Dear Tench:
a) Even if you secured nuclear power plants underground, there is also the problem of securing the transport of uranium from the mines to the plants. Then of course there is still the problem of storing and securing the nuclear waste, since there is no known alternatives for disposal. (I can imagine that the latter problem isn't that difficult to solve, but the former might still be a challenge that requires time, money, and effort to overcome.)
We have already solved the first. It is normally shipped by rail in very large heavy casks. Most nuclear plants are served by rail. Underground ones can be done the same way. If you like, think of the security on our land based nuclear ICBMs. How many of those would be a much more inviting target. The shipments to and from them have highly enriched uranium and plutonium materials, even if they couldn't blow the warhead. Nuclear fuel is much harder to get to critically and is not as useful to disperse in a dirty bomb. Add to that each individual shipment isn't really enough to get it to meltdown much less blow up. Ditto for the returning waste.
Then then next is by reprocessing the wate, you remove the short term radioactives (the one emitting the most radiation), that if stored, will lose their danger in a century or so. You also remove the non radioactive stuff (the largest part). You then remove the usable fuel and turn it back into more fuel for shipping back. A GCFBR makes more fuel than it burns. Whats left is the long term radioactive waste. Its far smaller in size less than 1% of original mass of the shipment. We then convert it to glass (glassification) and ship it to that storage facility using the methods above. Here is a site talking about doing only the extraction of the usuable fuel: phyast.pitt.edu
And an overviewL en.wikipedia.org
c) You mentioned terrestrial fusion, which is similar to my panacea for the world's energy problems (cold fusion). I'm sure we'll get there eventually. Then I can look back at the "old days" when global warming was just another panic attack like global cooling was in the 1970s.
I think that it is overblown however. Where I live (Milwaukee, WI), we would be better off with some global warming (more rain, warmer winters and the summers wouldn't be much hotter since we are on the second biggest Great lake). And the sea rise would take care of a lot of those bad places like New Orleans, Houston and New York. Even if all the polar caps melted, the 220 foot rise would affect us here. Florida, Louisiana and many coastal cities would be gone like NYC, Boston, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Mobile, Tampa, Miami, Gulfport and a good portion of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA and San Diego and both AMD and Intel HQs. Places like London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Marsellie, Venice, Istanbul, Cairo, Tripoli, Casablanca, Cape Town, Mogadishu, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and many others. On second thought, let global warming happen, so many trouble spots will be gone.
Pete |
