An important reason why I'm against nuclear energy
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"Preface. Plutonium for nuclear weapons was produced at the Hanford Washington site for nearly four decades. Today it is the world’s most polluted site chock-a-block with radioactive waste and toxic chemicals.
The department of energy estimates a clean-up could cost as much as $641 billion dollars (DOE 2022). Six years ago, the estimate was $110 billion. It’s a ticking time bomb that could release radioactive materials like Chernobyl and Fukushima if facilities were ruptured by an earthquake, fire, or explosion.
Hanford’s groundwater has already gone nuclear, with 450 billion gallons of radioactive liquids in the 200 square miles of aquifer below.
On land there are 25 million cubic feet of buried solid waste, spent nuclear fuel, and even leftover plutonium (half-life 24,000 years). Another 53 million gallons of radioactive and chemically hazardous waste remain stored in 177 leaky underground tanks far beyond their life expectancy, with at least 63 believed to be leaking.
When the contamination sinks enough and enters the Columbia river, it will be a long term threat to the people, fish, and ecosystems (Bernton 2019, Cornwall 2015, Frank 2022, NRC 2016, ODE 2017).
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If there is one thing we can do for the 40,000 future generations of grandchildren, it is cleaning up nuclear waste now while we have the fossil fuels to do it. The grandchildren can’t haul it off on horse carts. It is one of the few actions we can take since we can’t refill aquifers, bring back extinct species, restore eroded topsoil, or get rid of toxic and forever chemicals. Nuclear supporters like to brush storage off waste as a political problem that can be solved. But only Finland is actually creating a safe space underground to store nuclear waste in the future. I doubt Yucca mountain or other waste storage facilities will ever be built, since once an energy crisis hits and oil is declines exponentially, it will be diverted to growing food, distributing goods and other essential uses.
So clearly this is a crazy “solution” for climate change. Not only that but nuclear power plants emit a huge amount of CO2 over their entire life cycle, from construction, mining, milling, transporting, refining, enrichment, waste reprocessing/disposal, fabrication, operation and decommissioning (Pearce 2008). Especially now that the concentration of uranium in ore is declining as well and many existing uranium mines are near the end of their lifespan (Barnham 2015).
And what’s the point? They won’t keep the electric grid up because they aren’t flexible enough to balance renewable power. Natural gas is the long-term storage, and peak load provider, and coming to the rescue to backup for intermittent power within microseconds of when it dies or comes back to life. Nuclear power is baseload power that runs at a steady rate. They take days to ramp up and down, which damages their financial health and the facility itself since that harms the reactor (DOE 2020, NREL 2020).
It’s also crazy because of peak Uranium.
Well, some of my kindle notes follow, but the don’t begin to capture the story in the book, which you should buy in hard copy for the day when the grid comes down for good so that future generations can be warned about reactor and uranium mining sites. There are 500 sites on the Navajo nation land — this is covered in the book but not below, and so much more. The corruption of Bechtel sucking up your taxpayer dollars to clean up the mess and doing a spectacularly bad job at it, endangering live. And trying to hush up whistleblowers. This is really an exciting book on so many levels, ought to be a movie!"
My comment: "Peak Uranium" may have already happened, Alice writes in this blogpost from 2022.
Sometimes I have thought that if I was a world dictator, who was the one who got to decide in the world affairs, maybe the first thing I would begin to work with, was the decommissioning of the world's 450+ nuclear power plants. This in order to mitigate, as far as I can, the harm that the collapse of industrial civilization will have on nature and the animals. I'm ready to freeze and starve in order to get this done, ready to live without most of the electricity supply. This is not fascism, this is mercy. In fact we will all be living in a world of horrible nuclear radiation in the post-apocalyptic world if we do not do this. And it is deeply immoral to count on an imminent Second Coming of Jesus as an excuse not to do this. We cannot know how far in the future the Second Coming is going to happen. And you do not try to torture and poison an old dying patient. You try to get rid of all the torturers and poisons that can harm him, so he can die as mercifully as possible. If our world is going to die, Mother Earth and all humans and animals (and resurrect in the spirit world, in the Millennial Kingdom), I do not want to be radiated to death or die from cancer.
