US Has Largest Decline In Carbon Emissions...

[Leonhard]

Disposing of nuclear waste by rockets is the most crazy way possible to get rid of it. First of all you have to strap it on top of rockets (that we know never fail). Secondly getting it out of Earth's orbit would take a monstrously huge amount of energy. Consider that it took the Saturn 5 to take a few dozen tons to the Moon.

Those enormous areas are usually public land - either in use as cattle grazing or set aside as national parks and refuges. Nuclear waste isn't likely to go over well in either 'where your dinner eats its dinner' or 'treasured wilderness, parks, et al'.

If the US Army can get huge swats of it to blow to kingdom come, its hard to argue that 0.01% of that couldn't be cornered off. It wouldn't take more than that, the amount of nuclear waste though its rather difficult to work with, doesn't really take up all that much space. A years production of nuclear waste from a large nuclear powerplant could fit into the concrete foundation of a single wind turbine.

Any nuclear power plant usually has a buffer zone of a couple of miles (overkill in my opinion). A very small facility in that could be built where its stored.

Coal ash/soot actually has an historic use as fertilizer - I'd assumed that it was used for that. With the new emphasis on organics, that may change.

Isn't coal ash full of heavy metal residues? I know its mixed into cement, asphalt and other places that can soak it up. But I've never heard of it used as a fertiliser. Ash from charcoal would be more fitting for that I imagine. Mostly companies have just dumped it into landfills for as long as they have been allowed to get away with that. The space taken up by that ash dwarves many times the space that would be taken up by nuclear waste disposals.

[Starlight]

Isn't coal ash full of heavy metal residues?

It's apparently quite full of heavy elements that are radioactive. I've read that the average coal powerplant emits more radiation than does the average nuclear powerplant. The coal powerplants have a tendency to just release all that radioactive waste straight into the atmosphere.

[Teallaura]

Disposing of nuclear waste by rockets is the most crazy way possible to get rid of it. First of all you have to strap it on top of rockets (that we know never fail). Secondly getting it out of Earth's orbit would take a monstrously huge amount of energy. Consider that it took the Saturn 5 to take a few dozen tons to the Moon.

But once it's gone, it's gone for good (which is the counter argument. I don't really wanna create giant dirty bombs in the hope that they make it into space, either.).

If the US Army can get huge swats of it to blow to kingdom come, its hard to argue that 0.01% of that couldn't be cornered off. It wouldn't take more than that, the amount of nuclear waste though its rather difficult to work with, doesn't really take up all that much space. A years production of nuclear waste from a large nuclear powerplant could fit into the concrete foundation of a single wind turbine.

Um, very little munitions testing of that level occurs in the Lower 48 - and you can forget Alaska and Hawaii. Nice little abandoned, unwanted atolls and islands took the brunt of nuclear testing.

Even when I was at Tech, the explosives were only a relatively few miles away and we rarely heard them go off.

Applied science loses to human fear every time. We can barely build landfills that don't accept toxic waste - once you start talking toxins or radiation, it doesn't matter how 'safe' we can make it, no one wants to have to personally be at risk. Nor do we want glow in the dark antelope and cougars - let alone bigfoot! - so placing waste facilities of any kind near public lands is almost always met with steep resistance.

Any nuclear power plant usually has a buffer zone of a couple of miles (overkill in my opinion). A very small facility in that could be built where its stored.

I think above ground storage of any kind is a non-starter in the US - but it might be feasible with below ground areas - out west. Alabama's water table is too high and BF is way too close to the flood plain. That would be true in most of the areas east of the Mississippi since reactors tend to be built close to water supplies.

Isn't coal ash full of heavy metal residues? I know its mixed into cement, asphalt and other places that can soak it up. But I've never heard of it used as a fertiliser. Ash from charcoal would be more fitting for that I imagine. Mostly companies have just dumped it into landfills for as long as they have been allowed to get away with that. The space taken up by that ash dwarves many times the space that would be taken up by nuclear waste disposals.

I suppose it can be - but minerals are often a necessary additive so it would depend on the residue. In England, from the Tudor period when coal began to replace wood, soot and ash were gathered and used on the fields. Despite what most modern people think, medieval farmers had plenty of work to do without doing jobs that showed no benefit. They didn't understand the chemistry (neither do we, actually) but they did know when a fertilizer worked and when it didn't.

Ash of any sort is alkali as heck - and so its use is limited in the garden/field. A single family farm could spread all the ash it wasn't using pretty safely - even using fire for energy, they weren't producing enough to be harmful to the fields whereas a coal fired plant would produce far more than the average farm could use. But the real culprit is chemical fertilizer - it's cheap, unlikely to burn and easy to apply (unlike some coal dust) - farmers only needed one, not both. With the new move toward 'organics' I suspect many of the older fertilizers may be re-explored, including coal dust.