Support for nuclear power is neither exclusively right-wing, not exclusive to the reality of climate change.

“High level reactor waste is going to contain significant quantities of Pu-239 which has a half-life of nearly 25,000 years.”

Pu-239 is fissile. We don’t recycle our spent fuel right now because there’s the irrational fear that the Pu-239 will be separated from the Pu-240 and Pu-241 that reactor grade plutonium is contaminated with, and turned into weapons. That this is orders of magnitude more difficult than specially making Pu-239 or enriching U-235 – both things governments can feasibly do on the DL – seems lost on this fear.

Anyway, yeah. Backgrounding spent fuel takes 250,000 years – but spent fuel tailings only takes 300-500 years to background. No, it’s not in your generation, but reprocessing and storing the fission products is /far/ less insane than trying to control a repository for a quarter million years to store something that’s going to slowly become nearly pure weapons grade plutonium before it’s fully backgrounded.

Of course, you later trot out the “think of the children” red herring – stored nuclear fuel is a solid, man. It stays where you put it, and one would hope that you’re not storing it in your children’s playpen. We’re not contaminating the world – that’s what coal plants do, having uranium in their fly ash. Support for nuclear power means preventing climate change and trying to
/deprecate/ coal and natural gas.

But hey, you think I’m psychopathic. That’s cool. I just want to prevent entire countries from flooding, killing their populations. The Maldives? Gone in less than 100 years if we don’t replace our carbon producing energy sources at a realistic speed. But, you know, /I/ lack empathy. Seriously, dude? Get some damned perspective.

I would like to see a real analysis of nuclear costs that takes into consideration the ENTIRE nuclear fuel cycle and its consequences all the way from mining to long term storage of radwaste and dealing with the inevitable cancers resulting from not only the best-case zero-accident assumptions but considering that accidents and sabotage/terrorism will also occur in the real world.

High level reactor waste is going to contain significant quantities of Pu-239 which has a half-life of nearly 25,000 years. A general rule of thumb when dealing with high level wastes of any kind is that it takes TEN HALF-LIVES of careful storage under guard for its radioactivity to be dissipated to the point that it isn’t dangerous anymore. So in the case of Pu-239 that’s almost 250,000 years, meaning SOMEBODY has to either store and guard it for all that time or else suffer the very real and severe consequences of criminals, incompetents, and accidents causing its release.

The proper way to look at nuclear power is to imagine the test of time. Imagine for example that the ancient Egyptians had created hundreds of nuclear power plants all over the place, fully knowing that their nuclear garbage would be dangerous for many tens of thousands of years, yet selfishly harvesting their “cheap power” in total disregard of everyone who would come after. We would consider them criminal psychopaths today, long after their civilization had vanished and long after we had forgotten most of their names and the specific individuals responsible for their irresponsibility. We would hate them, we would revile them, we would use them as models for what to never let our own culture become. By now we would likely be committing a major part of our global energy on containing their garbage (adding new ‘shells’ around their crumbling structures, like Chernobyl will have to be maintained for the next quarter million years) and doing the best we could to clean up what leaked out and to counteract the excess radioactivity we would all be exposed to from the arrogant irresponsibility of a psychopathic culture that existed thousands of years before.

You pro-nuke types should take a longer view and realize your children and grandchildren and their children far down the line will hate you and consider you a primitive savage for being so selfish as to contaminate the world almost forever (on a human scale) for your 40 years of ‘cheap’ power per nuke plant. Cheap? As long as you do not hold any value for your children, perhaps you can think of it that way. But it is not going to be cheap for the many generations who will have to deal with the results of the psychopathic uncaring attitudes you hold today.

Pro nukes who say there is something wrong with the climate case are saying Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences, is stupid. Every other head of every science academy in the developed world must be a moron as well. This is what you are saying.

Do you mean the Ralph Cicerone who said last month that the recent controversies surrounding climate research have eroded public trust in scientists and damaged the image of science as a whole?

Do you mean the guy who has said the following:

There is a feeling that scientists are suppressing dissent, stifling their competitors through conspiracies. …

Public opinion polls are showing that the answers to questions like: “how much do you respect scientists?” or “are they behaving in disinterested ways?”, have deteriorated in the last few months. …

People expect us to do things more in the public light and we just have to get used to that. Just as science itself improves and self-corrects, I think our processes have to improve and self-correct.

If there’s something wrong with the “climate case” then it’s because of the unprofessional and unscientific actions of the researchers themselves (or at least Cicerone seems to think so), not because of the opinion of a few of nuclear engineers.

Besides, a wise advocate is careful about what he hitches his wagon to, and when it comes to PR, climate catastrophe is a poor horse indeed. Not only is it currently suffering from the credibility issues that Cicerone mentions above, but it also ranks dead last in the American public’s list of priorities. To put it bluntly, most of the public just doesn’t seem to care, or at least, they are more concerned with jobs and energy right now.

Thus, winning issues are the high-paying jobs and energy security that building new nuclear plants would provide. These benefits are certainly more tangible than some vague chicken-little threat — a farce that has now gone as far as to undermine the public’s trust in science itself.

So who does care about these climate issues? Apparently, the polls indicate that it is a small minority of activists with very loud voices. As you point out:

The strongest voices dumping on nuclear over its cost are people who have understood that fossil fuel generators can’t emit CO2 anymore.

Let me turn that around. I’d say that the strongest voices who insist that fossil fuel generators can’t emit CO2 anymore are the same people who have been dumping on nuclear, and they have been doing that for a long time now. I have been listening to their ridiculous arguments for my entire life, and I know firsthand that their claims about nuclear energy are unscientific nonsense. So please tell me, why should I start listening to these people now?

And here’s a quote from a report from the National Academies:

“Coal accounts for about half the electricity produced in the U.S. In 2005 the total annual external damages from sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter created by burning coal at 406 coal-fired power plants, which produce 95 percent of the nation’s coal-generated electricity, were about $62 billion; these nonclimate damages average about 3.2 cents for every kilowatt-hour (kwh) of energy produced. A relatively small number of plants — 10 percent of the total number — accounted for 43 percent of the damages. By 2030, nonclimate damages are estimated to fall to 1.7 cents per kwh.

“Coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S., emitting on average about a ton of CO2 per megawatt-hour of electricity produced, the report says. Climate-related monetary damages range from 0.1 cents to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, based on previous modeling studies.

“Burning natural gas generated far less damage than coal, both overall and per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. A sample of 498 natural gas fueled plants, which accounted for 71 percent of gas-generated electricity, produced $740 million in total nonclimate damages in 2005, an average of 0.16 cents per kwh. As with coal, there was a vast difference among plants; half the plants account for only 4 percent of the total nonclimate damages from air pollution, while 10 percent produce 65 percent of the damages. By 2030, nonclimate damages are estimated to fall to 0.11 cents per kwh. Estimated climate damages from natural gas were half that of coal, ranging from 0.05 cents to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. ”
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12794