hydro electric

[The Natural Philosopher]

nature has been doing it for years

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its a very very very dilute solution but a solution none the less.

Drink water? Ugh! Fish f*ck in it!

[The Natural Philosopher]

They do.

Its oinlt f=greens idiuots who objhect to any way of stiorinmg it, After all nuclear waste is leass dealy than heavy metals and they dont decay at all do they?

Yet we manage to store them

[Tim Streater]

The short half life stuff can be stockpiled until it has decayed. In the case of Fukushima, f'rinstance, it can be stated that if any iodine-131 was released from there, there will, today, be not a

*single* atom of it left. Not one.

Long half life stuff is not dangerous - because it has a long half-life.

The medium length half life stuff can be stored underground (salt mines are best). It can be turned into glass and then stored.

[Tim Streater]

Personally I'd dump it in the Marianna Trench, where it will be subducted into the mantle to join all the other radioactive stuff.

[The Natural Philosopher]

It could be dumped in the sea, but international bits of sea are politically sensitive.

Decomissioning is relatively simple. Run te nuke 40-60 years- spend 5 calmly takeing out the spent fuel and really hot stuff, mothball for 60 years then demolish with no special precautions.

Very cheap.

[Tim Streater]

Yes they do. This is a *political*, not a *technical* problem. As with anything to do with stuff that is radioactive, people who know little about it are easily led by liars. So they kick up about stuff which doesn't matter. In the 17thC it was witches. Today, it's anything "nucular", in this instance the long-term storage of waste.

I was always amused by the little old lady saying we shouldn't be putting radioactive stuff into space (this was before a launch of one of NASA's probes to the outer planets, a probe which used plutonium-238 to generate its electricity). She obviously hadn't considered the Sun recently, and had probably never heard of the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth.

[Chris Hogg]

How can it be a 'solution' when it's not a problem?

[Chris Hogg]

Amen to all that. And the Russians have been dumping the reactors from their nuclear submarines into the Barents sea for decades, with no ill effects on anyone, nor will there be.

[Chris Hogg]

Being 'contaminated' tells you nothing. It's just an alarmist term designed to frighten the general population. How badly contaminated, and will anyone suffer from it? All 'contaminated' means is that the detection equipment is so sensitive that it can detect the minutest trace of radioactivity. What it doesn't tell you is whether it's harmful, which it almost certainly isn't.

And of course the fishermen complain; they've been fed the alarmist view by people such as yourself, as have the general population, so the fishermen are worried for their own safety, and the general population aren't buying their prawns.

Much ado about nothing.

[Tim J]

There has been no increase in the level of radioactivity in Pacific Prawns.

[Chris Hogg]

Nice one. Do you have a link?

[Tim J]

That's a lie. Put it back where it was dug up from originally. It clearly survived there fine long term.

[Chris Hogg]

The Finns are already a long way down the road with their deep underground storage facility.

and Nuclear waste can be dealt with in several ways. The fuel rods themselves are left for several years on-site in deep tanks of water to allow the intense and very short term radioactive species to decay. Then they can either be sealed in concrete as they are, and enclosed in stainless steel or copper, and stored in deep depositories directly, as the Finns are doing. Or they can be reprocessed to recover the considerable amounts of uranium and plutonium still in them, for re-use, and the residue encapsulated in glass, sealed in concrete, enclosed in stainless steel or copper, the containers either stored above ground in 'warehouses' or in deep depositories, as with the untreated fuel rods.

The advantage of the second method is that you recover all the useful and unspent fuel for re-use, although an underground store with full access to the containers does allow you to recover used fuel rods at a later date if it's required. AIUI fuel for nuclear power stations is so cheap, relatively, ATM, that it's questionable whether actually recovering the uranium and plutonium is worth it.

The remaining core structure of the reactor can be sealed off for a few tens of decades until the radioactivity decays to levels where conventional demolition techniques can be used to take down the rest of it. It only contains nuclides with relatively short half lives, so the radioactivity decays away quite quickly.

Tried and tested methods. Nothing uncertain. Paid for in advance.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Good summary.

[mechanic]

Mate, you're clearly stuggling with nuclear physics, how are you on plumbing?

[Tim J]

Easy to claim. Clearly what was dug up was fine there for millions of years so there is no reason why the longer half life waste wont be fine back there too.

how are you on

Fine with that too. Nothing I have done plumbing wise has failed.

[Jim K]

Yebbut 10kw was the power of the +mill+ turbine setup, not some plastic spoon creation in an inverted washing up bowl....

[Jim K..]

Obviously the op of the thread (if you bother to read anything anymore) is pondering wasting water from his tap to try & generate power....

[Jim K..]

Just how much value have you ever added?

Go off & finish this year's sweetheart pantomime, you're almost believable on that thread.