Barrett Garese

Nuclear waste is miniscule in size—one Coke can’s worth per person-lifetime of electricity if it was all nuclear, Rip Anderson likes to point out. Coal waste is massive—68 tons of solid stuff and 77 tons of carbon dioxide per person-lifetime of strictly coal electricity. The nuclear waste goes into dry cask storage, where it is kept in a small area, locally controlled and monitored. You always know exactly what it’s doing. A 1-gigawatt nuclear plant converts 20 tons of fuel a year into 20 tons of waste, which is so dense it fills just two dry-storage casks, each one a cylinder 18 feet high, 10 feet in diameter. But contrast, a 1-gigawatt coal plant buns 3 million tons of fuel a year and producest 7 million tons of CO2, all of which immediately goes into everyone’s atmosphere, where no one can control it, and no one knows what it’s really up to. That’s not counting the fly ash and flue gases from coal—the world’s largest source of released radioactivity, full of heavy metals, including lead, arsenic, and most of the neurotoxic mercury that has so suffused the food chain…

Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (via ericmortensen)

Perspective.

I always wondered what sorts of energy would be required to take the waste and launch it into the sun. I willingly admit to knowing zero about the ramifications of such an action or the requirements (aside from a very heavy launch vehicle) of doing so, but nonetheless I wondered.

(via mikehudack)

Source: ericmortensen