[Post Summary]My beloved had turned away and was gone.
—Song of Solomon
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Check this out.
"Despite the scary headlines, the total amount of spent [nuclear] fuel in storage in the United States is small. The U.S. Department of Energy stated in 2007: 'If we were to take all the spent fuel produced to date in the United States and stack it side-by-side, end-to-end, the fuel assemblies would cover an area about the size of a football field to a depth of about five yards.'" (The Myth of Nuclear "Waste")
Judging by the volume of nuclear waste, then, the problem of storing it — were this either the wisest or only alternative — certainly does not seem terribly overwhelming. Yet what potential lies within the nation's stockpile of nuclear waste is something I found quite interesting.
There is a vast amount of usable fuel in what today is called "waste." Given presently existing technologies — processes whose pursuit the United States abandoned in the 1970s — nearly 96% of spent fuel from first-generation reactors can be reprocessed and used as fuel again. Were this technology in place, the spent fuel produced by a single 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant over its 40-year lifetime could be reprocessed and provide an energy source equal to the energy in 5 billion gallons of oil, or 37 million tons of coal.
In other words, we are sitting on a gold mine. It seems, then, if Congress were interested in leveraging investment in the economy, a bold initiative toward building out the necessary infrastructure for exploiting the complete nuclear fuel cycle would be a most fitting pursuit.
Thus, resistance to the economic stimulus package presently being debated in Congress represents an opportunity for thinking Americans to push for technologies whose potential on all fronts — science, energy, economy, environment — far exceeds that which will be made available in pursuit of wind energy and alternate fuels.
Economically speaking, the cost per kilowatt hour of electricity produced using nuclear power is 10-100 times cheaper than any known alternative. Thus, all kinds of pursuits, presently uneconomical, become viable.
Scientifically speaking, energy that can be applied to a square inch of any given material is multiplied in such a way as allows you to create valuable processes that would be impossible using non-nuclear energy sources. Nuclear power allows you to produce things that otherwise would be unavailable.
Environmentally speaking, buh-bye fossil fuel, buh-bye CO2. And it's not just me advocating a crash project push to build out the full nuclear power fuel cycle. Even Greenpeace founding member, Patrick Moore, recognizes the opportunity.
Could the industrial revolution have been possible without having mastered the harnessing of fossil fuels? Then, it seems a state-of-the-art revolution in industry should require we reach for the highest bar, taking gains in material mastery to the next logical level. Indeed, if we are to have a sound, stable, more equitable foundation for building and growing wealth — personal, national, material, intellectual — nuclear is the route we should go, and in fact must. Otherwise we remain no less vulnerable to being pushed down than is so frightfully true right now.
—Tom Chechatka
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