Not a lot of political (or practical) appeal here either

American Footprint says:

As I understand it, nuclear power is expensive, but a lot of this has to do with the fact that no nuke plants have been built in the past 25 years and a lot of old hippies are unduly alarmist about nuclear waste.

Yeah, those old hippies. Just so alarmist about how to take care of nuclear waste for the next thousand years. How silly.

And how powerful. Just think of it: a bunch of pot-smoking hippies stopped an entire billion-dollar industry. Probably just blew smoke in the face of the NRC. Would that it were so.

Seriously, I'd love to believe that nuclear power was practical but that pesky issue of what to do with the nuclear garbage is a real one and nobody seems to have a clue about how to solve it. We can't seem to come up with reasonable plans to "dispose" (i.e. safeguard for thousands of years) of the stuff we already have. To expand our nuclear capability without a real answer to that waste problem seems fairly radical.

Comments

[Brian Miller]

There is a nutcase on local (SF Bay) talk radio 810 am named "Dr." Bill Wattenberg who exemplifies why the average semi-educated American citizen distrusts "Bi Science." He is always babbling about a nuclear plant on every corner and how we should just "trust" industry scientists instead of the alarmist "environmental wackos." I think he was involved at one point in bomb-making. Yep, "Dr. Bill," I'll sure trust you. (Dr. Bill annoys me more than that raving crypto-fascist loon Michael Savage or the Big Addict Rush because he sounds sooooo reasonable-at first. :))

[clew]

If I recall correctly, from what I studied fifteen years ago when I was a licensed nuclear reactor operator on a research reactor, it's not actually technically implausible that we could reprocess the waste into useful/hot and manageable-half-life/cool components. (I think the reactor design for the hot reactors needed work, esp. if they're not to be deliciously attractive to terrorists; and 'manageable' in the sense that the serious danger would last no longer than nation-states usually do nowadays.) Some technical improvements have surely been made since then; pebble-beds for one, maybe.

But! The problem even with expected uses of tech we have is that few societies reward the kind of boring, long-horizon, technically detailed planning needed to pull that off; let alone manage themselves so that the people who get the benefit bear the risk. The States mostly provides incentive to avoid legal liability, sometimes by wilfully embracing ignorance (cf. the Space Shuttle disasters). Japan avoids embarrassment, apparently the same way.

Bureaucratic Socialist France, even according to The Economist, has probably done much better at running its reactors than the rest of us, mostly by sending many of its best students into technical administration and then listening to them. It's profoundly dull work, mostly plumbing, with very short moments of terrified decision.

[David Sucher]

But Clew, wouldn't the financial reward from making nuclear power work be sufficient? (The long-term waste disposal issue is my only real concern as I think that the short-term security issues are probably handleable, though 9-11 certainly puts that question to the test.) After all, you solve the waste problem and a significant part of the political opposition disappears. Are you saying that there are indeed methods of safe disposal but we are not using them because they are too expensive?

[clew]

I really ought to be studying something else, so am not going to properly look this up; instead you get my potted tour lecture from years and years ago, filtered through subsequent economic and terrorist history...

The risks are hard to contain; the many-generation horizon is an unusual problem, and not solved by profitable energy generation, because the future that bears the risk isn't around to charge us for it. That's what civil society reactor technocrats are for, ideally; hassling us into doing it the hard way to be equitable in the long run. But of course that's both morally and technically difficult, so causes complaint and grousing even where the technocrats are proooobably pretty good.

Even in the short term, the risks are geographically spread. I believe we only planned one reprocessing plant for the whole country. Two at most. The people near the reprocessor bear much more of the risk; at best, everyone on the grid gets the cheaper power. (Transport and reprocessing are IIRC more dangerous than the original power plants. I think the post-WWII planners assumed that the future would get both cleverer and more peaceful; we are already behind schedule on both.)

What's clearly profitable for some is to sell cheap energy for a while, and stick the polity with the cleanup costs. Lawyers seem to be a much better medium-term investment than physicists.

And besides, if we're going to assume that the physicists will eventually give us everything we ask for, there are even better things to ask. I want comfortable efficiency, equally safe distributed generation, cleverer irrigation, and a pony.

[David Sucher]

That sounds like agreement, I think.