Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Why not ?

Considering that the US alone has 45000 TONS of high-level radioactive waste (typically thinbgs like nuclear power reactor fuel rods), not to mention a all other high level sources and lower-level radioactive waste, not to mention the comparable waste that Russia, China, France particularly, the UK,and the rest of the EU, and all the other countries that have a few reactors, have produced,
considering that it is hugely more expensive and requires much more poweer and fuel and probably larger rockets to get something up to escape velocity to free it from the earth's gravity well--MUCH more than it takes to get something into low-earth orbit where most satellites and the astronauts usually go.
considering the small payloads we can currently send long distances away--typically a ton or two for the Mars Rovers and such, and consideering how expensive and rare those missions are,
considering the number of rockets that blow up before they reach space, which is not something you want to have happen if you're transporting tons of high-level nuclear waste thru the atmosphere we are breathing,
then disposal of nuclear waste in the sun is, for the foreseeable future, conomically and practically, nothing more than a daydream.
It's gonna have to be dealt with here on earh.

than what ? Storage in massive structures for at least 10,000 years ?

Seeing you mentioned it, how many rockets is that ? How many are new designs and are not yet known for reliability ?

The Mars launches are of sophisticated equipment which has to function after many months in space, whereas nuclear waste simply has to sit there. Rocket launches have such a high failure rate because Britain, the EU, Japan, China, North Korea, Russia and the USA have all developed their own separate rocket program and have each learnt through their own mistakes to develop their own reliable rockets. Even in the worst case scenario and the reliability of launches can not be improved, it is a relatively simple matter to eject the head of the rocket containing the waste and then detonate the rocket. Making the head crash survivable and easy to recover is again relatively simple but is the part that would draw the most attention from emotional arguments. Hitting the sun is the rocket equivalent of child’s play.

The Saturn V attained 47 tonne to Lunar vacinity, though it could carry about 100 tonne or more for just leaving earth and pointed at the sun, especially as the sun's gravity would help. Because of the high developmental costs Saturn V averaged $2.4-3.5 billion per launch in 2007 dollars. This could be brought down to well under 1 billion per launch or $22,000 per kilogram for leaving high earth orbit. For low earth orbit, NASA charges US$25,000 per kg on the Space Shuttle if you can get the space allocated. The Boeing subsidiary ‘Sea Launch’ charges US$1,000 per kg on old (technology) Russian rockets. Future plans for leaving earth hope to get the cost down to $100-$1,000 per kilogram depending on low earth or leaving high earth orbits.

About 97% of the spent fuel can be recycled leaving only 3% as high-level waste. This means a l,000 MWe nuclear reactor will produce about 700 kg per year.
Major commercial reprocessing plants are operating in France and UK, with capacity of over 5000 tonnes of spent fuel per year, - equivalent to at least one third of the world's annual output. A total of over 55,000 tonnes of spent fuel has been reprocessed at these over 35 years. This means the worlds fuel waste problem could be reduced to 450 tonnes per year. As Saturn V could take a minimum of 100 tonnes per launch, this means 9 launches per 2 years to eradicate new nuclear waste.

The USA alone has collected US$ 18 billion from consumers on a solution. Has it found one ? This would have translated to 4 years with no new nuclear waste in the world. How much will other countries pay to be rid of their high level nuclear waste ?

Let' see.. A rocket either blows up or it doesn't....

According to Ionus that would be 50/50.

Hey, parados, are you making any "headway?" LOL

And that is about the limit of your ability to contribute. I will explain yet again...see if you can understand this time...the first stage of any data analysis is to list all possibilities. These possibilities have an equal chance of occuring. Then you analyse the data. Otherwise, there is no point in analysing anything. You can simply guess, like with Global Warming. Of course you dont understand this and never will, but I will not give up on you parados, because I think that is your problem. Too many people have dismissed you as a belligerant fool and it has damaged your personality even further. Your preconcieved ideas like Global Warming are selected by you not for your ability to understand but by what you think will make you respected and feel powerful. Seriously, what are the chances of that happening ?

It's getting harder and harder to ignore climate change. Now our favorite ocean creatures are confirming what we already know. As the water gets warmer, the fish are moving away, faaar away, to find cooler habitats.

Researchers at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have published a new study that reveals that half of 36 fish stocks in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean have shifted their ranges to the north over the last forty years, reports Science Daily. Some of the stocks, many of which are commerically fished, have all but vanished from U.S. waters.

