The United States has a dreadful nuclear waste problem, but it's largely one of its own making. No, not because it has nuclear power plants, but because politicians and "activists" who don't know toffee about nuclear physics won't allow fuel reprocessing because they think the plutonium could be used to make bombs.It turns out that it's nothing but an old wive's tale that's left perfectly good fuel sitting about in ponds for decades when it could be generating lovely electricity.
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History will look back on the 1970s as that period of insanity when we turned our back on atomic power and decided that our future needed to be in the hands of Middle Eastern lunatics.
More of Jimmy Carter's policies that have returned to haunt us.
The most infuriating thing is that it's nothing to do with the science of generating nuclear energy and then taking the "spent" fuel (after a year the rods only deplete 4 to 6% but out they must come to be stored in the on-site pools) and reprocessing it back into even more fuel and other valuable and vital radioactive materials. Many for medical purposes, as in health care, that thing everyone is on about now.
To take a phrase from the left, that science is "settled". It can be done and is done all around the world.
It's really all about the politics of shutting down the US.
Today not that many people remember such leftist hacks like Barry Commoner but I'm unfortunately blessed/cursed with a long memory and recall quite well how he was all for nuclear power when it wasn't completely viable and then by the 1970s he was at the forefront, along with useful idiots like Ralph Nader, of the move to stop nuclear power and move only to "clean coal".
Yeah, remember coal, that's the stuff that makes all that evil CO2 and needs to be shut down because it works too, can't have that.
When I was a college activist, the pro-nuclear kind, I collected all the facts and figures I could on the subject, and even going by those numbers (circa 1980), had the US begun to build reprocessing facilities for the light water reactors, and begun building LMFBR (breeder reactors for which enough raw fuel material existed in mined tailings in 1980 to operate for an estimated 5 centuries at 100% of electrical capacity) the result would be energy to burn for us all, nice clean electricity running everything from our homes to our cars, and those great big buildings in New York would more than likely still be standing.
Politics can't be separated from energy, and there was a huge price to pay when the energy policy of this country was to wear sweaters and make trillionaires out of terrorists.
It's still very easy to find arguments about costs as well, and no matter what the ninnies say, atomic power is still the cleanest, cheapest, and safest means of manufacturing electricity that we have to date.
Interestingly enough it's the same folk that grouse about costs that don't mind spending us broke in their headlong rush to make everything "green", yet when the one source of energy that solves all of their problems is presented the response is always; "oh my no, that's too expensive".
And I don't believe the current administration's interest in atomic power is genuine either, since it is riddled with leftover hippies and no-nuke kooks.
Even if the president is sincere (LOL), if Ronald Reagan couldn't get the ball rolling on nuclear power, I don't think Jimmy Carter II will have a better go at it.
Sorry for the ramble, it's 5am and I woke up suffering the effects of an unpleasant evening's seafood dinner out.
footnote: The facts and figures presented can be found in the book "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" (1975 Golem Press) by physicist Dr Petr Beckmann. Hard to find and out of print, but it's a great read.
The Left always favors power sources that don't exist, and want to shut down those we rely on. Now that wind and solar are starting to come on line, expect a sudden shift of ecoweenie sentiment against those "monstrosities" destroying the landscape.
Hear, hear! (former Navy nuke)
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