Canada proposes 300 year above ground storage for spent nuke fuel.

[NNadir]

Canada, where people can think, has proposed a nuclear materials storage system suitable for retrieval.

"Canadians urge temporary nuclear waste storage

For at least 300 years, radioactive waste generated by Canadian commercial nuclear reactors should be isolated and contained in a monitored, retrievable system, recommends Canada's Nuclear Waste Management Organization in a draft report released in late May. Rather than disposal in a permanent underground repository, as the U.S. proposes for Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, the organization urges an "adaptive phased management" approach in which waste would be managed and could be retrieved. The organization was created by the Canadian government and is led by the nation's nuclear power industry. The report argues that its approach would require the current generation of Canadians to take charge of their waste but leave options available "for future generations to make decisions in their own best interests." The report proposes that waste be managed in three phases, beginning with on-site storage for 30 years, followed by movement possibly to an interim underground storage facility and then to deep underground storage in a retrievable and monitored system in suitable rock formations. The site selection process would focus on provinces that currently benefit from the nuclear fuel cycle, the report says. It estimates the total costs to be $24 billion."

http://pubs.acs.org/isubscribe/journals/cen/83/i23/html/8323govc.html

Some governments recognize reality, others don't.

Canada of course is the country of origin of some of the most important types of reactors known, the CANDU.

It is worth noting that in 300 years many important fission isotopes will essentially be gone. For instance, this represents about 10 half lives of Cs-137 (t (1/2) = 30.07 years) and less than 0.1% of it will still exist.

What is notable about this proposal is that it allows future generations to recover nuclear resources. If humanity survives the combined efforts of Bushies and anti-nuclear anti-environmental activists - i.e. if humanity survives global climate change - it will because nuclear resources are available.

This is an excellent proposal.

[jpak]

1. Canada passes (big) buck(s) to unborn

"it allows future generations to recover nuclear resources"

i.e., bomb material

"It estimates the total costs to be $24 billion..."

That's ~$750 per capita...

or $3000 for a Canadian family of 4...

or ~5 years worth of electric bills for a typical Ontario household...

such a deal...

[phantom power]

2. Their electricity must be pretty cheap.

That's like $600 per year. I'll spend about $800 just getting thru the phoenix summer.

[jpak]

4. It is... ~$0.05 per kWh for the first 750 kWh

for Ontario Hydro customers.

I paid about the same when I lived in Newfoundland (~$0.065 per kWh)....

[Massacure]

3. Let's reframe this.

Canada produced 550 billion kWh of electricity in 2002. Nuclear reactors accounted for 16% of it. That means 88,000,000,000 kWh were nuclear generated. If you were to split the cost up over the 10 year period, it would only cost 2.7 cents per kWh.

[jpak]

5. Let's re-frame it some more

The per capita cost for ALL Canadians would be ~$750.

There are no power reactors in Yukon, Nunavut, NWT, Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, PEI or Newfoundland/Labrador...

http://millennium-ark.net/News_Files/NBC/NukesCan.html

If the cost of this program were borne solely by hydro customers that actually used nuclear power, the per capita cost and the cost per family would be ~$1100 and ~$4500, respectively.

or about 7.5 years worth of electric bills per household.

again...such a deal!!!

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

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[NNadir]

9. There are no power reactors in Yukon, Nunavut, NWT, Manitoba, Alberta...

...Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, PEI or Newfoundland/Labrador?

Boy this is rich. I think you mean to say there are no nuclear power reactors in Yukon, Nunavut, NWT, Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, PEI or Newfoundland/Labrador...

I understand that all of the Canadian provinces actually have electricity. Some have nuclear capacity and some don't.

Now, googling like a scientific ignoranamus, I came up with this precious link that says:

"...Saskatchewan has some of the highest per capita emissions in Canada because of our heavy reliance on fossil fuels to heat our homes and provide us with electricity. Coal is used to generate over half of Saskatchewan’s electricity and the primary fossil fuel used for providing heat is natural gas. Saskatchewan residents produce an average of 6.7 tonnes of GHGs annually compared with the national average of 5.5 tonnes..."

http://www.environmentalsociety.ca/issues/climate/saskatchewan.html

This is right out of the mouths of citizens of Saskatchewan. Now who pays for the waste associated with power production in Saskatchewan? Every citizen of the planet. In return, the citizens of Saskatchewan are not supposed to pay a few cents a day to protect every citizen on the planet from the destruction of the atmosphere. Great ethics here, every man for himself.

Isn't this happy horseshit? Wunderbar.

Saskatchewan may not have any nuclear power plants but they sure as hell should build some.

One of the things that is really amusing about anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists is the way they make points for their opposition.

[jpak]

10. No, Saskatchewan should build some wind farms

PV arrays, biomass/biogas plants, and invest in energy efficient appliances, lighting and residential insulation.

They should not have to pay for custody of spent fuel they did not generate.

[NNadir]

6. Um, all other forms of energy are free in Canada?

Is this the claim here?

Who pays when Canada dumps coal ash in Rivers? Is that a deal or a bargain?

Who pays when Canada dumps CO2 in the atmosphere? Every living thing on the planet.

Now, my family pays more than three thousand dollars a year for energy, cash outlay, and we of course suffer health consequences from air pollution, heavy metals, etc that probably exceed that value.

The usual claim that nuclear energy is somehow different than other forms of energy because there is some horse shit/cow shit solution to the problem of energy production needs some examination.

Recently I got a quote from BP solar on installing a solar system in my house, not including the cost of destroying the mini-forest around my house. $8/watt for something that runs for a fraction of the day for a fraction of the year installed (not some stupid generality about costs coming down or the wholesale cost but MY cost, real time.) The contractor, a representative of Home Depot, who was sent to me by BP after I contacted them on their web site, told me that a "good system" would be 10,000 watts, because (and he was telling the truth) the system works part of the time. The cost includes installation and an inverter but not construction of a south facing roof.

So basically my family would have to pay $80,000 to get a system that works less than 1/3 of the time - after trashing the environment around our home. Now I personally know stupid people - some of whom who claim to be scientists in spite of the fact that they clearly cannot compare two integers - who say that this cost is cheap, while any expenditure on nuclear energy, even $3,000 is unacceptable. What these total morons are saying that $80,000 ($240,000 if you pay attention to the fact that the system is probably useful about 1/3 of the time on average) is less than $3,000.

This is brilliant. Par for the course.

In Canada, in 2003 over 70,000,000 Megawatt-hours of electricity was generated by nuclear means. In 2004 Canada produced 84,000,000 Megawatt hours of electricity. These figures are respectively, equivalent to The 24,000,000,000 dollars proposed represents all of the so called "nuclear waste" produced in Canada for all time.

http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/nuke-gen-monthly-2003.htm
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/nuke-gen-monthly-2004.htm

Now these links show the wholesale price of the generated power, respectively $3,000,000,000 and $3,400,000,000 Cdn. Thus the cost was 3,000,000,000/70,000,000 MW-hrs = $42.86 MW-hr and then fell to 3,400,000,000/84,000,000 = $40.48 MW-hr. Now I know that anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists can't do any math whatsoever but to convert a megawatt-hour to a kilowatt hour, you divide by 1000. Thus the wholesale cost of nuclear power in Canada is roughly $0.04 Cdn for nuclear electricity. This is roughly comparable to coal generated power except that the cost of coal waste is dumped into citizen's lungs and water. Moreover this same waste is also about to destroy the entire planet through the agency of CO2.

Now, let's say that Canada has been producing around 75,000,000 Megawatt hours of nuclear energy for around 15 years, which seems reasonable. Let's pretend, in order to make anti-nuclear anti-environmental activists not seem more stupid than they already are, that the $24,000,000,000 is only for these 15 years and not - as is actually the case - the entire cost of nuclear generated power for all time in Canada generated thus far. We then have $24,000,000,000/(75,000,000*15) = $21.33/MW-hr or $0.02/kilowatt-hour. Thus the total cost is $0.06 kilowatt hour, with the obvious exception that in the nuclear case we have clean air.

Now anti-nuclear anti-environmentalists do not care about clean air, which is why they propose happy horse shit solutions to the global climate change crisis in spite of the fact that they cannot show even 10 gigawatts of such installed horse shit/PV/blah blah blah power on the planet or even where 10 gigawatts of such power is under construction. They think it's perfectly OK to dither along at the edge of a climate crisis of unimaginable proportions while we wait for to complete the impossible task of teaching them high school level thermodynamics.

They say with gravity that belies their stupidity that, "that represents $3,500 for a family of four" without recognizing that that it actually represents (for a 15 year period) $233/year, less than $1.00/day, $0.63/day to be exact.

Now, I have kids and because I love them very much, I despise the stupidity of anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists who are trying to kill them through appeals to ignorance. Because I love my kids, I would certainly be willing to pay more than a dollar a day for them to breathe clean air. Hell, I pay more than that to buy coffee in the morning.

The fact is that even if I paid one hundred dollars a day, it is not technically feasible in any sense of the word to deal with the wastes produced by coal and oil. There is not one anti-environmental anti-nuclear activist who seens to get that. What will be the cost if my kid's lives are shortened by air pollution? What will be the cost if they are killed by famine because of global climate change? What will be the cost if they are killed in Repuke fossil fuel wars? I'll tell everyone who asks that it will be a fuck load more than 233 bucks a year.

Meanwhile the horse shit crowd motors along thinking that the shit they allow to be dumped into the air, coal and oil waste, has no cost. Meanwhile they have the moral weakness to whine and cry over the leaky pipe at Sellafield which has injured zero people. They apparently have no intellectual pride whatsoever. They are as bad as Bushies.

No wonder these people so admire horse shit. They are full of it.

[jpak]

11. LOL!!!!

"Who pays when Canada dumps coal ash in Rivers?"

Where in Canada do they dump coal ash into "Rivers"?????

"So basically my family would have to pay $80,000 to get a system that works less than 1/3 of the time..."

Nonsense, with New Jersey's rebate program, a 10 kW PV system (which would be among the largest residential PV systems in the state) would cost $27,500

http://www.bp.com/solarsavings.do?categoryId=4323

An energy efficient home would only require a 2-4 kW PV grid intertie system - which would produce 100% of your electricity over an annual cycle.

(BTW: a 2 kW system would cost you $7k after rebate).

$3000 a year for energy seems pretty profligate to me - I pay an average of $23.00 a month for electricity and <$25 a month for gasoline.

"Now, I have kids and because I love them very much, I despise the stupidity of anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists who are trying to kill them through appeals to ignorance."

Dude...chill....

:)

[suneel112]

12. About your solar energy point...

In addition to those problems you listed: taking out the trees around your house and working for only 1/3 of the year, Canada also recieves solar energy at very low angles. In fact, for an array to work in northern Canada, it would have to be twice as large as an array in northern Brazil to put out the same amount of power (cos(60 deg) = 1/2 * cos(0 deg)). Since Canada DOES have the largest (or one of the largest) uranium reserves on the planet, Nuclear Energy would be a good idea for them. The United States, though, is closer to the equator and gets sun at a higher angle than Canada. In addition, lots of the new lots (the housing bubble) have large houses and small trees. Installing solar roofs in three or four years (when the efficiency goes up to 50 or 60 percent, from a current 10 to 20 percent) would be a better idea for sustainable energy in the United States. Heck, with all that roof space, Americans may still be able to be the most wasteful people on earth, except then, we will only waste solar energy.

[NNadir]

7. Oh, and speaking, like a Bushie, of the "unborn..."

the reason that Canada is proposing this solution is not to give them a burden. It is to allow them to recover the fuel.

When the Bushies speak of the unborn, it is really for the purpose of unveiling some new horror, coat hangers for raped teen aged girls for instance. The same is true here, the person who claims to speak for the unborn is proposing that we allow the tar sands in Canada to be exploited.

Anti-environmental anti-nuclear anti-future activists have no more right to speak for the unborn than the Bushies do. In fact, the unborn do not speak at all and no one has the right to speak for them, no matter what the source of their intellectual weakness might be.

[struggle4progress]

13. Idea of storing nuclear waste finds little favour in northern Ontario

By Gillian Livingston
25 May 2005 at 10:33 AM

TORONTO (CP) -- The idea of building an underground home for Canada's spent nuclear fuel won't find much favour in northern Ontario, even though such a project would be a financial boon worth billions to the economically ravaged region, a longtime proponent said Tuesday. <snip>

Scripnick polarized the town 115 kilometres north of Sudbury last year when he invited the NWMO _ the body commissioned by the federal government to come up with a plan to deal with Canada's nuclear waste _ to come to town.

On Tuesday, the organization released an interim report that suggested the best solution is a long-term $24.4-billion plan to bury radioactive waste deep in the earth, preferably somewhere in the Canadian Shield, predominant in northern Ontario and Quebec. <snip>

Since most of Canada's nuclear waste is produced and already stored in Ontario, that's the most likely location for a storage facility, said David Martin, energy co-ordinator with Greenpeace Canada. <snip>

http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=9982

[struggle4progress]

14. Keep nuclear waste in the east says concerned Kenora residents

A draft of a report on what to do with Canada’s nuclear waste is not sitting well with some Kenora residents.

By Dan Gauthier
Miner and News
Thursday June 09, 2005

<snip> The Nuclear Waste Management Organization issued its first report since holding community discussion sessions across Canada last winter. The group was in Kenora twice, once in November and once in December, to discuss options on how Canada’s nuclear waste should be stored.