Their research, which appears in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, illustrates how changing coastal and ocean temperatures are altering the behavior of fish species that range from North Carolina to the Canadian border. The species in question include Atlantic cod, haddock, yellowtail, winter flounder, spiny dogfish, Atlantic herring and more obscure species like blackbelly rosefish.

The researchers took account of historic ocean temperature records, long-term oscillation processes, fishing pressures over time and natural fluctuations in ocean temperatures to arrive at their conclusions.

"The fact that we see responses in many species consistent with what you would expect with warming, but in different types of species that have experienced different historical fishing pressure, suggests that we are already witnessing the response of fish to a warming scenario," said Janet Nye, a postdoctoral researcher at NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center laboratory and the study's lead author, according to Science Daily.

And how will this impact the dinner table? The study's authors said that as fishermen have to travel farther to find the species that are moving offshore, it will eventually stop being economically feasible to catch them. At that point consumers will have to do without.

I admit that your responses here are on the highest scientific level.
Nothing for someone as uneducated as I am.

Since I'm here to learn, you may excuse this question: to what "rocket programs" that Britain (sic!) developed are you referring here? The Congreve Rocket? (Well, it has been actually the mother/father of many more modern weapons.) Skylark? (Hm, many countries were experimenting - not all had the best captured German scientists like the USA.)

So.. there is an equal chance that your head will blow up today?

Chance is not determined by simple counting to 2.

Don't you think it is 1 out of 2 since there are only 2 possibilities?

What do you think the chances are that I will take you off ignore after this post?

Britain did extensive research into rocketry at the end of WWII, simultaneously with developing Nuclear Weapons. Many years later it implemented the Polaris missile which is an American design into its nuclear defence program, prior to joining the EU and participating in Ariadne among others, but no longer as a seperate nation's scientific endeavours, to which Germany also contributed. Just to maintain and launch someone else's rocket takes significant knowledge.

I hope they are zero. But the possibilities are you will or you wont. Then by narrowing down the variables...if they are determinable...we may be able to calculate the statistical chance of one of the possibilities actually occurring. Find any book on statistics. Throw it away. You wont understand it. But I wont give up on you parados. It is the way people have treated you that has made you like this.

I suppose you are referring to "Operation Backfire".

But these were tests with captured V-2 rockets ...

Britain did an entirely seperate missile program in the middle of Australia, I think it was called the Blue Streak from memory. I dont know the missile you called Skylark unless it is the Australian weather rocket. Having said that, it just occured to me I think there was a British Skylark as a part of the British program as they named their rockets after birds.

Yes, Blue Streak was developed from 1958 onwards (I've met some of the personal involved in that program).

Some infos about the Skylark rockets

Thanks Walt. An interesting ref. even if it did force me to dust off my cobweds. Always a pleasure to discuss with reason instead of emotion. By the way, why arent you out celebrating ? I remember watching in shock and awe the wall come down. I just found it uplifting that without a war a great wrong had been righted.

Finding that something is occurring is quite seperate to why. Does it surprise you that Global Warming researches find Global Warming ? Big Foot researches find Big Foot. We have to be skeptical because a crowd behaves foolishily and Global Warming is the latest fad.

I would like to know to what extent if any overfishing played in finding fish populations in places further away.

I've been in "the East" over the weekend. But thanks for your sympathy.

Walter,

We 'celebrated' here with remembrances and video footage.

If we can do the below with warhead material, we ought to be able to do something similar with 'spent' rods from nuclear plants.

November 10, 2009
Power for U.S. From Russia’s Old Nuclear Weapons
By ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW " What’s powering your home appliances?

For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it’s fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, including Russian ones.

“It’s a great, easy source” of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Capital and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war.

But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn’t secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.

Already nervous about a supply gap, utilities operating America’s 104 nuclear reactors are paying as much attention to President Obama’s efforts to conclude a new arms treaty as the Nobel Peace Prize committee did.

In the last two decades, nuclear disarmament has become an integral part of the electricity industry, little known to most Americans.

Salvaged bomb material now generates about 10 percent of electricity in the United States " by comparison, hydropower generates about 6 percent and solar, biomass, wind and geothermal together account for 3 percent.

Utilities have been loath to publicize the Russian bomb supply line for fear of spooking consumers: the fuel from missiles that may have once been aimed at your home may now be lighting it.

But at times, recycled Soviet bomb cores have made up the majority of the American market for low-enriched uranium fuel. Today, former bomb material from Russia accounts for 45 percent of the fuel in American nuclear reactors, while another 5 percent comes from American bombs, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade association in Washington.

