Perhaps if IFRs existed, we wouldn’t have to mine uranium and perhaps the West would find another use for depleted uranium rather than bombing the crap out of defenceless citizens in Iraq but you’d need to try getting past the influential U miners first. The dust ups will be varied and bloodied when the Uranium industry starts to squawk about reduced uranium sales.

However, respected energy expert, chairman and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute Amory Lovins, advised that:

“IFRs are often claimed to "burn up nuclear waste" and make its "time of concern . . . less than 500 years" rather than 10,000-100,000 years or more. That's wrong: most of the radioactivity comes from fission products, including very-long-lived isotopes like iodine-129 and technicium-99, and their mix is broadly similar in any nuclear fuel cycle.

“IFRs' wastes may contain less transuranics, but at prohibitive cost and with worse occupational exposures, routine releases, accident and terrorism risks, proliferation, and disposal needs for intermediate- and low-level wastes.

"It's simply a dishonest fantasy to claim that such hypothetical and uneconomic ways to recover energy or other value from spent LWR fuel mean "There is no such thing as nuclear waste." Of course, the nuclear industry wishes this were true.”

I consider it prudent to ponder the information of a scientist who’s an energy expert rather than the information provided by Barry Brook who's a biologist.

So more old style spin where proponents persist with the pretence of “rigorous international oversight” from the nuclear “regulators” while the UK Government recently planned to have 250,000 tonnes a year of nuclear waste disposed of in ordinary landfill sites but crashed at the first hurdle with irate villagers and a council rejecting a proposal supported by its own Environment Agency.

France continues to dump radioactive waste 8,000 kilometres away in Siberia for reprocessing by the Russians who announced in December, their intentions to continue developing nuclear weapons despite seeking a new disarmament treaty with the United States.

The second life of nuclear remains as dirty, as dangerous and as hypocritical as it’s always been.

As Wikipedia articles go, the entry on the IFR does not fare well.

The first citation sounds authoritative, but it leads to a poorly reproduced set of powerpoint slides that sorely lack an author or any of the sense the author might have given. What do they mean? Who can guess? You had to be there, I'd guess.

A final citation, from Science Magazine, gives us a table of contents. Which article is important? The link suggests the article on page 256. That article, more transparently cited, might appear thus:

Marshall, E. (1992) Was Argonne whistleblower really blowing smoke? Science 17 April 1992 256:303

James Smith, the human subject of the article, is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry, but you have to retrieve the 1992 Science article to discover that, and you can't retrieve the article without a subscription.

Thank you Fester for letting us know about the the Wikipedia article. If it were handed to me for marking, I would send the author back to his/her escritoire. It could be improved with a well-founded discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of committing one or more nations to an IFR nuclear electricity supply. Perhaps Iran could be discussed as an example.

Meanwhile....

We, investors, government and industry could be supporting clean renewable and diverse energy sources such as hydro, solar, thermal, wind and probably technology that is yet to be invented, instead of banging on about the demonstrably problematic technology of nuclear.

That such a variety of renewable energy sources would not only free us from dependency on fossil fuels and global corporations, an array of technologies would also boost small business, jobs and the economy for far more people than a wealthy few. Another point that is lost on the pro-nuke brigade.

An interesting article on wind-generated electricity can be found at
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/29/0909075107.full.pdf+html

although you may have to register for the free access. The gist of it is that several groups of offshore wind turbines, optimised for wind patterns over their region and connected via undersea cables, could provide steady and reliable power on a large scale. The model is based on the east coast of the USA.

The on-line article is titled
Electric power from offshore wind via synoptic-scale interconnection

The authors state:

"There are four near-term ways to level wind power and other fluctuating generation sources. (i) Expand the use of existing control mechanisms already set up to handle fluctuating load and unexpected equipment outages—mechanisms such as reserve generators, redundant power line routes, and ancillary service markets. This is how wind is integrated today (5). (ii) Build energy storage, as part of the wind facility or in another central location. (iii) Make use of distributed storage in loads, for example home heaters with thermal mass added or plug-in cars that can charge when the wind blows or even discharge to the grid during wind lulls (6). (iv) Combine remote wind farms via electrical transmission,the subject of this article."

Enjoy

Thank you for that information Sir Vivor and it appears that George W is not beyond redemption for he's soon to speak on the benefits of windpower.

Similar to Yellow Cake Johnny, he does charge a substantial fee for appearances but they reckon everytime Dubya made a speech in another life, the stock market went down.

The upside is that he's managed to find windpower though he failed to find those pesky WMD. Well at least in his state of Texas, there's heaps of windpower, so he can't mangle this one, can he? Standby:

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/04/george-w-bush-wind-guru

I had a great Easter away, and now am prepared to re enter the fray:

Protagoras,

Your unsupported snippets generally quoted out of context does nothing to indicate the scale of the problems with uranium mining, nor does it compare them to the issues with any other form of mining.

A smaller power station like Hazel wood burns in the order of 50 000 tonnes of coal a day for less than 0.1% of the worlds power supply, compared to Ranger Mine which moves 1/10th of the ore, and produces sufficient uranium for nearly 2% of the world's power requirements.

Considering that coal ash contains moderate levels of soluable toxins and low levels of radioactivity, but simply that the vastly different amounts of ore moved means that coal is far more dangerous per kWhr generated.

Perhaps instead of posting snippets of trivia you could try a comparison of actual environmental harm for each of the energy sources on a per kWhr basis or similar.

Further, in the absence of an alternative replacement of coal, we are left with little choice.