Either into the sun or a black hole....of course, if a black hole then turns out to be a way to another place then we've just shifted the problem to them, but hopefully they'll have a way of dealing with it that we don't currently have.
Throwing it into the sun is a good idea...but if it then decides to throw out a large flare or something, then it's gonna really screw things up if it hits Earth.
I live just down the road from two nuke plants, I've been in both, one of them has just been decomissioned, so eventually it's all going to get pulled down, but the reactor area itself is still going to be hot for another century, and since it'll probably be entombed in a concrete/lead shell ala Chernobyl that's no real concern.
Nuke stations, or at least Sizewell, has thousands of backups, readouts, procedures and everything else, so it's all pretty much safe....it still leaks every couple of months or so, but so far it's behaved itself.

However, nuke power is not the permenant future for earth power...powering engines for space vehicles? Great idea! (although Fusion reactors would be so much better) but for our daily needs, we need to find something just that little bit less catastrophic when it all goes wrong.

It's about time we looked in to methane us humans and the animals all break wind. and it's free of charge. :shifty:

Even more important than just a yes or no, I want to reduce transmission losses. This stuff where Oregon pumps 20GW to California at the cost of 2GW needs to stop. Aside from a superconductive transmission grid, I want local nuclear power production. State by state. My state would be completely served by a 3GW plant, including spare capacity. It would pay for itself at $.12/kWh, since our current (from natural gas) is about $.085/kWh. California would have to get off their socialized arses with closer to 250GW, with straight up about 15GW going to desalination for LA alone.

Electrical Consumption 2002, including resistive losses as far as I can tell. New York and California are so high because they have to buy it from 200+ miles away, which is why their rates are $0.18/kWh or more. Resistive losses are crazy. We probably use close to 3TW (that's terawatts, or 10^12) now, and the last time I saw numbers for losses, average transmission losses were around 8% -- some places it runs up to 15%, others down to 5%. Close to 250GW of loss. production.

I want local power production. City-by-city where indicated, state-by-state for the rest.


edit-- By comparison, Chernobyl had a total of nine reactors in three groups, each with a 3GW thermal capacity, 1GW electrical

I wanted to say that... anyway, there are nuclear explosions on the sun every day, so one or 2 more from us will not make a difference. :cool:

Cost effective? In my way to think, we dont have another choice. Either run out of energy (the oil wells will be dry sooner than you think) or die on nuclear waste.

If you burrie it and corrosion occours, you have a VERY bad problem. The difference is, you have it in 50 years, not now.

In 1810, people said "reality is we'll porbably never fly in the sky, we wont be shooting man on moon, let alone on other stars." ;)

Never say never!

You got that right! Two words Waste Disposal

Bingo. We wont settle down and commit to space travel for a awful long time.... if ever.
If space is infinate we wont be seeing that waste ever again anyway.

The only problems with nuclear is the potential disaster that can be caused. I think if a whole new reactor design was used then maybe it would be a great solution but i dont think i need to remind anyone about the chernobyl incident :nope:

Nuclear Power: Yay or Nay?
 

As long as the waste problem of nuclear energy is not fully solved, it can't be considered a permanent solution of our energy problem.
It is essential as a temporary source of energy, but I hope fission techniques will in the future solve the energy problem, together with better use of solar, wind and aqua energy.

On aspect that was not yet given attention to in this thread is the dependence upon suppliers of uranium. Who wants an UPEC (Uranium Producing and Exporting Countries) with nations like Russia and Congo, to mention a few...

Yes. Man will never stop wanting, sooner or later the earth will have nothing to give. Nuclear means - crafts- space - planets - mining.

On another note i just view something funny on the news, Some bright spark gave the all clear to send 1.8billion dollars - in cash! Loaded in pellets and was suppose to be shipped of to iraq - yet it went missing:D they have no idea what has happened to the money! Somebody out their is now looking at some islands to buy for retirement.

Ignore the above not meant to hijack but hey thats out of it!

Pro Nuclear, My father has worked in the Nuclear Industry for over 30 years, The last 20+ years as a Technical Writer (Operating Procedures, etc), among other tasks (Quality Assurance, etc.) at various plants across the country. So, the Pro Nuclear message has been ingrained in me from the get-go you could say.

I live less than 100 miles from where the plutonium for the first atomic bombs was processed (B Reactor). The Hanford Nuclear Reservation starts about 70 miles from my door. A few years back we took a road tour of the sites, which was pretty interesting; seeing all that history up close. My dad had plenty of intertesting tales. (Bluing glass in the heavy water of the spent rod tanks was particularly interesting

Comparing Chernobyl's Reactor(s) and Containment systems to Any of the modern US Reactor(s) and Containment is a very apples to oranges comparison, in terms of construction, safety, and operation.

