>The budget for Hanford alone is about $2.3 billion in...
Hanford was started in the Manhattan project to produce plutonium and during the cold war produced plutonium for tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. All of these government weapons plants were quickly started with inadequate policies for handling the material.
>...Ultimately, however, the core problem may be that such new reactors don't eliminate the nuclear waste that has piled up so much as transmute it.
A 4th gen design like the IFR would allow you to end with a much smaller volume of waste that would only be dangerous for a few centuries.
In terms of natural gas, the numbers given are probably out of date - CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are lower than a coal plant, but that doesn't account for the methane emissions that come with fracking and distributing the methane.
>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.
Hanford was started in the Manhattan project to produce plutonium and during the cold war produced plutonium for tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. All of these government weapons plants were quickly started with inadequate policies for handling the material.
>...Ultimately, however, the core problem may be that such new reactors don't eliminate the nuclear waste that has piled up so much as transmute it.
A 4th gen design like the IFR would allow you to end with a much smaller volume of waste that would only be dangerous for a few centuries.
In terms of natural gas, the numbers given are probably out of date - CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are lower than a coal plant, but that doesn't account for the methane emissions that come with fracking and distributing the methane.
>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...
As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35659947