I doubt anyone is still following this article, but as a followup to my earlier post, I forgot about the fission products Sr-90 and Cs-137, both with about a 30 year half-life. My point remains the same: that if we reprocessed and recycled the uranium and transuranics, with only the fission products to dispose of, the waste would not need to be stored for thousands or millions of years, but only a few hundred years. This way the Yucca Mountain repository (or equivalent) would only be a temporary "decay in storage" facility.

Nuclear power is as dirty as fossil fuels. We need to look to the future and learn from the past.

Smart people learn from their mistakes; wise people learn from the mistakes of others.

I'm skeptical that the small-scale Toshiba reactor will pan out economically; historically nuclear reactors have depended on economoy of scale leading to large baseload plants (unless you're the Navy where cost is less of an issue), but I would love to be proven wrong.

joeflint, bacteria aren't going to affect the radioactivity since they only operate with chemical reactions. The only way to deal with long-term radioactivity is to either bury it (or otherwise store it), or chemically separate the elements to recycle in a reactor. As it turns out, the long-term radioactivity of spent fuel is primarily the result of the uranium, plutonium, and other transuranics that we inefficiently throw away with the spent fuel. This uranium and transuranics can be burned as fuel in a reactor. After extracting the usable fuel out of spent fuel, all that's left are the fission products which have much shorter half-lives (the longest lived major isotope that comes to mind is Co-60 with a 5 year half-life). I agree that we should be reprocessing.

There are many intriguing possibilities being discovered for dealing with the spent fuel to render it harmless; some involving bacteria that can break down the fuel, other methods are more traditional in that the fuel is reprocessed.

Certainly, modern fission powered plants are very safe.

On the horizon (~50 years) are some exciting possibilities for fusion power which involves no radioactivity. The concept is very well understood but there remain some challenging engineering hurdles.

Despite my strong skepticism about global warming, Nuclear technology presents some interesting possibilities in the production of energy. I don't know that it's any safer than burning coal, but with if the government would lift some of the restrictions on building new plants, utility companies might gain an interest in them. The biggest problem is what to do with the waste. Assuming that about every 20 years the core needs to be replaced, what is to be done with it when it's spent?

http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next...

Who needs to build HUGE nuke plants when you can have one of your own!

We need to build more nuclear plants in this country and start replacing dirty (all of it is) coal. France supplies 70% of their electricity with nuclear power plants.
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Two things we need to do: First, we need to reprocess the fuel like France does. Second, we need to pick a proven design already in use and build with it. One of the main problems with nuclear plants in America is that they have been built with creeping design changes and incurring cost overruns, like they were new planes built for the Air Force by Boeing or Lockheed.
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I'm for continuing to look into alternative energy sources, but there are limits to how much energy they can provide. Wind power isn't consistent and has costs to store the energy or provide an alternative source for when the wind isn't blowing.,I think we've about "hydroed" out our rivers, though we might pick up some more power by restoring old abandoned power stations and replacing older hardware with newer, more efficient equipment. Solar power is inconsistent and although I think more homes and shops should be using passive solar power for heating, the hardware used to create sunshine to electricity requires some poisonous materials to construct. I've also read there is some doubt as to whether they recover the energy costs to manufacture the hardware or if they are just specialty equipment to use in situations where stringing power lines or hauling in generator fuel is more expensive. Burning hemp (or other bio-fuels) is an inefficient use of the land required to grow the crop.
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We need to phase out coal as soon as possible. The pollution coming out of the newer "filter-tip" smokestacks and older tar-and-nicotine pipes is nothing compared to the destruction of the environment being caused by mining it.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Feature...
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/razin...

No way. Unless the fuel can be re-enriched once it is spent, it is not worth the environmental cost. Wind, solar, hydro, and hemp, all the way!

Im for it. Building a new nuclur power plant mean 1,000s of well paying jobs during construction and after commisioning. Heavy on the well paying jobs!

I've never read the actual moratorium bill, but I understand that it has 2 restrictions before building a nuclear power plant in WI:
1) it must be economical to the rate-payer
2) there must be a solution in place for where the waste is to be disposed of

I never understood the reason for #1, since the PSC shouldn't be approving any plants that are not economical anyway. But restriction #2 could be tricky; does it mean that Yucca Mountain has to be completely built, or is it enough that it has now been approved? In other words, could a utility decide to build now already and meet the restrictions of the moratorium bill?

It's high time to really put the power of the atom to work for us.

The construction and operation of the plants will mean jobs. We should double down on the plant near Kenosha and sell excess electricity to Chicago.

Nuclear Power. The only Carbon Nuetral Electric Power Source. You can use renewables for all of the resources to build, supply and maintain the power plant. With new innovations, the safety aspect has improved many fold.

As a bleeding-heart liberal, I say build it! It IS clean, safe, and virtually limitless!

Nuclear power is clean, cheap, safe, and long overdue. How clean and safe? So safe that I would love to have a nuclear power plant installed in my apartment building. Not just cheap electricity, but free steam heating, and steam that could be sent to nearby buildings, like the library and county courthouse. Don't laugh -- they're going to do it in Galena Alaska, and they should do it here too.

Don't want to rush anything. Let's talk about it for awhile. Maybe in ten years we'll see another plant almost under construction.

This discussion should have been held twenty years ago.