"uranium quarry for the world"

[miriam_e]

Oh great! Australia looks like it will gear up uranium sales to become "the uranium quarry for the world". Morons!

Uranium makes the world even more unsafe and earns money for a very few ultra-rich people. It does very little for anybody else. Much better would be to resume our position near the forefront of research into alternative and renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

Nuclear power is just as non-renewable as petroleum. It is a limited resource.

We have been wrecking the atmosphere and climate for our children with carbon-dioxide from petroleum and coal. They are gonna really love us when we leave them with a whole lot of radioactive problems too. Our generation will go down in history as the biggest screw-ups of all time.

Nobody has yet worked out a truly safe way to store radioactive waste. Bear in mind that it never actually becomes safe. Its half-life of 250,000 4.5 billion years means that it takes that long to become just half as deadly!! (Our Earth is between 4 and 5 billion years old.) This is a problem we can't just ignore.

Short sighted greed!

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Firing it off into the sun has been seriously proposed as a solution. But it is only useful as a way of cleaning up what we have already done. Ongoing nuclear waste production becomes even more uneconomic if such a method is factored in (and it is already barely profitable -- no US reactor has turned a profit in decades).

I agree that getting it off the planet would be a good idea, though there is the danger of an in-flight accident high in the atmosphere spreading radioactive material far and wide.

Another possibility is to get it down into the molten magma below the crust of our planet. Of course that risks it coming up again in a radioactive volcano, so it isn't as good a solution as it first seems.

One of the worst solutions I've heard is that some radioactive waste disposal companies are simply dumping it in drums into the deep ocean trenches. The drums are unlikely to last more than a decade ( I believe they've already been doing this for more than a decade) and then the stuff starts leaking out into the food chain.

These are the sort of problems we expose ourselves to with nuclear power. The people in power airily wave their hands and give bland assurances, but the problems are real and will already haunt us for millions of generations... should humanity survive that long.