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The Water Cooler
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Sanders asked to leave restaurant
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<blockquote data-quote="Dave70968" data-source="post: 3128363" data-attributes="member: 13624"><p>Hell, there's a lot to recommend even fission reactors. We're hung up on the waste products, but there are designs that are <em>much</em> cleaner than our current pressurized-water low-enriched uranium designs. Breeder reactors are great for producing fuel at the same time as power, and there are thorium-fueled designs that are pretty clean as well. As to where to store the waste, that's a political problem, not a technical one. We have storage facilities--Yucca Mountain comes to mind--but powerful politicians and NIMBYism, combined with general ignorance, make it impossible to get things done.</p><p></p><p>So we burn coal, which emits more radioactive waste in a year than most reactors will produce across their entire lifecycles.</p><p></p><p>As to nuclear-powered cars, that's a non-starter; there's just too much loss of economy-of-scale to shrink reactors down to the size necessary for a vehicle (and shielding is damned heavy). Nuclear-powered cars would work the same way as nuclear-powered Earth: a big reactor, situated remotely, converted into another form of energy (probably electricity), and used in that secondary form.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Dave70968, post: 3128363, member: 13624"] Hell, there's a lot to recommend even fission reactors. We're hung up on the waste products, but there are designs that are [I]much[/I] cleaner than our current pressurized-water low-enriched uranium designs. Breeder reactors are great for producing fuel at the same time as power, and there are thorium-fueled designs that are pretty clean as well. As to where to store the waste, that's a political problem, not a technical one. We have storage facilities--Yucca Mountain comes to mind--but powerful politicians and NIMBYism, combined with general ignorance, make it impossible to get things done. So we burn coal, which emits more radioactive waste in a year than most reactors will produce across their entire lifecycles. As to nuclear-powered cars, that's a non-starter; there's just too much loss of economy-of-scale to shrink reactors down to the size necessary for a vehicle (and shielding is damned heavy). Nuclear-powered cars would work the same way as nuclear-powered Earth: a big reactor, situated remotely, converted into another form of energy (probably electricity), and used in that secondary form. [/QUOTE]
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