It is unfortunate that due to the dangers of climate change and America’s dependence on foreign oil that anyone, anywhere, would be speculating about the expansion of nuclear power/energy.
You are writing on a subject that needs to be presented honestly and I cannot imagine that you can honestly say the things that you do in just your first paragraph.
Uranium mining takes up a tremendous amount of land area and whether it produces 100 times less radioactive or toxic waste than coal power plants is not a positive point. That it produces and leaves behind both radioactive and toxic waste in the very high volumes that it does is what should be considered when dealing with nuclear power/energy. This is not a compare and contrast situation.
If you are fully informed and willing to be honest with your readers you would not, or better yet; could not say that nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases are emitted by the production of nuclear power/energy. Plutonium does not miraculously appear at a nuclear power reactor. There is a process that gets it there and you, nor anyone else, can separate the process from the product.
You are apparently not considering the carbon emissions created during the use of very heavy equipment while engaged in the mining process, the mining process itself, the coal fired plants used in the uranium processing, or transporting the nuclear fuel to the reactor site.
Uranium ore is the source of the plutonium that is used in our nuclear reactors. Uranium ore has to be mined, like coal, to be used as a fuel source for the production of nuclear power/energy. Uranium is both radioactive and a chemical toxin. Additionally, numerous heavy metals are present in uranium ore.
Uranium milling consists of chemically separating uranium from other ore components. A thousand tons of ore must be processed to get just 2 tons of uranium. The waste produced is known as “mill tailings” which are often left near the land surrounding the mine, creating another dangerous legacy of the mining process. For typical uranium concentrations, the tailings contain 85 percent of the radioactivity in the original ore along with toxic chemicals and heavy metals. Furthermore, the volume of mill tailings is enormous and the majority of the radioactive components are extremely long-lived. Unfortunately, a large portion of mill tailings in the United States were “grandfathered” when more protective standards began to be implemented in the late 1970s, leaving behind more than 100 million tons of uranium waste with limited regulatory oversight.
The mill tailings can infiltrate surrounding waterways. {In 1979, near Churchrock, New Mexico, a United Nuclear uranium mill tailings dam broke, dumping nearly 100 million gallons of liquid radioactive tailings and 1000 tons of solid tailings into a surrounding area, spreading nearly 60 miles from the facility. The Rio Puerco River was contaminated and the local Native American tribe was devastated since their water source was forever rendered toxic by the tailings. Please don’t say that 1979 was a long time ago. When some of the waste has a 200 million year half life, 1979 was not that long ago}
After the uranium ore is milled, it is converted to uranium hexafluoride. It is then further enriched through a chemical process known as gaseous diffusion. Enrichment is required to increase the percentage of Uranium-235, the isotope of uranium needed for nuclear power or nuclear weapons. In natural uranium, U-235 concentration is too low, even after milling and conversion. The end results of gaseous diffusion are called a) the “product,” in which the percentage of U-235 has been increased and b) the “tails,” which is predominantly U-238, also known as depleted uranium, in which the percentage of U-235 has been decreased. Uranium Enrichment has been the largest contributor of wastes to the DOE’s materials inventory.
Nuclear power would not be considered cheap by any stretch of the imagination without our tax dollars supporting it with subsidies. See if any investor would touch it if it were not so subsidized by our federal tax dollars.
How you arrived at your numbers stating that nuclear power produces 70% of the non carbon dioxide polluting electricity in the U.S. is flawed if you did not include the full process of producing nuclear power/energy, i.e. mining, milling, transport, waste storage. It seems that proponents and supporters of nuclear power/energy are very willing to skew numbers and statistical data when promoting it to the general public. If it is so great, why is that necessary?
You might want to look into the realities of reprocessing spent fuel. No matter what you do, or how many times you run it through, there will be hotter, dirtier radioactive waste each time. It will never be a closed fuel cycle, never.
No, it is still not easy to see why numerous countries around the world are interested in nuclear power. There are reasons that there are financial and political obstacles for nuclear power here in America. The biggest reason is that the majority of people have a voice and all voices have the opportunity to be heard. And for those who don’t have the opportunity to be heard, there are people willing to speak up and speak out for those Americans who suffer from the effects of nuclear power/energy expansion who may be in a minority, and who, for whatever reason, cannot speak for themselves. This is America and we tend to not be willing to make one group of people suffer for the comfort and financial enhancement of others. This is America and we prefer to look for solutions that do no harm when we have the option to do so.
The U.S. is not behind the rest of the world, we have moved on ahead of the rest of the world. We are a civilized nation attempting to move into the future with our energy policy, we are not trying to revive a dirty, dangerous dinosaur from the past.
It is unfortunate that you think that the problems that we face with spent fuel and nuclear waste are largely political. I read your four point solution to nuclear waste in your article Short & Long Term Solutions for Nuclear Waste and they were not only farfetched, they were very expensive and not very practical.
I am not sure that you are considering the full breadth of the nuclear power/energy issue. There are a number of areas to which you don’t seem to give any consideration. There are a number of reasons beyond technology that nuclear power/energy is wrong for America and Americans.
It is environmentally wrong because the nuclear fuel cycle is dirty, extremely and irreversibly polluting. The long-term radioactive wastes that are produced on both ends of the fuel cycle are so harmful to this environment we may never recover if you continue on this path. Every aspect of our environment is adversely affected.
Can you tell us:
Expansion of the nuclear power/energy industry is morally wrong for a number of reasons:
Expansion of the nuclear power/energy industry is fiscally wrong for our country in any economic scenario.
Referenced: Appendix C of Code Red Alert: Confronting Nuclear Power in Georgia 1 (published by Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, May 2004. (Copyright 2004 Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. All rights reserved.) www.cleanenergy.org/Code%20Red/FinalCodeRed.pdf
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