Hi Pogi and MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Nuclear waste is not a problem, it's the SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE!

The original nuclear engineers in the 1950's would be HORRIFIED to think we all still thought nuclear waste was a 'problem'. They knew then what I only learned in my 40's. Nuclear breeder reactors EAT "normal" nuclear waste.

They burn the longer lived stuff (actinides) to get 90 times the energy of a normal Light Water Reactor. Breeders leave some final waste (fission products) but they are so hot the burn themselves out in 300 years. AND it's only 1 golf ball to power your entire lifetime with reliable abundant clean power, all day, every day no matter the weather. Reliably. Without the impossibly expensive task of trying to build huge expensive pumped hydro dams to try and get you through the night with 'unreliables' like wind and solar. Nuclear has enough power to light your world and charge your EV, or even manufacture synthetic fuels to replace oil and jet fuel. At 1 golf ball per person-lifetime, Australia would only have 25 million golf balls to bury every 70 years, filling just 1.25 Olympic swimming pools! That's compared to burning 800 ELEPHANTS worth of coal for 1 lifetime of energy. The final nuclear waste (fission products) just melts down into ceramic blocks that will be buried under the energy park. Uranium goes in, and never comes out again! Here's a 4 minute video that explains it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMDDhQ9-pE

Now imagine another solution for the FINAL waste (fission products only, no lovely high-energy actinides).

Imagine the WHOLE world of 10 billion people in 2050 is nuclear powered and that most of those reactors are breeder reactors eating nuclear waste.

The other option is to collect the entire WORLD'S nuclear waste into one old barge every 2 years, tow it out to the deepest ocean trench, and sink it.

WHAT?! POISON THE OCEANS! KILL THE WHALES! NEVER!

But wait! It's been vitrified, melted into ceramic blocks. It's not a fine dust that might float around somewhere. It's not going anywhere.

Also, REMEMBER THE PHYSICS! Water halves radiation every 15 cm, so a few meters of water between the barge walls and the waste cages inside would protect sea life. No-one is going down 6km to try and grab this stuff, and there's not much they could do with it if they did.

In 300 years, it's safe. Done! Nuclear waste is just not a problem. But if we make other choices, by 2050 Australia could have 1.5 MILLION tons of solar panels to recycle. America would eventually have to recycle 1.35 MILLION solar panels EVERY DAY! Now that's a waste crisis!

But worse, solar and wind are just gateway drugs for fossil fuels, especially peaker plants like natural gas. Go down the renewables only route and I guarantee we will not solve climate change. An energy storage revolution would have to occur that's several orders of magnitude cheaper, and there's NOTHING like that even on the horizon.

If we get magic batteries, then I'm all in. But until then, we need to BAN MAGICAL THINKING! We need hard nosed, REAL engineering solutions to the energy problem, and mass producing CAP1400 once-through reactors is the only solution to climate change today while we commercialise and perfect the vast array of options of breeder reactors we KNOW work but just have to commercialise. (Like Ed Pheil's MCSFR.)

In 10 years we may know if Svenmarks global Maunder minimum hypothesis
has overpowered the AGW process by the fall in earths average temp.
If so we can continue to burn the coal as it will be cheaper than
renewables and nuclear. Also will hold back the cold times.
However nuclear is the only long term option.

One US study showed that based on mtbf of solar cells in a 100%
renewables system they would need teams of workers to replace
100,000 solar panels EVERY day.

Oh BAZZ, really?

Svenmark has been duped by the same tired old anti-climate myths. He must be politically allergic to the policy demands of climate change.
http://www.desmogblog.com/henrik-svensmark

COAL IS NOT CHEAP!

Coal kills nearly 3 million people a year, which is about 650 Chernobyl disasters a YEAR. (The west NEVER built a single Chernobyl reactor — not all nuclear reactors are the same!) Every year coal kills the same as 650 Chernobyl disasters. https://tinyurl.com/pqgdd5q
This is why George Monbiot says: “….when coal goes right it kills more people than nuclear power does when it goes wrong. It kills more people every week than nuclear power has in its entire history. And that’s before we take climate change into account.”
http://tinyurl.com/93nm9sn
The health costs nearly double the cost of coal! You pay once in your electricity bill, and again in your public health bill.
http://tinyurl.com/6m2o7c5
Dr James Hansen has calculated that by displacing coal, nuclear power has already saved 1.8 million lives.
http://tinyurl.com/ydx6mxrb
W.H.O. also reports that the pollution from energy poverty, like wood and dung smoke, kill another 4 million people a year. That's 7 million people a year dying from dirty energy worldwide. The health bill isn't just treating those who eventually die, but also includes those who survive with lung diseases and other health complaints. The health bill is enormous! If we pump money into solving climate change, we also create clear skies and reduce health bills, create energy security and avoid potential oil wars and we prepare for the fact that fossil fuels are actually finite and will one day peak and start a permanent decline

Nuclear energy is very green. It emits almost no CO2 to mention. Yes opponents of nuclear power frequently claim that uranium mining emits a lot of CO2 but this is simply wrong.

In this topic, you have to understand that people lie. A lot.

Now, nuclear power does also create nuclear hazards of various kinds, including nuclear weapons proliferation. Maybe those aren't "green" in which case it's not green. The radiation at Fukushima and Chernobyl is very real.

But from a purely environmental perspective, in terms of protecting the maximum number of fish, fowl, lands, oceans, and human lives, nuclear is still vastly superior to burning coal/fracked natural gas (which are the primary electrical energy sources in the world).

Right now, China burns so much coal that the pacific ocean is literally being polluted by mercury.

Chinese coal is killing the Earth and environmentalists respond by trying to ban nuclear power. There you have the environmental movement in one sentence.

The biggest problem in the nuclear business is that it's so small and underfunded, there are all kinds of whackos beginning to crowd in and make big claim for very bad ideas. For example Thorium Molten Salt Reactors (horrible) and PACER (even worse).

Whaaaat? You don't like MSR's? Sorry, but you're going to have to explain why. I know many nuclear engineers that think they're the BEST!

+ It *cannot* melt down because the fuel is already a liquid.
+ It requires power to keep the fuel up in the core and reacting. In a power failure the hot liquid salt pours down to the drain tank and the moment it cools to 400 C the salt crystalises into a solid block that's not going anywhere.
+ The Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactor eats uranium and thorium and nuclear waste and nuclear warheads!
+ It burns all the longer-lived 'waste' out of it, getting 90 times the energy out of the waste, turning a 100,000 year storage problem into today's energy solution.
+ The final wastes are fission products that you melt into ceramic blocks and bury under the reactor carpark for 300 years. Then they're safe! Your whole life would only result in 1 golf ball of waste. That volume for Australia would only come to 1.4 Sydney Olympic pools of nuclear waste after 70 years of abundant, reliable, carbon free electricity!
+ Uranium from seawater can run the world for billions of years. It's essentiall 'renewable' because geological activity and erosion tops up the oceans.
+ Dr James Hansen, the world's most famous climatologist, says we need nuclear power and we should look to the history of the French. They built out a mostly nuclear grid in just 15 years. It can be done, fast and cheap. The French electricity bill is about half Germany's, and Germany is only a third done with their unreliable wind and solar plan. According to Hansen the choice is nuclear power or climate change.