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"There is a better way. Nations should focus on lowering the cost of clean energy, not raising the cost of fossil energy. The goal? Make clean energy cheap enough to become a viable option for poor as well as rich nations. Until that happens, emissions will continue to rise, and no effort to regulate carbon can succeed.
How do we accomplish that? Stop subsidizing old technology that will never compete with fossil fuels and create incentives for innovation. Along with ramping up support for research, governments should buy cutting-edge clean-energy technologies, prove them—and then give away the intellectual property, so others can improve on it".
"I figure that what we need is to tear the whole sorry system down and see what comes next. The best hope is that a patriot will learn how to impel some unused interplanetary object, Phobos or Deimos or Ganymede maybe, into Washington at ninety percent of the speed of light. This would eliminate the teachers unions, the Pentagon, AIPAC, Fox News, Langley, the Washington Post, lobbies, and my mother-in-law. Cockroaches would doubtless survive, that being what they do best, and evolve into a civilization less degraded than ours, briefly".
"These smaller reactors contain less nuclear fuel. This smaller amount of fuel (with passive cooling I’ll mention in a minute) slows down the progression of reactor accidents. This slower progression gives operators more time to take action to keep the reactor cool. Where operators in large reactors have minutes or hours to react to events, operators of SMRs may have hours or even days. This means the chance of a reactor damaging accident is very, very remote.
Even better, most SMRs are small enough that they cannot over heat and melt down. They get all the cooling they need from air circulating around the reactor. This is a big deal because if SMRs can’t melt down, then they can’t release radioactive gas that would pose a risk to the public. Again, this means the need for external emergency actions is virtually eliminated.
Also, some SMRs are not water cooled; they use gas, liquid salt, or liquid metal coolants that operate at low pressures. This lower operating pressure means that if radioactive gases build up inside the containment building there is less pressure to push the gas out and into the air. If there is no pressure to push radioactive gas into the environment and all of it stays inside the plant, then it poses no risk to the public.SMRs are small enough to be built underground".
"Over the past decade, more than 7,000 shipments of radioactive nuclear waste have been sent, without any problem, to a government repository in the southwestern United States.
This crucial repository is not the ill-fated Yucca Mountain, the Nevada site that has been steeped in controversy since Congress selected it 22 years ago to store the country's civilian nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain, in fact, has gotten so bogged down in legal and political fights that President Barack Obama, in his new budget, is proposing to eliminate almost all of its funding and explore "alternatives," raising serious questions about how the United States will resolve its nuclear waste problems—and, for that matter, whether the nuclear industry will be able to grow in coming decades.
The functioning repository is located in Carlsbad, N.M., and it may hold some useful answers. Since opening in 1999, it has received more than 60,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste from the country's nuclear defense facilities. Experts say its success offers valuable clues about how Washington can learn from the mistakes made at Yucca Mountain to find a lasting waste solution".
¶More than 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste.
¶At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry wastewater and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams.
¶Of more than 179 wells producing wastewater with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced wastewater carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable.
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