Straining At Gnats

One thing that ticks me off is when people bring up the problem of disposal of nuclear waste as why we can’t use nuclear power. This bugs me because our best hope for dealing with global warming is to switch to nuclear power for electricity generation. We have 300 gigawatts of coal power plants in the United States that we really need to replace with nuclear power to reduce our carbon dioxide production and the air and water pollution produced by these coal fired plants. Below is a table of amount of waste generated by a 1000 megawatt coal plant compared to a 1000 megawatt nuclear plant per year. The numbers are roughly correct, but there a lot of variables depending on the kinds of plants, how they are operated and even what kind of coal they burn. I express the amounts in tons per gigawatt capacity and also pounds per capita to put it on a more human scale. I'm assuming about 13,000 kilowatt-hours per person per year.

Coal Plant
Pollution	Tons per GW	lbs per person
Carbon dioxide	7,400,000	21958
Ash	240,000	712
Sludge	386,000	1145
Sulfur dioxide	20,000	59
Nitrogen oxide	20,400	61
Carbon monoxide	1,440	4.3
Particulates	1,000	3.0
Hydrocarbons	440	1.3
Thorium	13	0.039
Uranium	5	0.015
Nuclear Plant
	Tons per GW	lbs per person	Ratio to CO2
Nuclear Waste	23	0.068	321,739
After Full Reprocessing	1.2	0.003	6,434,783

Nuclear power produces about 1 ounce of nuclear waste per person per year with no fuel reprocessing. The bottom line here is that for each pound of nuclear waste we produce, we could be preventing the release of 322,000 pounds of carbon dioxide! The United States doesn’t do any recycling of spent nuclear fuel. 95% of the spent fuel is Uranium or Plutonium that can be recycled and used for more fuel. France uses partial fuel reprocessing and only produces about 3/10ths of an ounce of waste per person. Better methods exist for reprocessing fuel, which should allow us improve the ratio of carbon dioxide to nuclear waste to 1,000,000 to one! What do you think is the real waste disposal problem: 1 oz of nuclear waste or 11 tons of carbon dioxide?

References:

America's Nuclear Waste and What to Do With It.
http://www.ppionline.org/ndol/print.cfm?contentid=254827

What is nuclear waste?
http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/waste.html

Environmental impacts of coal
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Environmental_impacts_of_coal

Hundreds of Coal Ash Dumps Lack Regulation
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/us/07sludge.html?_r=1

Can Coal and Clean Air Coexist in China?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-coal-and-clean-air-coexist-china