Treaties at the end of the cold war led to the decommissioning of thousands of warheads. Their energy-rich cores are converted into civilian reactor fuel.

In the United States, the agreements are portrayed as nonproliferation treaties " intended to prevent loose nukes in Russia.

In Russia, where the government argues that fissile materials are impenetrably secure already, the arms agreements are portrayed as a way to make it harder for the United States to reverse disarmament.

The program for dismantling and diluting the fuel cores of decommissioned Russian warheads " known informally as Megatons to Megawatts " is set to expire in 2013, just as the industry is trying to sell it forcefully as an alternative to coal-powered energy plants, which emit greenhouse gases.

Finding a substitute is a concern for utilities today because nuclear plants buy fuel three to five years in advance.

One potential new source is warheads that would become superfluous if the United States and Russia agree to new cuts under negotiations to renew the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires on Dec. 5.

Such negotiations revolve around the number of deployed weapons and delivery vehicles. There is no requirement in the treaty that bomb cores be destroyed. That is negotiated separately.

For the industry, that means that now, as in the past, there will be no direct correlation between the number of warheads decommissioned and the quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, also used in weapons, that the two countries declare surplus.

(This summer, Mr. Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia agreed to a new limit on delivery vehicles of 500 to 1,100 and a limit on deployed warheads as low as 1,500. The United States now has about 2,200 nuclear warheads and the Russians 2,800.)

Mr. Medvedev has reaffirmed Russia’s commitment to a 2000 agreement to dispose of plutonium, and both countries plan to convert that into reactor fuel as well.

An American diplomat and an official with a federal nuclear agency in Washington have confirmed, separately, that the two countries are quietly negotiating another agreement to continue diluting Russia’s highly enriched uranium after the expiration of Megatons to Megawatts, using some or all of the material from warheads likely to be taken out of the arsenals.

The government officials were not authorized to publicly discuss these efforts.

This possible successor deal to Megatons to Megawatts is known in the industry as HEU-2, for a High Enriched Uranium-2, and companies are rooting for it, according to Jeff Combs, president and owner of Ux Consulting, a company tracking uranium fuel pricing.

“You can look at it like a couple of very large uranium mines,” he said of the fissile material that would result from the program.

American reactors would not shut down without a deal; utilities could turn to commercial imports, which would most likely be much more expensive.

Enriching raw uranium is more expensive than converting highly enriched uranium to fuel grade.

To make fuel for electricity-generating reactors, uranium is enriched to less than 5 percent of the isotope U-235. To make weapons, it is enriched to about 90 percent U-235.

The United States Enrichment Corporation, a private company spun off from the Department of Energy in the 1990s, is the treaty-designated agent on the Russian imports. It, in turn, sells the fuel to utilities at prevailing market prices, an arrangement that at times has angered the Russians.

Since Megatons to Megawatts has existed, American utilities operating nuclear power plants, like Pacific Gas & Electric or Constellation Energy, have benefited as the abundance of fuel that came onto the market drastically reduced overall prices and created savings that were ultimately passed along to consumers and shareholders.

Nuclear industry giants like Areva, the French company; the United States Enrichment Corporation and Nuclear Fuel Services, another American company; and Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear corporation, are deeply involved in recycling weapons material and will need new supplies to continue that side of their businesses.

In the United States, domestic weapons recycling programs are smaller in scale and would be no replacement for Megatons for Megawatts. The Nuclear Fuel Services, in Erwin, Tenn., in 2005 began diluting uranium from the 217 tons the government declared surplus; so far 125 tons have been processed. It is used at the Tennessee Valley Authority plant.

The American plutonium recycling program is also well under way at a factory being built at the Energy Department’s Savannah River site in South Carolina to dismantle warheads from the American arsenal; a type of plutonium fuel, called mixed-oxide fuel, will come on the market in 2017.

In total, the 34 tons to be recycled there are expected to generate enough electricity for a million American homes for 50 years.

I've been there (and saw some local festivities pkus attended a church service) without really looking at the date.

Of course, we had live reports in all major programs from Berlin, reports (with testimonies etc) in the papers - but festivities were just in Berlin and some places along the border.

And I really wonder why outside Germany this local event got such an attraction.
For me, this day - November 9 - is more the day to remember the November Progrome (downplayed and trivialising called "Kristallnacht/Night of Broken Glass").