dangerous components are the ones with half-lives of days, weeks, months
or (at the safer end of the scale) years (i.e., rather than centuries, millenia
or hundreds of millenia). *They* are the ones than need to be secured, guarded,
protected & monitored very carefully for that period of highest danger.

The longest lived radioactive components are the least dangerous.
The longer the half life, the longer the substance is taking to decay and thus
the lower the intensity of radiation emitted during each second of that time.


> So again, we leave it for future generations to deal with.

Which is exactly my point w.r.t. the fossil fuel waste (that we are now
starting thinking about dealing with ... as long as it isn't too
expensive ... or too inconvenient ... or too politically unwise before
the next election ... or ...).

We *KNOW* that dumping the waste into the atmosphere and the oceans is
a BAD mistake. That is proven every day. Again, I don't need to remind
you of that.


> So what are we going to do with nuclear waste?

Well, as you said earlier, ...

>> Yeah, I get it, bury it in the ground so some other people in the future
>> has to deal with it.
>> good plan.

Strangely enough, yes, that is a "good plan".

Storing it on site (i.e., the site where it is generated) is not ideal
as it is harder to manage a distributed "secure safe store" than a single
purpose-built storage facility (or a small number thereof). Hell, you have
read the same proposals that I have so I don't need to spell it out to you.
Guard it, shelter it, monitor it.

What you don't do is dump it in the atmosphere.

What you don't do is dump it in the ocean.

What you also don't do is try to smother the safest way to store it in the hope
that it will kill off the "nasty nuclear industry" *BEFORE* eliminating those
very generating plants that *ARE* dumping their waste in the atmosphere and
that *ARE* dumping their waste in the ocean.


I agree that the ideal situation is that we do NOT generate it in the
first place. The ideal situation is also that we do NOT burn fossil fuels
and spread that waste all over the damn planet. The ideal situation is that
everyone reduces their consumption drastically and the resulting (far lower)
demand is satisfied by renewable, sustainable, non-polluting sources.

With the best will in the world, that ideal is not reachable overnight.

Given the mindset of most of the current "leaders", it might never be reachable
but we cannot give up all hope.

In the meantime, we act as responsibly as we can with ALL of the generating
plants AND their waste output.


I hope I have explained better this time.

[Odin2005]

4. +1,000,000,000,000

:applause: