So im getting ready for a debate that students are forced to do in my class. I debating for the future of nuclear energy, this other guy is debating that we should rid of all nuclear energy and destroy all the power plants. We both genuinely believe in what we say. I've done my research, but there are a few things I can't answer;
1) What exactly is nuclear waste? What makes it waste?
2) Why can we not recycle the waste?
3) Is it feasible to just shoot the waste into space?
Nuclear energy questions
Adrian Perry
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
Thomas King
>I've done my research, but there are a few things I can't answer
You could have easily googled these questions, fuck off.
Evan Jenkins
Nuclear waste is basically just the leftover radioactive fuel that is subcritical and not sustainable in a traditional reactor; unusable radioactive isotopes and inert reaction products. It also includes heavy water and spent control rods (Carbon 14).
With traditional reactors (i.e. reactors from the 70s and 80s) this waste is completely unusable. In various other designs (molten salt, accelerator driven, etc) the waste is much more efficiently taken care of, and in some cases nearly eliminated completely.
It wouldn't be feasible to send it into space, for fairly obvious reasons. As it is, it's perfectly safe the way we do it now, with geological disposal. We seal the material in tonnes of concrete and bury it where it can't do anything. An even better option that has been proposed in the past is deep sea disposal.
Julian Howard
Despite the spooky mass of all of our nuclear waste, the volume is very very small (high as fuck densities). There's no reason not to store it underground.
Carson Hill
Also, the most dangerous radiation (alpha) doesn't go far enough to hurt people. Gamma is the only real concern, but it has such a small chance of interacting that it isn't a concern with sufficient distance and shielding.
Jason Ramirez
>I've done my research
All the questions you posted are expected from someone who has done research and should be asked in /sqt/, do you have a more general or controversial topic you want to ask? I don't think so causr you are underage.
Ryan Morris
Also, the dangers of nuclear waste vary depending on if Uranium is used or if Thorium is used. Thorium is far safer (no dangerous meltdowns) and can generally produce hundreds of times more power, but the government went with Uranium since Thorium waste couldn't be used for weapons.
t. Salty Nuclear-Materials student
Cooper Fisher
will. I was going to bring up how advancements in nuclear energy will go on a separate path from military use. For instance thorium would be hard to use to make a bomb with, so we can feel safer about allowing countries to use nuclear energy given that they can only use thorium. It would allow them to power their cities and bring them out of a 3rd world hell hole. My opponent argues ridding the world of nuclear energy would be peace
Nicholas Clark
Yes. That's what I want to argue. A part of the debate is relating it to Trump's state of the union. My opponent is going to bring up "trumps new nuclear research for warheads". But I want to argue that there isn't anything new about it, and that Trump is just putting more funding into outdated nuclear methods that we already have been practicing for decades.
i talk more about it here
Adam Young
You could always pull the whole sustainable energy alternative to fossil fuels bit. Nuclear even beats out hydroelectric in carbon emissions, and is much more reliable as a baseline energy producer.
Easton Campbell
Yeah. It sucks because the class is like 100 people. It seems the majority is against me.
Connor Smith
You don't need to go with torium as a mane argument as the current infrastructure is not based on it. Yea what this user says
is correct, but uranium plants are not bomb factories, in the sense that no matter how ugly a meltdown can get, the percentage of fissible material in a reactor is less tiny compared to that of a bomb. It has the least deaths in total and per mega watt hour (yea, it even beats solar), and shouldn't be thought as some sort of unstable place. And say that even if todays reactora are safe, they can only get safer with more funding.
Kevin Sanchez
Nuclear waste is primarily the daughters of uranium fission. These are radioactive for tens of thousands of years. They can't easily be split so they can't just keep being split in a reactor.
While it is possible to send the waste into space, the risk of a explosion leading to spread of radioactive material into the atmosphere is one governments are unwilling to take. Remember rockers are basically giant cylinders of highly explosive material that are combined in a controlled manner. The current best course of action is to bury the waste in some dry uninhabited place
Benjamin Butler
Getting rid of nuclear power made the terrorists just throw down their arms and renounce their devilish ways. Not only that, but my neighbor no longer covets my car, and Africa's food and water shortage problems have been solved completely.
Who knew that getting rid of nuclear would lead to world peace?
Lucas Powell
Is this a strawman or genuine satire? Or something else entirely?
Isaac Bailey
A little from column A, a little from column B.
It is a gross oversimplification of global politics to suggest that getting rid of nuclear would bring peace.
Jeremiah Myers
There are several reactor designs and fuel cycles utilized globally, in about roughly 542 operational reactors. These range from test reactors to commercial power reactors which can be PWRs (like the CANDU and Westinghouse AP1000s) or the BWR designs like GE makes.
Depending on this, you get different grades of enrichment for the fuel that is produced from the reactor, and subsequently, fuel can also be used in blankets around the core to "breed" fuel.
While most of the fuel has VERY high level alpha radiation wastes, most of these do not travel further than 2.5 cm in air (picture your thumb length) and will be stopped by your skin. The heat deposition however (since it is equivalent to a Helium molecule sans 2 electrons ) is high, due to the kinetic energy converted into thermal upon impact. One of the difficulties of storing this high level waste in the form of fused borosilicate glass has been cracks forming within the material.