The document, called Choosing a Way Forward, a draft report of the organization’s recommendations, touts an “adaptive phased management approach” that would see nuclear waste moved from the storage facilities at nuclear power plants where it is currently being stored, and put in deep geologic repositories in the Canadian Shield within the next 60-90 years. <snip>

http://www.kenoradailyminerandnews.com/story.php?id=165791

[struggle4progress]

15. Sask. named as possible nuclear waste site

Sask. named as possible nuclear waste site
Last Updated May 25 2005 05:15 PM CDT
CBC News

<snip> In a report released Tuesday, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization said there are now about two million used nuclear fuel bundles in Canada. Provinces involved in the nuclear industry – including Ontario and Quebec, which have nuclear power plants, and Saskatchewan, which is home to Canada's uranium industry – should be considered as storage sites, the report says.

The report says northern Saskatchewan might be a good place to store spent nuclear fuel, which could be buried deep in rock formations. But even Regina, Saskatoon and other urban areas shouldn't be ruled out, the 304-page draft report says.

The report says nuclear waste is currently being stored at nuclear power plants, but in the long term, other sites will have to be found. <snip>

If the organization's plan moves ahead, it could take as long as 18 years to pick a site and it could be 30 years before spent nuclear fuel is buried there.

http://sask.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=nuclear-waste050525

[struggle4progress]

16. Nukes-Against-Global Warming Strategy Scored as Too Costly

Stephen Leahy

<snip> Canada's Nuclear Waste Management Organisation proposed last month to bury the spent nuclear fuel from Canada's 22 reactors in an underground vault carved 1000 metres deep in solid rock. It recommends spending the next 30-60 years finding a location and designing an impervious vault for permanent storage. Estimated cost: 24.4 billion Canadian dollars (19.6 billion U.S. dollars). <snip>

http://www.ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=28911

[struggle4progress]

17. Nuclear waste disposal could prove costly

Point Lepreau wastes may cost NB Power about $300M

BY RICHARD ROIK
Telegraph-Journal
As published on page A1/A11 on May 25, 2005

<snip> The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has released a $6.1-billion draft plan for the deep geological disposal of the equivalent of five hockey rinks of irradiated nuclear fuel that includes radioactive waste currently stored on-site at New Brunswick's Point Lepreau power plant. <snip>

Under the potential plan, NWMO would take up to 30 years to prepare for the eventual disposal, including the selection of a willing host community and the building of an underground research laboratory.

Another 30 years could then be needed to confirm the suitability of the site and the technology for a deep repository. <snip>

Under the NWMO's plan, the nuclear waste would be stored in underground mausoleums kept open for up to two centuries to allow Canada to rethink its options in case there is a change of heart or new technologies emerge for better dealing with the waste. <snip>

http://canadaeast.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050525/TSEBRIEF/305250060/-1/FRONTPAGE

[struggle4progress]

18. 300 year above ground storage? Horse puckies!

Read your own snippet.

Or see my posts #13, #14, #15, #16, and/or #17.

Canada expects trouble siting a facility and faces uncertainty about whether today's disposal technology is sufficiently sound to justify immediate irreversible engineering decisions. But there is currently expert consensus on the concept of very deep entombment.

[NNadir]

19. Oh, I just think I'll pick out one to read. One's probably as bad as the

next.

I'm sure you guys promoting global climate change will never do calculations, because you can't.

You say six billion, or one hundred billion or whatever number and post all kinds of articles about other NIMBY idiots. What you don't do is compare.

I calculate. Pro-global climate change anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists pretend that saying 24 billion is impressive, but I have shown by calculation that the entire cost is less than $0.02 per kilowatt hour. It is trivial.

Here's another way to put it, although I'm sure that the preternaturally dumb won't get it:

Here's Canada's greenhouse gas inventory for just one year, 2003: 740 million tons. That's millions of tons. Do you get it?

http://www.ec.gc.ca/pdb/ghg/2005summary/2005summary_e.cfm

You can't understand it?

It's clear you can't.

What is the cost of fuel to generate 740 million tons of waste. Any idea?

No idea?

I didn't think so.

Less than six billion dollars do you think? Less than 24 billion?

How much effort and expense would it take to contain 740 million tons of waste?

Impossible to calculate?

I thought so.

Now, just because anti-nuclear anti-environmentalist "we only care about nuclear waste because we don't understand anything at all about nuclear issues" activists don't care at all about global climate change, doesn't mean that global climate change is waiting for them to demonstrate minimal comprehension and minimal levels of concern and human decency. No, it is threatening people right now.

There are 100 million people at nearly sea level in Bangladesh. Now I know that some fucking white rancher in Nevada or Nova Scotia means more to anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists than every living human being in Bangladesh, but don't expect me to applaud for this criminally immoral indifference.

