[LINK] Should Australia consider nuclear electricity?

[Karl Auer]

On Wed, 2021-11-24 at 15:47 +1000, Robert Brockway wrote:
> How do you feel about using fast breeder reactors to extract more
> energy and reduce the nuclear waste by a couple of orders of
> magnitude?

Oh, much better. Being stabbed ten times is so much better than being
stabbed 1000 times.

The stuff is deadly, and stays deadly for a very, very long time. It is
deadly as fuel, it is deadly as waste. Even small amounts of it are
deadly. Reducing waste by a factor of X is of little comfort if you
have X times as many reactors producing it. And the longer they run,
the more waste they produce. And the more you have the more likelihood
of failure.

And that's just the waste. The potential for pollution in case of
accident, attack or natural disaster is also unacceptably high -
because any risk other than zero is unacceptably high. The more
reactors you have the more likelihood there is of failure.

Think about all the human upheavals that have happened just in our
recorded history, let alone earlier. Think about terrorists,
politicians, the disaffected, the exigencies of war. Think about
ordinary people making mistakes.

Do you honestly think that it is even remotely likely that we can keep
anything safe for that long? Make no mistakes, allow no attacks, even
simply remember it is there, as the centuries and the millennia march
on?

We can't even keep our reactors safe, or make sensible decisions on
where to put them, or set up useful procedures for disaster. The
Russians had no idea what to do when Chernobyl melted down. The
Japanese built nuclear reactors on the coast - in a volcanically
active, earthquake-prone (and thus tsunami-prone) region.

Some people have suggested we fire it into the sun. Sounds good, gets
it right off earth! SpaceX to the rescue? Except: Challenger...?

This is a problem to which there is literally no answer except "don't
do it".

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer

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