CDR: Re: Nuclear waste

[Sampo A Syreeni]

On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Tim May wrote:

>Nuclear waste is easy to track, easy to store, hard to hide.

Self-evidently the problem is *not* in the kind of waste in the containers,
but the enormous timespans - uranium is a metal, nothing else. What *is* a
problem is that you cannot secure *anything* for more than about a couple of
hundred years with any certainty. The only real problem specific to 
radioactive materials is that ionizing radiation of any kind accelerates the
formation of active radicals which eat away the containers. This is
something which can be guarded against through proper engineering.

>I could go on to educate you and others about the advantages of 
>nuclear power over alternatives, and the ease of storing nuclear 
>waste, but I expect this list is the wrong place for such education.

Again, everybody with half a clue knows that nuclear energy is pretty clean,
if not very cheap. This simply means that all of the alternatives are quite
bad. Spending less energy does not seem to be in vogue, anymore. I still put
the lights of, spin down my harddrive whenever possible and never intend to
own a car...

Sampo Syreeni <decoy at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university