Sierra Club says we can’t store nuclear waste for 10,000 years but we can store CO2 forever
– By Stephen Heiser –
Well it seems that our friends at the Sierra Club have a bit of a split personality. It seems that these folks have determined that there is no feasible way to store nuclear waste for 10,000 years. However, there seems to be no problems with storing carbon dioxide until the end of time.
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200205/gambling.asp
The radioactivity would have to be isolated from the environment for 10,000 years—about twice the length of recorded human history. The waste-fuel assemblies would be locked into metal canisters and deposited in the rock, one canister per hole, like the larvae of some outsize high-tech insect. The canisters might last 500 or 1,000 years —the numbers are only guesses. It is the rock itself, 1,100 feet thick, that would be expected to contain the demon's brew: strontium 90, cesium 137, and, far less abundantly, plutonium, which remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years.
Wow, that sure sounds like a long time to me. The Sierra club has been telling us for years that nuclear waste could kill millions and make parts of the earth uninhabitable for years. The Sierra Club also tells us daily that CO2 is the element that is killing the entire planet and nearly everything living on it for so long that we can’t even calculate it.
The truly interesting point, however, is that if we store CO2 the underground storage areas seem to be immune from naturally occurring geological changes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics. On the other hand, if we store nuclear solids instead of carbonic gasses the earth will move, the stone will crack, the waters will rise, and the trees will grow, or not grow depending on which one is worse.
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200205/gambling.asp
Gertz admits there is no 100-percent guarantee when predicting events 10,000 years into the future. The enabling legislation, he notes, calls only for "reasonable assurance" by "scientific consensus" that radiation will not escape into the environment over ten millennia. "What's reasonable assurance to you may not be reasonable assurance to me," Gertz says. "And what exactly is scientific consensus? Is it 51-49? Is it 80-20? Is it 99-1?"
In its online publications, The Sierra Club contends that long term storage problems for nuclear materials are all technical/geological while CO2 storage problems are all monetary/economic.
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200907/grapple.aspx
"Unless we have a climate-change solution that can apply to coal," says Sarah Forbes, senior associate at the World Resources Institute, "we won't have a solution to climate change."
The key to having our coal and burning it too is carbon capture and storage (CCS): separating the carbon dioxide, compressing it into a supercritical liquid, and sticking it deep underground–in old oil and gas fields, coal mines, or saline aquifers. The carbon can be stripped from the coal either before combustion, as part of a process that converts it into fuel gas, or afterward in a traditional pulverized-coal plant.
But all that separation and transportation takes more energy–which means burning even more coal. Unless other scrubbers are part of the package, it also means more sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury emissions. And more money: CCS would increase the cost of coal-generated power by 20 to 80 percent.
And that's why CCS remains largely theoretical. While the G8 nations set a goal last summer of having 20 CCS plants operating around the globe by 2010, so far there is only one–a 30-megawatt test plant in Germany.
Perhaps somebody should remind The Sierra Club that somebody by the name of Mother Nature has been storing uranium and its sisters underground since the earth was formed. Likewise, storing manmade CO2 will result in humans storing an infinitesimally small amount of CO2 when compared to what Mother Nature stores with no help from us at all.
So it seems that we lack the ability to do or not do what Mother Nature has always done but we can’t do, or undo,…wait I’m confused, what was it we can’t do again? Well, at least we have the integrity and knowhow of the Sierra Club to teach us what the good things are that we can bury in a great big hole from the bad things that we can’t bury in a great big hole. I guess if you want the rules of science and laws of physics to not apply, you had better make sure that you are a variety of waste that is politically correct and popular with The Sierra Club.
What has me scratching my head, however, is if The Sierra Club can bend time and space to suit their personal opinions, why do they need money from me?
About the Author:
Stephen Heiser has been writing and editing energy news for a variety of publications including: Wilson's Business Abstracts, Individual Inc., Newspage, Newsedge, Andover News Network, VerticalNet, PowerOnline, ElectricNet, and Live Power News. In December of 2008, Stephen was hired by industry veteran and Nuclear Street Publisher Cam Abernethy to become Nuclear Street’s Managing Editor. Stephen is a member of AEE, ASME, and NEM.