nuclear critters

[pilvikki]

after reading this, I once again asked myself why we don't work harder for alternative power sources. there are so many options and yet even more plants are built.

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ho ... 3148152815

[Icey]

I agree with you, and I have to shake my head at the promise of nuclear power making energy clean and cheap. We've had no noticeable drops in electricity prices provided by nuclear plants, and as for being "clean", a little leak can do a lot of damage, whether it's contaminated steam or water.

The French company, EDF Energy, which operates Britain's nuclear power stations, said that there had never been any danger to staff or the public and it always reported "low-scale events" to the regulator. Strange, then, that Sellafield's had several leaks over the past 6 years, oozing radioactivity 5 times higher than the permitted "safe" dose. There've also been accidents at other power stations - in Scotland, Hartlepool, Kent and others.

The link was interesting. I've read several of these type of reports. In south Carolina and Chernobyl, the problem of irradiated birds, fish and animals contaminating areas further afield're obviously a concern. It's even worse in Fukushima, where paddy fields were abandoned because of the fall out. Now farmers're moving back, and rice's still being eaten and exported, despite the possible future dangers, but understandably, when one's livelihood's been pulled from under their feet, poverty's going to make some people push all that to the back of their minds.

[pilvikki]

soon we'll have glow-in-the-dark pets. and then we'll start.

earning a livelihood on one hand, companies making big bucks on the other. and as for the French... let's not even go there. which is why I prefer to keep a bit of distance between the kids and those stacks...

i'd love to live somewhere else in this country, but look at this map, it's kinda hard to dodge the sodding things:



i'm totally convinced that something is leaking somewhere, they just "forget" to mention it....

[pilvikki]

and 'cheap'? hell no!

how about this then:

France, the world's most nuclear-dependent country, operates 58 reactors and has been a leading international proponent of atomic energy.

drat, should have looked that up before moving here... finland, for one, has a sum total of 1.

[Icey]

I can appreciate your worries, but it's too late to worry about such things. If the Finnish reactor went into meltdown, the whole place'd be irradiated anyway. Obviously the more of them a country has, and the closer together, the more it concerns folk.

These're ours .......

[Kellemora]

And where are they putting all the spent fuel rods?
They are more hazardous than the reactors themselves!

[pilvikki]

exactly! one really stupid idea they was to cement them into huge boxes and sinking them into the ocean. bloody brilliant or what? if one of them cracks, we can kiss our asses goodbye for it'd contaminate the whole damned thing...

[Icey]

Ours DID get put into cemented boxes and dumped into the Irish Sea. Then the practice suddenly came to a halt when it was reported that children living on the east coast if Ireland were developing leukaemia and other cancers in a far higher ratio than was normal.

Sellafield, in Cumbria, is one of our reprocessing plants. Spent fuel rods, still highly radioactive, are ferried by rail so that it can be decommissioned or re-used. Unfortunately, although things're kept quiet, seeping water and ponds full of radioactive water've caused much panic to the local community. The government and nuclear power plant bosses've been quick to try and quell any fears, saying that it's all being made safe, but it'll take decades, if not centuries before the stuff decays enough to be considered risk-free. Meanwhile, it piles up, and although reinforced containers're used, nuclear waste's moved down the country using the ordinary rail system, which means that the contaminated cargo passes through stations, towns and villages alike. I personally shudder at the thought of it.

[Kellemora]

Deadly man made stuff that cannot be unmade.

There was a company several years ago who wanted to use little pellets of these rods to make batteries which would last for years. Trouble is, it would cost so much to make them so they stayed safe, nobody could afford them. Then they still had the problem of disposal when they finally did go bad after 30 to 50 years of use.

I read once where if they dropped them into active volcano's they would be neutralized, provided they didn't cause the volcano to erupt while it still contained active materials.

Maybe they could shoot them into the sun, might keep it from running out of fuel one of these days, hi hi...
Or it could cause the sun to blow up and then none of the solar panels will work.

[pilvikki]

yes, i'd heard the plan to shoot them off into the sun...

why can't they ever figure this out before hand???

[Icey]

Because, people're stupid, but it's fair to say that no one realised that some radioactive isotopes have half-lives of thousands of years, so now we're stuck with wondering what to do with all the waste.

We could probably power rockets with plutonium, which'd breed even more and therefore be used as permanent fuel to send craft into far-flung areas of space. Away from the gravitational pull of objects in our near galaxies, maybe we could use deep outer space as a safe dumping ground for the future muck we've created .... unless it blew up and somehow caused some terrible catastrophe. : (