Categories
-
Recent Posts
- Who Killed the Electric Car & more importantly, the Electric Truck?
- President Carter’s energy solutions 1977
- Peak Menhaden
- Hemp for paper, textiles, the war on drugs, and more
- Why towns have a hard time adding EV, solar, heat pumps
- Building a national super grid in America
- The Mayflower from the book The Barbarous Years
- Deep Sea Oil
- Book review of “Livewired. The inside story of the ever-changing brain”
- The conveyor belt may be slowing down — Yikes!
- Battery Energy storage batteries (BESS) too complex to ever be commercial
- New war and energy alliances over next resource wars
- Book review of “Siege: Trump Under fire”
- Why do people vote for Trump?
- Book review of “Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID”
Category Archives: Nuclear Waste
SMR / Gen 4 nuclear reactors less safe & create even more toxic waste
Preface. With climate change getting all the press and the coming energy crisis virtually no coverage, pro-nuclear forces are strongly pushing new nuclear plants as a way to lower CO2 emissions and deliver reliable power (but only baseload, they … Continue reading
Posted in Gen IV SMR reactors, Nuclear Waste
Tagged modular reactors, Natrium, nuclear power, nuclear waste, PWR, SMR, sodium
Comments Off on SMR / Gen 4 nuclear reactors less safe & create even more toxic waste
Disposal of nuclear waste in municipal landfills
Preface. The pandemic is probably going to enable a lot of bad legislation to be snuck in while attention is focused elsewhere. This proposal is for low-level waste in landfills. But the big problem is that nothing at all is … Continue reading
High-level nuclear waste storage degrades faster than thought
Preface. Burying nuclear waste ought to be a top priority, now that it appears peak oil may have happened in November of 2018 (Patterson 2019) and perhaps even sooner if covid-19 crashes the world economy (Tverberg 2020). It won’t happen … Continue reading
Nuclear waste will last a lot longer than climate change
Preface. One of the most tragic aspects of peak oil is that it is very unlikely once energy descent begins that oil will be expended to clean up our nuclear mess. No one wants the spent fuel! New Mexico is … Continue reading
Posted in Nuclear Waste, Planetary Boundaries
Tagged climate change, decommissioning, nuclear waste
3 Comments
Climate change risks could cause an American “Fukushima”
Preface. Nuclear power plants need a constant supply of electric power to pump cool water into a reactor’s core. Ninety percent of them, 54 plants, have at least one flood risk exceeding their design. If flooding stops the power supply … Continue reading
Posted in Climate Change, Nuclear Waste
Tagged climate change, Fukushima, meltdown, nuclear waste
2 Comments
Decommissioning a nuclear reactor
Preface. Below are excerpts of articles about the costs and challenges of dismantling nuclear power plants. This is at the top of my “Energy Descent To Do List” given the consequences for future generations for up to a million years, … Continue reading
Posted in Nuclear Waste
Tagged decommission, nuclear
Comments Off on Decommissioning a nuclear reactor
The Devil’s Scenario – near miss at Fukushima is a warning for U.S.
[ The most likely event to trigger a loss of power long enough to cause a spent fuel pool zirconium fire meltdown and release of radioactive particles into the atmosphere is a nuclear or natural geomagnetic storm electromagnetic pulse (see … Continue reading
Admiral Rickover 1957: Energy Resources & Our Future
Preface. I’ve shortened and reworded this speech. All of Admiral Rickover’s speech is prescient and important, a few paragraphs: “We live in what historians may some day call the Fossil Fuel Age. Today coal, oil, and natural gas supply 93% … Continue reading
GAO 2012 Spent Nuclear Fuel
[ If we don’t clean up nuclear waste while there is still the energy and a functioning financial system to make it happen, it won’t. Yet another nightmare for future generations. Shameful. Disgusting. Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks … Continue reading