Sunday, September 2, 2012

One gram of “garbage” per day: we should all be so lucky

The Canadian Energy Issues blog has an appendix, of sorts, for an article on nuclear waste in the Toronto Star.  Both are worthwhile reading.  
I will note the Star's description of  waste that would fill "six NHL hockey rinks, stacked up as high as the boards," basically states all spent fuel could fit in a single, typical, warehouse.

One gram of “garbage” per day: we should all be so lucky | Canadian Energy Issues:
"Yesterday’s Toronto Star carried a curiously soft-hitting front page headline about nuclear “waste,” which while trumpeting the fact that Canada has produced over 2 million bundles of it—which sounds like a lot—gives no point of comparison with the waste products of other types of power plants. If comparators had been presented in the article, the picture would be more accurate.
Those 2 million used nuclear fuel bundles, each weighing about 20 kilograms, collectively weigh 40 million kilograms, or 40,000 metric tons. That’s from over four decades of operation."
If you think 40,000 tonnes over four decades is a lot, here is a point of comparison the Star could have provided. Gas-fired power plants in Ontario have dumped more than 5,300 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) between midnight September 1 and and 0830 September 2. They will likely have surpassed nuclear spent fuel by midnight tonight, i.e. within a single day. Every year they dump literally millions of tons into the air. Operators of gas-fired power plants simply could not keep the stuff on site; at a production rate of thousands of tons of it per day, there is just too much of it. So it gets dumped into our air, where it swirls around for hundreds of thousands of years before dissolving in ocean water, making it more acidic.
Read the entire article at Canadian Energy Issues:

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