Our Atomic Dominoes are Falling

[PamW]

28. WRONG!!! WRONG!!! WRONG!!!

Warpy,

You have absolutely ZERO idea what you are talking about.

Evidently you don't know ANYTHING about the interior design and construction of a nuclear power plant.
For your information, ionizing radiation does NOT degrade the containment. First, there is really no ionizing radiation that reaches the walls of the containment. The reactor has internal radiation shields that prevent the radiation from getting out beyond those shields. People have to be able to enter the reactor building and be within the containment building. Human bodies are much more fragile than concrete.

Additionally, what do you "think" that ionizing radiation does when it encounters concrete? Do you know what it does? Evidently not! It turns into a small amount of heat. Concrete doesn't have any long complex molecules like our DNA that can be disrupted by radiation. So ionizing radiation really doesn't damage concrete. It would do more damage to heat the concrete with fire. How much damage does fire do to masonry? Why do you think the hearth in houses with fireplaces are made of masonry?

Nuclear power plants were designed to have lifetimes of many, many decades. Yes, the normal license period is 40 years. However, saying that means the lifetime of the plant is 40 years is as erroneous as saying that a car driver should be retired the first time his/her license expires. NO - humans can get their driver's licenses renewed because we are good to operate motor vehicles for the duration of several license terms. The same with nuclear power plants. They don't have 40 year lives.

As far as what to do with the nuclear waste; scientist know what to do. The problem is the US Congress OUTLAWED the solution. What the scientists / engineers that designed nuclear power plants had in mind from the beginning is for nuclear waste to be reprocessed / recycled.

Here's an interview with nuclear physicist and then Associate Director of Argonne National Lab, Dr. Charles Till, interviewed for PBS by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

You see if you reprocess / recycle nuclear waste it can be transmuted into elements that have SHORT lifetimes; of the length of time in the highlighted section of Dr. Till's response.

ONLY the USA has this multi-thousand year problem that the Congress created for us at the behest of the anti-nukes.

Do you see France or Sweden or Japan looking for a mountain to bury nuclear waste in? NO - France reprocesses / recycles their long lived waste back to their reactors as fuel. The fission products are stored in the reprocessing center at La Hague until they radioactively decay on the time scales described above; and then the French can discharge the material that is no longer radioactive.

It's really quite simple. However, the anti-nukes don't like this solution; so they got Congress to outlaw it so they would have something to whine and complain about. The anti-nukes are the last people that want a solution to nuclear waste.

It would be like people opposing catalytic converters to clean up car exhaust because they don't like a solution in which we have clean cars. They want to BAN cars. So they keep the cars as dirty and polluting as possible, so they have something to complain about.

I find it the height of HYPOCRISY to complain about a problem that you created yourself.

PamW