Carbon neutral and CO2 emissions, etc

bennty
Thu, 09 Sep 2021 01:03:45 +0000

ucbalumnus:

Of course, burning coal just distributes radioactive materials in any fly ash that escapes into the air (coal has embedded other stuff in it, some of which is radioactive).

Well, it’s about concentration, isn’t it. The problem with nuclear waste isn’t that it’s radioactive, it’s that you’re heaping a whole lot of it together, and there isn’t currently any way we know of either containing it well or knowing and responding to what it’s evolving into as it’s stored. You can follow a decay chain for a single isotope, but the isotopes don’t exist in isolation; you’ve got a whole molecular and isotopic stew in there. The exciting danger is meltdown, but even there it’s a concentration story (see Ken Buesseler’s work in tracing cesium and other isotopes through oceans after Fukushima and Chernobyl). But the bigger problem for using nuclear as a power source is about waste storage and the efforts to recycle.