There are problems that arise from high level waste however. As other posters have mentioned earlier, while the gamma radiation is not such a big issue due to shielding, the fuel bundles are generally stored in spent fuel pools for between 5-7 years to "cool down"(closer to 10) before being moved into on site storage, gigantic dry casks that weigh anywhere from 100-150 Tons. This poses a security risk, since the fuel is radioactive for many, many years, and the confidence interval of fuel present within (for non-proliferation concerns) disappears the moment it is sealed. (Picture this: I'm 25 working at a nuclear reactor as a guard. Today I saw the cask #1 being sealed with 18 fuel bundles in it. 35 years have passed. I am retiring, and you take over. From the day the cask was sealed, My confidence that the fuel is present in the cask has started to drop from 100.00% to 99.99% the next day and so on. Now, 35 years later, you only have my word for it.)
Zachary Phillips
Contd.
The upside is the storage in salt mines, with the glass turning into a "salt-like crystal" over millenia. Or places like the WIPP in New Mexico, or Yucca Mountain (which greentards still have a problem with. It is LITERALLY called YUCK!A mountain).
Think of the problem with that for a second. Millenia? While we can guarantee the casks will survive that long, due to the design, what makes sure humans can recognize the language or the warning signs being used? Will the "Danger: Radiation" signs be recognized? Nuclear Semantics is a field that looks into the effects of the waste.
But AS for the way to counter your hippie friend who wants to shut down all power plants:
1. As a fallout (pun intended) of the SALT2 treaty, and since the US took a political decision to NOT reprocess spent fuel, (which can be used to breed weapons grade material) as an example to the rest of the world, the US produces a ton of waste. This is a problem because while the NRC said they would open a repository, with the delays in Yucca Mountain Waste Repository opening, Reactor Operators have been forced to store the spent fuel on site, in the casks aforementioned. France is the only country reprocessing currently (their plant is run by 4x1000 MW nuclear reactors.
Why does this matter? Because the sum total of all the energy used by a person in the US today in terms of fuel used would be 37 cars of coal, or 1 coke can worth of Uranium fuel. This would further be reduced to the size of a slug the size of a baseball if reprocessed (extracting fuel to re-use in the most basic definition).
2. I do NOT want my national defense grid, my anti-ICBM defenses, air defense radars, emergency services to be dependent on solar/wind/coal/oil etc. Nuclear is guaranteed to provide basepower, and is reliable for long term storage. (the avg. 3000 MW power plant uses about 27,000 tons of coal a DAY!, and the coal fields on site only carry enough for about 7-10 operation days.
Parker Martinez
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Blake Reyes
Contd. More
2..... So with processed fuel, you could store the bundles on site/underground etc. as a backup for years of power in case of a war/doomsday scenario etc.
3. No, it is not possible to send this into space. Keep in mind that Uranium-238 / 235 are among the heaviest elements known to man (compare atomic mass to Carbon or Nitrogen and think of the weight). Similar with Plutonium etc. Radiative decay leads them to reach the stable isotope after many years of Lead, which is still 208. Until we have the ability to send stuff up for super cheap (grav lifts or something), it makes no sense to dispose in space, but you could imagine a future where it's cheaper to send this stuff from orbit (when generated there) into planetary gravity wells, where the heat of reentry could create a fused rock that impacts on a "shithole" planet, and thus no harmful consequences.
4. Fission is a stop gap. It is the equivalent of us figuring out that gun powder could be used in a musket. Fusion is the future, but is still a LONG way away. (remember, it's only 40 years away. and they've only been saying that for 40 years). Think of fission reactors now as testbeds to a) understanding neutronics, reactor thermal hydraulics and materials and b) they were a tool to get the public to accept nuclear and c) a means to breed weapons grade material.
Now for the first time, you are having reactors that are designed, not as naval reactors for submarines and then scaled up for land use, but a first principles, walk away safe, no moving parts, natural circulation driven system, to minimize accidents. That's not even counting the GEN 5 designs that NRC is unable to license (since they are unable to come up with a design basis accident short of a meteorite impact through containment).
Basically, We need fission. To figure out the science, all the papers and textbooks and knowledge that will allow us to build the reactors of the future. For both earth and space applications.
Benjamin Lee
>>we should rid of all nuclear energy and destroy all the power plants.
how to win this argument: point out that solar power and geothermal power are nuclear power. Point out that fossil fuels are really nuclear power too.
Also come out of left field and start advocating for nuclear fusion power. There are zero risks of meltdown with fusion power and the amount of nuclear waste produced is practically nil. Point out that we could get aneutronic fusion to work, which for all intents and purposes would not produce nuclear waste because it doesn't produce neutrons. It's a debate class, fusion doesn't have to work for you to argue that it can.
) What exactly is nuclear waste? What makes it waste?
nuclear fuel that don't burn too good. also what said
) Why can we not recycle the waste?
france does.
) Is it feasible to just shoot the waste into space?
yeah, but rocket launches have much too high of a failure rate. Very deep borehole disposal works:
en.wikipedia.org
Past a certain depth, there's practically no chance of it coming up. If they try to say it could leak like fracking, point out that you aren't pumping massive amounts of water in like fracking does
Isaiah Miller
Nuclear waste is easily containable; a reactor over a year will generate 20 metric tons of waste. No need to launch it into space etc. just put it in a hardened building. Compare this contained waste to all the waste that other forms of power, like coal will put into the air like lead, mercury, and sulfates. Personally, I am more terrified by the thought of breathing in mercury compared to people who are terrified by the perception of nuclear power that comes from movies. Plus no carbon emissions.