Tag Archives: nuclear waste

Environmental effects of nuclear winter

Preface.  This post is a summary of what I thought interesting and important from this 2025 National Academy of Sciences report “Potential environmental effects of nuclear war.” Unlike other nuclear winter papers reviewed in energyskeptic, the National Academy does not … Continue reading

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Will Congress ever create a new independent agency to store nuclear waste permanently?

Preface. The lack of permanent geological storage of nuclear waste will be yet another nightmare for those living after fossils have declined and civilizations go back to biomass fuels and muscle power. They will already be dealing with heat making … Continue reading

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Nuclear waste will harm future generations for a million years without underground storage

Preface. This is a book review of “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste” and the best book I’ve read on the topic, as well as additional research on the topic. Now that world wide production of … Continue reading

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Book review: Atomic Days. The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America

Preface. Plutonium for nuclear weapons was produced at the Hanford Washington site for nearly four decades. Today it is the world’s most polluted site chock-a-block with radioactive waste and toxic chemicals. Chemical pollution is one of the planetary boundaries that … Continue reading

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Uranium waste from 50+ sites contaminating groundwater

Preface. One of the top priorities of collapse from energy decline is to clean up nuclear (Superfund and other hazardous) wastes NOW, while we have the energy and technical ability to do so. Future generations will be thrown back into … Continue reading

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World Peak Uranium Production

Preface.  The World Nuclear Association estimates 90 years are left.  Today  67,500 tonnes of uranium are consumed a year world-wide and production in 2020 was 47,731 tonnes (WNA 2021). Sounds a bit peakish, thank goodness for stockpiles and the infinite … Continue reading

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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

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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

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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

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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

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