Interesting link(s) here.
http://www.niof.org/campaigns/chernobyl.htm

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/tri...les/part3.html


The Bottom line is the biggest risk is human error.

I say we shoot it into space with a ?Rail Gun? or a rocket. if it fails we will be wearing sunscreen in alaska and glow in the dark. maybe some day we will figure out fusion.

Sending that much weight into orbit (and beyond, it seems) would be a disaster for the already-****ed atmosphere. Space launches dump huge amounts of gases into the upper atmosphere, fortunately we don't launch that often.

But consider the increas involved in sending up all of our nuclear waste. i say bury the stuff in the most secure way you can. Turn it to glass, pack into drums, then backfill the whiole vault with concrete. 24-hour guards, too, to ward off nutterism.

Until fusion works effeiciently, if it will

I wasn't thinking clearly. Ok. That link I have up above is in gigawatts. Million kilowatt hours. So, that comes out to about 400GW. America requires about 400GW of electrical power production, and consumes 3.8 Petawatt hours (10^15).

Texas pays for itself, even though it is the largest user (37GW) -- 1/4 of that is probably walmart. California would need 30GW plus desalination so they could stop drawing water from the Colorado. Far as I can tell, Los Angeles uses 6.6 million gallons per day, which would take maybe 100MW to generate and another 5MW to pump around the hellhole (tricounty). New York would need 16.5GW for electrical. My state would take almost 6GW.

We have something like 102 total production reactors right now, in the United States. Some of these are operating at 102% capacity because during the turn-arounds they have been able to install more efficient turbines and pumps and run the reactor a bit hotter. However, all these plants are 35 years old with life expectancies of 40-50 years. We have another 35 plants that are in various states decommissioning, and the north east power grid is currently the one strained.

That's an idea Seth, some kind of accelator....hell, it sounds very Jules Verne/HG Wells-ish but, kinda like a giant gun, launching 'bullets' of nuclear waste space-craft into space.

Didn't the US play around with the idea of using nuclear explosions to propell things into orbit back in the 1970s? Project Thunder-something I think, or Project Anvil...I can't remember off hand. Either that or some kind of accelator device...punch it out of Earth, since it'll be unmanned, it doesn't matter about G-forces.

Of course, it'll have to be fairly well secured, just incase the 'gun' misfires and it lands up falling on someone :oops:

Project Orion it was called.

I've posted my environmental objections to shooting waste into space via conventional rocket, let's not get started on a couple of hundred fission weapons...

Nuke power is the answer to global warming by the way. Even with the Waste Disposal problem, it is the cleanest energy that you can possibly imagine. No coal firing CO2 emission producing old gen power plant to pollute our atmosphere. Battelle has nearly perfected the waste disposal method of containing the waste in glass rods, so this won't even be an issue in the future.

Nukes also have tremendous power output, so much so that there is only one dam in existence that can outproduce a nuke plant - Grand Coullee dam. One simple nuke generating plant can outproduce some of the largest power generating structures ever devised.

Its a no brainer - nukes are a must for the future - especially in an era of global warming. After that, we will move to Fusion. After that, maybe some sort of anti-matter reactor.

-S

Here is Battelles patent on glass rod waste disposal:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4362659.html

Actually, Prof. Gerard O'Neill and his grad students put together something called a Linear Mass Driver using superconductive magnets to move a steel bucket along a rail back in the 70's. The model they built accelerated the bucket from 0-80 mph in 15 feet. It was part of an idea for building giant photovoltaic satellites in earth orbit and mining the construction materials on the moon. the LMD was workable enough on a large scale to boost the material out of the moon's gravity well to the L5 & L3 libration points between the earth & the moon. O'Neill's team figured that orbital solar power satellites would produce 5 times the electricity as a similar terrestrial array. They planned on beaming the energy to earth as microwave beams, then convert back to electricity using rectifier antennas. So even with microwave losses, the total usable electricity produced would be 3-4 times as much as terrestrial arrays.

Regarding nuclear power, I have no problem with it as long as the families of the management teams and the major stockholders of the plant owners agreed to store and safeguard the wastes on their own property until it was no longer a danger to the general populace. Of course, that would mean condemning their descendants to safeguarding the material for at least 100,000 years, but you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Nuclear power is the way of the future. We have come a long way since the Three Mile Island incident and the unfortunate events of Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was as much a fault in the reactor as it was the people useing it. What I have been taught in school about the incident and what I KNOW know are totally diffrent. The only real issue with nuclear reactors is what to do with the spent nuclear fuel.