Report: Safety and Security Risks Undercut Nuclear Power's Role in Minimizing Global Warming?

It has been known for decades that Nuclear power was shelved because the public was misinformed as the chance of meltdowns. In some reactor designs, (Canadian - CANDU reactors) there cannot be a meltdown. These non enriched uranium reactors have been in use for decades. Even if they are wrecked, the reaction just stops. The spent fuel is still a waste problem as from other reactors. But surely, Climate Change trumps this problem.

Yes, those are the same issues used back in the 70s to block construction of nuclear power plants, and now you see what the fossil fuel alternative has wrought: Global Warming.

All of the wildly imaginative terrorists issues are totally moot now that North Korea has tested a nuclear weopon and Iran is threatening to join Pakistan. Moslem nutcases need not trouble themselves in stealing radionuclides from USA sites now that they have a friend in Iran.

Since the USA and China are given most of the blame for GW, they should be allowed to pursue the nuclear remedy without constraints imposed by the sloppy security in lesser nations.

Ever since the Three Mile Island incident, the nations remaining reactors have quietly turned out untold terawatts of clean energy without releasing radioactive pollution into the environment. I daresay its the most regulated and closely watched industry in existence. If you think more oversight is necessary then by all means hire more NRC inspectors. Just let the licensing procedure get rolling again. And quit storing the wastes out in the open if you're worried about them, a well guarded mountain in Nevada is better than no storage at all.

By the way, all of the pollution issues involved in building a nuke plant apply equally to all of the thousands of solar and wind farms greenies want to put up. Lets see the calculations on those , mmkay?

And one final clue....uranium and plutonium turn into strontium 90 and iodine after the fission reaction. Those are the dangerous byproducts that merit the most concern and within about 40 years the radiation of THOSE elements is greatly attenuated. If there is any uranium and plutonium left over its recovered and used as fuel instead of going into long term storage.

I have never been confident in the ability of nuclear power to help reduce global warming. Leaving aside the carbon cost of recovery from an accident, one must take into consideration the entire carbon cost of construction and the fuel cycle.

Here are some things that will leave carbon footprints:

site preparation

concrete

steel

other materials

transportation

human labor

Uranium exploration

mining

transportation

processing (plus its infrastructure)

medical expenses

I've never seen an accounting of nuclear power that includes believable carbon-based numbers for the above-mentioned costs, but there's one immense cost I've left out: that of sequestering nuclear waste from the environment for the foreseeable future. The math turns out to be quite interesting: Plutonium--only one of the biocidal isotopes produced in nuclear reactions--has a half-life of 24,000 years, which means that if you have ten pounds of it today, by around the year 26,000 you'll have five pounds left. In another 24,000 years you'll have two-and-a-half pounds--and so on towards the end of time. If we use the arbitrary number of ten for the total number of half-life durations during which we'll have to keep Plutonium away from anything it could hurt (anything alive), we get a total of 240,000 years, forty times the length of all recorded human history. Now let's say we're going to pay one person ten dollars an hour to guard the stuff (obviously a great underestimation of the cost, but nonetheless useful). After one year, we'll have spent $87,600. Multiply that by ten half-lives, you get $21,024,000,000.00. Yes, that's twenty-one billion and change. And remember, we based this calculation on a ridiculously low number. Multiply this by whatever more realistic number you like and it immediately becomes obvious (if it's not already) that using nuclear power to fuel our profligate contemporary lifestyles is nothing less than outright thievery from the future--all those generations who will have to deal with this stuff which benefited them not a whit, and probably condemned them to a much less comfortable world than ours.

It's difficult to make a calculation based on dollars accurately reflect carbon cost, but if anyone who reads this can help, I'd like to see the numbers.

Nuclear power is, at best, an extremely temporary fix that will serve only those who've already mined enough uranium, coal and oil to be able to afford it. The rest of the present world, and all future generations, will pay for it.