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Chemical waste is a problem but it is not nearly as deadly or difficult to handle as nuclear waste. Just one obvious example -- you can put lead into metal blo

by hristov 11y ago

Chemical waste is a problem but it is not nearly as deadly or difficult to handle as nuclear waste. Just one obvious example -- you can put lead into metal blocks and store it virtually anywhere (well away from drinking water). Nuclear waste irradiates stuff around it, generates heat, and causes everything you put it in to rust and deteriorate very quickly. Some nuclear waste generates so much heat that it has to be continually actively cooled so that it does not set itself on fire and spew clouds of radioactive gases. If there was a warehouse full of blocks of lead in fukushima, the tsunami would not cause much of a disaster. Nothing worth mentioning on TV. But instead there was nuclear waste storage, which had to be actively cooled. So when the tsunami knocked out the cooling systems, it caught on fire and there were the clouds of radioactive gasses.

akiselev 11y ago
The radioactivity and maintenance requirements are certainly problems but the extreme regulation in the nuclear industry compared to other industries may drastically mitigate their long term impact, especially compared to the many chemicals we use that bioaccumulate in the food chain. With the amount of mercury, lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals that we routinely dump into the environment, we really don't know what the long term effects will be as they make their way in ever greater concentrations into animals across the world. Already there is mounting evidence that these chemicals are having an extreme effect on the top layer of ocean life (which is estimated to produce the majority of our oxygen) and if we continue on the path of indiscriminately dumping toxic waste the resulting effects could be significantly more dire than if we powered the entire world with fission. Properly regulating nuclear waste from reactors and disposing it might be more practical than regulating all of the other uses of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. If we further manage to develop technologies that can pump waste back into reactors as fuel or to convert them to more unstable isotopes (which decay to stable ones faster than hundreds of years) the entire problem can become much more manageable. Unfortunately we seemed to have written off nuclear almost completely and will never get there. These are two drastically different industries (power generation vs manufacturing) but the comparison is still worth keeping in mind.
pdkl95 11y ago
Which of these places would you prefer to visit? * Fukushima Prefecture, Japan - near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant * Pripyat, Ukraine - near the Chernobyl power plant * Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India - near the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant * Bullitt County, Kentucky - near the "Valley of the Drums" -- You choose lead as your example for chemical waste, but lead is only a moderate risk compared to the nastier chemical pollutants. The real hazards are things like the PCBs (among hundreds of other nasty chemicals) in the 100,000+ leaking drums at the "Valley of the Drums", or the 42 tons of methyl isocyanate sprayed over Bhopal. These incidents have already had significant costs in human lives and ongoing health problems for the local population. In comparison, Chernobyl killed only handful of people and Fukushima hasn't killed anybody yet. We are still waiting to see the costs of extra cancer cases from these disasters, but it won't be anything close to the damage from the chemical industries or coal power industries.

by hristov 11y ago

akiselev 11y ago

The radioactivity and maintenance requirements are certainly problems but the extreme regulation in the nuclear industry compared to other industries may drastically mitigate their long term impact, especially compared to the many chemicals we use that bioaccumulate in the food chain. With the amount of mercury, lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals that we routinely dump into the environment, we really don't know what the long term effects will be as they make their way in ever greater concentrations into animals across the world. Already there is mounting evidence that these chemicals are having an extreme effect on the top layer of ocean life (which is estimated to produce the majority of our oxygen) and if we continue on the path of indiscriminately dumping toxic waste the resulting effects could be significantly more dire than if we powered the entire world with fission. Properly regulating nuclear waste from reactors and disposing it might be more practical than regulating all of the other uses of heavy metals and toxic chemicals. If we further manage to develop technologies that can pump waste back into reactors as fuel or to convert them to more unstable isotopes (which decay to stable ones faster than hundreds of years) the entire problem can become much more manageable. Unfortunately we seemed to have written off nuclear almost completely and will never get there. These are two drastically different industries (power generation vs manufacturing) but the comparison is still worth keeping in mind.

pdkl95 11y ago

Which of these places would you prefer to visit? * Fukushima Prefecture, Japan - near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant * Pripyat, Ukraine - near the Chernobyl power plant * Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India - near the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant * Bullitt County, Kentucky - near the "Valley of the Drums" -- You choose lead as your example for chemical waste, but lead is only a moderate risk compared to the nastier chemical pollutants. The real hazards are things like the PCBs (among hundreds of other nasty chemicals) in the 100,000+ leaking drums at the "Valley of the Drums", or the 42 tons of methyl isocyanate sprayed over Bhopal. These incidents have already had significant costs in human lives and ongoing health problems for the local population. In comparison, Chernobyl killed only handful of people and Fukushima hasn't killed anybody yet. We are still waiting to see the costs of extra cancer cases from these disasters, but it won't be anything close to the damage from the chemical industries or coal power industries.