Note that the mention of nuclear energy came with the qualifier “safe”.
All those nuclear wonks should be made to go live in the nuclear wastelands of the US, Russia and France (yes France). The waste problem is already intractable, the US cannot even get its shit together to bury it in Yucca mountain. Nuclear power is the post modern wet dream of academics and business urgers who never studied any-thing about science except as part of a sales and marketing science degree or some such. Nuclear is just so fuken dumb.

And what “nuclear wastelands” might they be, in the real world? Lake Karachay, perhaps? You’ll need an example of more relevance to nuclear power, not merely the results of the USSR’s buildup of a stockpile of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons as quickly as possible during the Cold War.

“Academics and business urgers who never studied anything about science…?”

Well, at the very least, Robert and myself would certainly disagree with you on that.

Quite the opposite, in fact – essentially all the opposition that I see to nuclear energy comes from people who have got absolutely no idea about the science and technology and the reality of it.

Nuclear power makes no sense tho, takes 10-20 years to bring a pile on-line, with HUGE decommissioning costs.

It takes 3-5 years to construct a nuclear power plant. We have significant empirical experience across the world which confirms that. When the time frame is longer than that, what causes that? Political rubbish, NIMBYism, protests from so-called environmentalists, and spurious lawsuits and litigation by activists who try to stop it.

You sometimes hear chronological estimates of 10-15 years – but that’s 3-5 years to actually construct it, and n years of what can only be described as political bullshit.

Of course, you can build more than one at once.

How many years does it take, for example, to construct the 1200 or so typical wind turbines that are required to generate the same energy output in any given year as a nuclear power reactor?

Whenever these energy issues are discussed, we must be very careful to compare one kilowatt-hour from apples to one kilowatt-hour from oranges.

Nuclear might not be ‘not all that dangerous in the grand scheme of things’, but my objection to nuclear power is fairly straightforwardly political: to make it ’safe’ requires creating (and hence supporting other related) regimes of control and policing that necessarily contradict basic freedoms.

Nuclear energy doesn’t take away your freedoms. The Patriot Act wasn’t introduced to make nuclear energy in the US safe, nor was it required to do so.

There are many hundreds of commercial light-water-moderated nuclear power reactors in the world, and not one of them has ever hurt anybody. That is why I, for one, say nuclear power is safe. Direct empirical experience shows that nuclear power is safe.

Well the long time scales are really the only thing that make managing nuclear waste tricky.

It’s important to ask just how long such timescales are. All too often I’ve seen people that just seem to arbitrarily make up some long time scale when discussing nuclear waste – but let’s just ask one important and unambiguous question: what are the radionuclides involved, and what are their half-lives?

In practice, once you’ve separated the usable actinides fuels from the unburned uranium which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the used nuclear fuel, you’re left with highly radioactive fission products which constitute almost all of the radioactivity of such material, such as strontium-90 and caesium-137, which have half-lives of approximately 30 years. Not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, but 30 years.

But why should that mean that the necessary control and policing encroaches unacceptably on basic freedoms?

What control and policing is actually necessary, and what basic freedoms does it encroach unacceptably upon?

FWIW, I’m with RM – nuclear waste should be buried under the sea, which is pretty much what Sweden do with it.

Sweden are arguably the world leaders in well organized, well set up permanent deep geological of radioactive waste.

http://www.skb.se

Although they actually suffer from one of the same key flaws as the US does with Yucca Mountain – they actually think it’s a sensible idea to stick the whole used fuel assemblies from light-water reactors into the geological repository forever and waste them – that’s so wasteful and inefficient, and stupid, I think.

the radioactivity to which you refer is basically the background left after Thorium decay in granite, it is now many orders of magnitude lower than the radioactivity of nuclear waste – barely above background level.

The radioactivity in question is the natural radioactivity of uranium, thorium, radium and potassium within the Earth – which is a significant contributor towards the heat inside the Earth.

Last time I looked the decay time of plutonium – a component of “spent” nuclear fuel is about 200,000+ years. I guess that will be great legacy for the cockroaches when they take over.

Well, the half-life of plutonium-239 is about 240,000 years, but the half-life of plutonium-241 is only about 14 years. The half-life of plutonium-244 is something like 80 million years, going off the top of my head, which is why you can find it in nature – it hasn’t decayed away, it’s a primordial radionuclide, present since before the formation of the Earth.

there is definitely a risk of toxic gas blow-outs

Not to mention the release of radon from radiogenic hot-rock geothermal, as well as the accumulation of radium, polonium and other NORM on the pipes, in a way which is very similar to that sometimes seen in the natural gas industry with radioactive contamination.

Bury it 500 metres underground and it becomes rather difficult to steal.

As you know, Robert, Pu-239 is valuable, useful, potent fuel – it should not be declared “waste” and “wasted” 500 meters underground.

http://www.americablog.com/2008/11/sarah-palin-pardons-turkey-while-others.html

Unbelievable.

Bury it 500 metres underground and it becomes rather difficult to steal. The IEER (who are a pressure group, not some disinterested party) are only half-right on radium and similar natural radioisotopes; there is a great deal of them in the environment, but it is only present in very tiny concentrations. But if you’re, say, a water molecule making your way to the surface from that depth, you’ll pass quite a lot of it in your travels.

In any case, the plutonium in spent reactor fuel is a mixture of Pu-239 and Pu-240. If you’re specifically trying to make a bomb, you run your nuclear reactor for short periods to maximise the proportion of Pu-239. If you’re trying to run your reactor efficiently, you leave it in there for the longest possible time, increasing the proportion of Pu-240 and making it much less suitable for bomb-making. It’s probably not impossible, but it’s very very difficult to make a bomb out of that mixture. If you have the tech to separate out the Pu-239 and Pu-240, the same tech can be used to enrich uranium and make a bomb anyway.

It seems very, very unlikely that a terrorist group will ever construct a nuclear weapon from scratch out of plutonium. No terrorist group has ever demonstrated anything approaching the resources and skills to do so (Aum Shinriyko came closest, but they couldn’t get the much easier task of making and deploying a relatively simple chemical weapon right). The only plausible way for them to make a nuke is to get access to a complete one (probably the biggest risk), or make one out of highly enriched uranium (next on the list, as there is still too much of it
lying around in too many locations).

You’re further assuming that the only radioactive materials in the environment are man-made, which is flat wrong. There’s a metric buttload of uranium and its decay products (including nasty things like radium) in rocks (and thus concrete, brick, and construction stone), water, air, and even in the food we eat. Yes, even the organic stuff.

The other figure that we really just don’t know is the land-use requirements, but I’m willing to bet that to supply the equivalent amount of energy, much more land would need to be given over to geothermal plants than to nuclear power plants and accompanying uranium mines. Now if most of that land is relatively unhabited, and not particularly ecologically sensitive, that’s probably not a huge issue, but I’m not sure we know enough to say for sure.