Nonukenick: “Nuclear waste can’t be stored safely!”

Nuclear Engineer: “Yes it can.”

NN: “But if some terrorist gets his hands on it he can make a dirty bomb! It needs to be guarded!”

NE: “Sigh. OK, it’s a trivial cost compared to the time we’re wasting on this discussion. We’ll spring for two armed guards in perpetuity.”

NN: “OK, put it in writing.”

[The agreement is announced as policy]

NN: “Nuclear waste is so dangerous that even the experts admit that it needs armed guards for 92 million years! BAD, bad, bad!!!!!!”

Please, you really think that that waste is just going to sit there idle until its safe??

With consistently high funding into nuclear energy research, and increased control over subatomic particles (which things like CERN will bring. We would probably figure out a way to use it as FUEL (or simply neutralize it) within a couple decades.

Lunar storage. Yes fantastic. Let’s have a gigantic pile of lethal toxic waste and combine it with highly explosive rocket fuel and send it up in the atmosphere where it really can be distributed over a large population in case the rocket explodes. Great! truly Nobel price worthy thinking here.

For about 20 years our reactors churned out the power with no problems at all. Lately, however, the plants have turned into an expensive millstone around our necks. It will cost billins of dollars to fix them and almost as much if we decide not to fix (you can’t just flip a switch and close a nuclear plant. They are dammned expensive things to turn off and tear down).

The Ontario government’s reaction has been to call for new nuclear plants to be built.

I don’t have a lot of trouble with nuclear power itself. There have been serious problems at plants all over the world, but if people realized that nuclear power is something you can’t be sloppy about and the rules have to be followed to the letter (unlike Chernobyl) it’s certainly better for the environment than coal or it’s oxymoronic brother “Clean (?) Coal”.

I do object to the fact that the costs will probably be about 50% higher than the $15 billion our government says they’ll cost.

I get a lot of heat from my leftist friends for this, but I believe that although renewable is the way to go long-term, for the next couple of decades we need nuclear. I just worry about price.

Then you have Sen. Harry Reid throwing roadblocks at Yucca Mountain at every possible turn.

It’s sad to see the NIMBY crowd stifle a safe, reliable (20% of the nations electrical generation capacity) energy industry.

Hey, I’m all for solar and wind generation too. By the way has anyone driven past a solar or wind field lately and seen how much acreage is required for even a paltry amount of generation capability?

It was touched on earlier that RBMK reactors, like Chernobyl, are inherently unsafe, in contrast to American built reactors, but I should add that unsafe designs like RBMK, which are prone to cascading nuclear reactions when they overheat, are illegal in the United States.

“You can make a piston engine run on either diesel or gasoline, but not a mixture of both ….”

That bare statement isn’t strictly true: witness the old army
deuce-and-a-half truck with its multi-fuel engine and Automatic
Density Compensator. One time our rookie put gasoline in a crane
that took diesel. We dragged it back to the shop and dumped the
contaminated mix into our 2.5 ton truck. It ran okay, but noisy.

Mixing fuels in an army truck is a survival trick: possible but
not a good idea for the reason you said. I take your argument that mixing fuels in a nuke bomb wouldn’t work well. Anyway, I thought that was a fun fact.