It's not just uninhabitable, someone has to maintain that property forever. You don't just put an "abandoned" sign on a melted down nuclear reactor and expect the problem to be solved. You don't just put the waste in barrels and tanks that go into the ground and have them leak into local rivers and ground water, which is what we're doing now.
We still need to clean up the nuclear messes from earlier decades of nuclear research, a time when we were not afraid of the bad consequences of nuclear, and it shows, much to our detriment.
That is like pointing at a model-T and claiming how dangerous cars are and how they are too dangerous for people to drive. All of our real nuclear problems are due to plants designed in the 50s and 60s, which is only around 15 years after nuclear power was first discovered. Of course that shit was/is unsafe, they barely understood the materials and science they were dealing with, they still had xray machines in shoe stores at the time. There is no disputing that our nuclear science has come leaps and bounds since then and there is no reason to think we can't make safe nuclear power plants.
The least we could do is atleast replacing the current 50 year old plants that are still running today with modern safer designs.
Where are the Model Ts that are leaking nuclear waste into rivers and ground water? The point was that bad consequences occurred from "not being afraid of the bad consequences of nuclear", and much of the hesitancy and cost associated with nuclear today is due to a better understanding of its risks and liabilities.
The problem is nuclear is very expensive to build, takes forever for ROI, is a huge liability risk that likely no private company can tolerate, and a logistical nightmare with waste management and proliferation concerns.
I would personally be for it being adopted as a major DoE energy independence project where trillions are pumped in over 25 years to do it properly, and provide a cheap baseload to the population. That's unlikely. Just as unlikely as a private company actually being able to come through without cutting safety corners to improve ROI, or not becoming insolvent and externalizing the cost onto society the moment there is a problem.
Almost all the radioactive waste that exists is from bomb making, not from power generation.
If you also create a good plan to recycle reactor fuel into new core assemblies, the total amount of waste drops by a significant amount below the relatively small volume power generation creates now.
Spent fuel rods are presently stored in casks on the grounds of power plants. There aren't mountains of them.
Reprocessing waste is extremely expensive, something like $50 - $60 billion to copy what France does, who funded theirs through weapons research.
It's not all dry cask storage, most energy sites store spent fuel in cooling pools. NRC has had to authorize plants to exceed the original design limits of their pools due to the amount of waste with nowhere to go. This is hardly a trivial problem.
All sites in the US that I know of store spent fuel in cooling pools prior to it going to dry cask storage. That's how the system works - the radioactivity goes down/the rods cool in the pool, then when they're sufficiently low activity they get moved to dry cask.
>NRC has had to authorize plants to exceed the original design limits of their pools due to the amount of waste with nowhere to go. This is hardly a trivial problem.
State your source(s) for this. I do know that the NRC has to authorize all on site storage whether there's "room" or not, simply because there's that much oversight involved.
How about we just throw it all into the sea? After all, that is pretty much what we are doing with our fossil emission (which contain plenty of radioactive elements, btw): belch them into the atmosphere without a care in the world since the air will dilute them enough so the effects are spread over huge areas.
But the trouble is not with the radioactive elements from the earth making it to the surface. Our current problem is with CO2 and its atmospheric accumulation. So instead of being scared of bogeyman like "waste leaking into the ground water" your only nightmare should be this:
Because that is on the whole planet and your future climate will affect every corner of the globe making whole continents uninhabitable, not just a few exclusion zones.
We already have nuclear sites such as Hanford leaking radioactivity into local water systems. We have Rocky Flats poisoning whole communities. While these are the aftermath of poorly managed nuclear weapons projects, it's testament to our extremely poor handling and the extreme costs of nuclear waste.
Regarding power generation, Fukushima has dumped gobs of radioactivity into the ocean. Even reprocessing facilities like La Hague release radioactivity into the channel which then flows into the North Sea.
The problem with just letting radioactivity leak into the environment(and those who claim "fewer people have died from nuclear than any other energy source"), is that the effects of radiation contamination may not be felt for decades, in things like early cancers, reproductive problems, and birth defects, and be hard to trace back to their original source.
Radioactivity is extremely dangerous, this is a well-known fact, and to not acknowledge the great challenges around managing nuclear projects and the waste they generate, just reduces the credibility of nuclear apologists. Nuclear could be done safely and effectively, it's just very very very expensive to do so and thus corners get cut, and we end up socializing the costs into haphazard sites, which will cost billions of dollars to maintain over the next few decades alone, and we all know nuclear waste will stick around much longer than that.
>Fukushima has dumped gobs of radioactivity into the ocean.
You mean the Japanese government has.
That aside, total radioactivity emitted by Fukushima's leaks stands at about 35 PBq if you count the amount released into the sea.
Total radioactivity released by coal burning power plants world wide is ~200 PBq.
Annually.
Fukushima grabs headlines, but it's releasing far less radioactivity than the ongoing operation of coal burning power plants.
>the effects of radiation contamination may not be felt for decades, in things like early cancers, reproductive problems, and birth defects, and be hard to trace back to their original source.
Especially since Fukushima is statistically unlikely to be the source, since so much more radioactivity comes from elsewhere.
>Radioactivity is extremely dangerous, this is a well-known fact,
Radioactivity is completely natural. It can be dangerous, but so can fire if you don't know how to handle it.
>and to not acknowledge the great challenges around managing nuclear projects and the waste they generate
Nuclear power plants generate only a small fraction of the waste that things like bomb making generate. The largest challenges for managing it are political because of the prejudice of the public against it.
Literally the only way to "save" Fukushima was to dump sea water on its melting down reactors in its initial days/weeks/months. I also don't get your deflection, as if you're insinuating the Japanese government is somehow a source of radioactivity. Actually it's coming from the melted down reactors. If you want to blame poor management as the cause of the nuclear diaster, unfortunately that seems to be a trend in the nuclear industry, so it doesn't help your argument.
>Radioactivity is completely natural.
Not in the concentration needed to run a nuclear reactor. Many mines are operating U-235 concentrations that are a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Some of those operations use methods similar to fracking to extract uranium, and are not clean. There are some select high-grade mines, but unsurprisingly, the high radiation levels require special precautions and heavy reliance on automation due to the deadly hazards radiation poses to personnel.
>The largest challenges for managing it are political because of the prejudice of the public against it.
Nope, it's a hard technical challenge that requires vast resources to solve. It is not as simple as nuclear apologist think it is. I would like to see it come to fruition, but as a major government project, where we stop the charade of it being a viable business model for private industry.
We still need to clean up the nuclear messes from earlier decades of nuclear research, a time when we were not afraid of the bad consequences of nuclear, and it shows, much to our detriment.