One lifetime of Nuclear Power equals half an ounce of waste

Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear-engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has calculated that over the life cycle of power plants, which includes construction, mining, transport, operation, decommissioning and disposal of waste, the greenhouse-gas emissions for nuclear power are 1/700th those of coal, 1/400th of gas, and one-fourth of solar. Nuclear also requires 1/2,000th as much land as wind and around 1/400th as much as solar. For any given power output, the amount of raw material used to build a nuclear plant is a small fraction of an equivalent solar or wind farm. Although nuclear waste is obviously more difficult to dispose of, its volume is 1/10,000th that of solar and 1/500th of wind. This includes abandoned infrastructure and all the toxic substances that end up in landfills. One person’s lifetime use of nuclear power would produce about a half-ounce of waste. Even including the Chernobyl disaster, human mortality from coal is 2,000 to 3,000 times that of nuclear, while oil claims 400 times as many lives.

All that is not to deny the dangers of a Nuclear plant. Anybody who has watched the series Chernobyl won’t easily forget some of the images. I remember the radioactive rain that effected the food industry in Europe….great care had to be taken.

But with care and much better current technology this can be made a very safe solution to all the restrictions the Greenies really want to impose on the world. And the greater global prosperity will save countless lives versus the downturn in economic activity these anarchists want to impose on the world,