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102 comments on New Cabinet Position-"Energy and the Environment"?
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The reason that there is a surplus in the US nuclear fund is that no disposal has yet been undertaken.
I'm assuming that you are stateside and that Yucca Mtn, Nevada will be your friendly local nuclear repository. OK, I wouldn't expect anyone to break into Area 51 to check that its being laid out yet, but as far as I know its not been constructed yet.
According to your own Department of Energy figures this facility will take $42m per year just to deal with corrosion of its own workings. OK, that ain't a hill of beans in Texas, but start to ramp it up with a real world discount rate over the 300 year period that you quote for reactor waste to get down to 0.7% U-235 activity (equivalent to naturally occuring uranium) and it doesn't look so rosy. I doubt that you'd want your kids to sit on a couch made of 0.7% U-235 by the way. Start to add some nice warm waste with added meaty chunks of plutonium from those reactors that aren't efficient (i.e. those working now) to deal with and the figure is anybody's guess.
The UK experience with reprocessing using the ThORP plant does nothing to encourage the view that cheap and efficient reprocessing is anywhere near economically viable. If you take a look around the world at nuclear disposal options you will see that the storage/geological disposal option is preferred by those with access to the detailed costings. Even the super-efficient Japanese are going down this route.
FYI, the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Agency has just started recruiting for geological disposal techs after the experience with ThORP. Send any signals ?
Danger, schmanger ! Nuclear power is bankrupt before it even starts. A wind turbine can fall down and be replaced, a hydro dam can break drown a town and be replaced, a gas turbine can blow up and be replaced, a solar panel can revert to being simply a panel, but radioactive waste is an expensive friend for its lifetime, no replacements necessary.
I'd love to know what those useful long-lived isotopes are by the way. To the best of my knowledge most of the applications that you quote are supplied by 'research' reactors specifically jigged to produce those particular 'topes not to produce power.
And it never has to be either. Dry cask storage is good for several centuries at least. Either we have a better solution by then or we reseal the casks at a fraction of the price.