So let's level: In the dumb world of Greenpeace anti-environmental activists is the contention that 740 million tons of greenhouse gas waste is without cost? (We haven't touched the ash, the benzopyrans, the heavy metals here either.) Is the answer to this problem some dumb statement about how the price of PV cells is coming down from extraordinarily unaffordable and unreliable to merely incredibly unaffordable and unreliable?

I suppose this MUST the position, since it never gets mentioned in these drama queen posts about the alleged costs of so called "nuclear waste." 24 billion dollars, indeed.

Now, it is very difficult to find someone who opposes the storage of coal waste in the atmosphere because no one has any choice. It is not technically possible to stop these outrages against humanity supported by stupid anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists unless coal production is shut down.

We can always find NIMBY people and make hundreds of links and thousands of posts from dumb reporters linked by dumb googlers about how everyone wants all energy waste problems to be fall on someone else. I'm sure there are such people in Canada, just as there are such people in the United States.

The people of Saskatchewan who dump their waste indiscriminately into the atmosphere however, into my lungs, my children's lungs and the lungs of the dumb alike, uncharged, unpaid for, without regard to environmental consequences. Their waste is in my food supply, it poisons my water and kills the future. Unlike the people of Saskatchewan, he people who use nuclear power can do something about their spent fuel: They can recover these materials and use them, as surely future generations will need to do. That is the point. The mere fact that this can be a consideration says volumes about the nature of so called "nuclear waste." I have not heard one stupid set of day dreams from dumb weak minded anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists that gives any real hope on a demonstrable, planned or under construction scale, that does any real thing to recycle the most intractable waste for which they do not the moral strength to resist: carbon dioxide.

I note that the people in Canada who have proposed the 300 year storage plan are not local yokels who have been whipped into a state of fear by constant appeals to ignorance. They are scientists. The article reported was reported in Chemical and Engineering News, not some local yokel newspaper. Chemical and Engineering News is the news magazine for one of the largest and most prestigious scientific organizations in the world, the American Chemical Society.

What's amazing is how assiduous the dumb can be in finding and reporting these sorts of links and how continuously weak and ineffective they are when I ask (repeatedly) for them to demonstrate a case where someone has actually been injured by nuclear waste. Note the distinction: I am not asking for someone who has been whipped into a state of fear about being being near nuclear waste. I am asking for someone who has actually been injured by nuclear waste.

However, my link about the Canadian plan wasn't from some dumb newspaper quoting some dumb local yokel about his fear of nuclear waste.

It doesn't help, of course, to have immoral stupid people egging these crowds on with specious arguments, one dumber than the next. W

For the record, I'd be perfectly happy to have spent nuclear fuel in my backyard, right here in New Jersey. That's because I understand what it is. I'm not a dumb mystic.

[struggle4progress]

20. I simply posted 6 links showing you misrepresent the NWMO recommendations.

[jpak]

21. Yup, Canadians will be overjoyed at the prospect of a ~40% increase

($0.02) in their electric bills to pay for spent fuel disposal.

Current residential rates for most provinces are ~$0.05 per kWh

Canadians that heat their homes with electricity (and most do in Newfoundland for example) will suffer greatly.

Brilliant deduction: "trivial"...

[dcfirefighter]

22. Hydro

only so much electricity can be generated at $0.05 kWh from hydro - can't be expanded, population and demand growing, it's gonna happen anyway.

[jpak]

23. wind

far cheaper than nuclear

no $24 billion spent wind disposal cost

can be generated at <$0.055 per kWh

can provide 20% of Canada's electricity

http://www.canwea.ca/en/QuickFacts.html

it's gonna happen

[Massacure]

24. It won't break them though. Electricity cost 9 cents in the U.S.

Plus the canadian dollar is only worth a little over 80 cents on the dollar when traded for U.S. currency.

[jpak]

25. Nonsense

A 40% increase in electric rates would "break" the budgets of most American households - especially those with electric heat in the northern tier of states...

...and particularly those households that "...pay(s) more than three thousand dollars a year for energy, cash outlay..." and contribute heavily to US greenhouse gas emissions...

[Massacure]

26. Newsflash: Canada isn't America.

Canada has decently funded welfare for the poor unlike America.

Most houses use less than 1000 kWh a month. This rate increases would only add $20 a month onto the electric bills, about 66 cents a day. Don't tell me that it will bankrupt Canadians.

People with electric heat are in a single digit minority. That is a moot point.

[jpak]

27. Newsflash: I used to live in Canada

and use to pay those electric bills to heat my home in the winter.

A 40% electric rate hike to pay for spent fuel disposal would kill nuclear power in either country.

Canadians won't put up with it...and neither would Americans...