NO dangerous nuclear waste, since there is NOT ONE person in the dangerous anti-nuke religion who can produce a single case of a person injured by the storage of used nuclear fuel.
Of course, the anti-nuke religion - a kind of anti-scientific creationism - never stops to ponder whether the dangerous fossil fuel waste repository, that would be the atmosphere, is filled. They couldn't care less.
The matter of energy resources is covered nicely in a recent paper in the
scientific literature - something one is not qualified to read if you repeat the 31 year old rhetoric of the paid (off) Walmart thug Amory Lovins almost none of which has been correct - by Weston Hermann of Standford University's Global Climate and Energy Project. The paper cited is called "Quantifying Global Exergy Resources" and the reference is
Energy 31 (2006) 1685–1702, and it all about thermodynamics, a topic you're not allowed to know about if you want to go to Greenpeace services.
Now, if you're in Greenpeace and thus are religiously restricted from reading stuff called "science" close your eyes, now, less you be struck down by the Windmill God as channeled by Saint Amory of the Holy Rio Tinto Amazon Cyanide Laced Gold Mine.
All activity in the universe derives from matter and energy becoming more disorganized as expressed by the second law of thermodynamics. This law can be used to quantify the degree of disorder and define the work potential of a substance relative to a reference state. When the substance is allowed to interact only with a reservoir in the reference state, this work potential is the exergy of the substance <1>. Exergy describes the quality of energy in addition to the quantity, providing deeper insight into work potential than analyses which only utilize the first law.
Now, the
first law isn't the law of mocking scientific units by saying "EXO-JEWEL" whenever anyone discusses the unrelenting fact that solar energy is just a toy for trust fund brats living on Mommy's dime and dreaming of a Tesla sports car, electric of course.
Continues Dr. Hermann:
Exergy does not describe the ability of humankind to exploit a resource, but is a path-independent property, serving as a model for the theoretically extractable work contained in a resource regardless of geometry, technology, and economics. This independence makes exergy a useful tool for evaluating the efficiency of resource energy conversion and comparing the magnitudes of resources both within and beyond current technical ability and experience.
You can't get into Greenpeace if you've passed a high school AP math course, and so there is no point in repeating the short thermodynamics review in the article but it has this to say about uranium resources:
Uranium and thorium are two heavy elements created in stellar events billions of years ago that readily undergo nuclear fission and exist in significant abundance on Earth. These elements can be found throughout the crust, but are concentrated in certain geologic deposits. Concentrated uranium occurrences are estimated to be about 13 Tg <42>, representing an exergy reservoir of 1YJ with a specific exergy of 77 TJ/kg. The known 4Tg thorium resource has an exergy of 300 ZJ <46> with a specific exergy of 78 TJ/kg. In addition to ores, uranium also exists at a concentration of 3.3 ppb in the ocean <47>. With approximately 1.4 Yg seawater, the
seawater uranium exergy reservoir is over 350 YJ.
I can't wait to see how the anti-nuke religion deals with yet another scientific unit for which it has only contempt, but a YJ is a yottajoule, which is one million exajoules.
World energy consumption was 488 exajoules in 2005, almost all of it coming from fossil fuels, about which the anti-nuke religion couldn't care less.
Of course, the anti-nuke religion, with its contempt for science, it's "chalk is cheese," "yogurt is metal" and "soap is lightning" rhetoric, Nader and Lovins type ignorance, loves to run around swearing the world is running out of uranium, which is pretty amusing when you think about it, because this cute little cult seems awfully anxious about the possibility that uranium resources are
big and that people will continue to use them in vast amounts. This religion, beginning with Lovins prayers written in 1976 and 1980 on the subject of how nuclear energy was "just going away because it doesn't work," seems to be really, really straining to prove that it is just going away, especially because nuclear energy is producing 4 times as much energy as it was in 1980.
In fact, the little cult - and doesn't it sort of remind you of Pat Robertson's cult about evolution - is
against the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy. It is also now the cheapest form of climate change gas free energy except - in some places - hydroelectricity, especially when you include external costs as determined by the increasingly utilized discipline of life cycle analysis.
There have been some interesting papers on this subject published about the external cost of the cute, less than an exajoule scale, forms of energy most chanted about by the anti-nuke religion. I'll cite those papers in response to the next bit of anti-nuke chanting I hear from the "I couldn't care less" anti-nuke squad.
I also have just read a very interesting paper about the environmental cost of an imaginary nuclear phase out in Japan, which could even be worse than the grave damage being done to the atmosphere by the anti-nuke pro-coal forces in Germany who have just handed megaeuros to the South African coal industry.
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