No, and you are not the one who does not think. There is not enough uranium on Earth to fill much of anything so there is no worry about there being waste everywhere. Also waste stored deep in the stone caverns has no effect on environment if by that you mean biosphere, otherwise your definition is useless for this discussion. Also please do show what cleaner practical options we actually have to generate power.

maybe u should read my first post where i state "it's the cleanest one we know"

Icemind

Germany570 Posts

December 14 2010 12:59 GMT

#263

Your title is VERY misleading. There is no confirmation in this at all that Iraq had WMDs (unless you count the chem weapons that everyone is bound to have known about before because they were used in the Iraq-Iran war almost 30 years ago). The only thing it is really saying is that some part of the military claims to have found uranium that could potentially be used to build nuclear weapons (But only after a looong process requiring technology that Iraq never posessed). People like to think "Oh no he has yellowcake (which is really not much more than milled uranium) now they can build nukes!". Well as a physicist i can tell you that is not true at all. They would still have to enrich this in order to be able to build a uranium based nuclear weapon (which is the weakest kind of nuclear explosive and horribly ineffective) or use it in a fully working nuclear facility in order to get plutonium which then could be used for the kind of weapon that everyone likes to think about when they hear "nuke".
One thing to be kept in mind here is that the Iraq war-logs only contain information that was already available within the military. Only because it was released this way now does not mean at all that it is objektively true, all it does mean is that it is stated by the military even if it has not been made public before.

That it could just as well be used for nuclear power is beeing dismissed in the articel with the argument "they have lots of oil they dont need that" which is not exactly a good point because there are a lot of countrys with decent oil reserves who still pursue nuclear power (Iran beeing just the most recent but other countries like canada have large amounts of fossile fuels at their disposal and pursue nuclear power nontheless)

So for the future please try to keep your titles a little more objektive.

Edit: Damn looks like iam a little late with my answer. Well this only proves the awesomeness of TL once more, solving the issue even before i have finished writing about it.

Elwar

953 Posts

December 14 2010 13:01 GMT

#264

On December 14 2010 21:58 vGl-CoW wrote:
yeah renamed - the OP's article is right wing garbage

Thread title still implies that new or unknown uranium was stored/found in Iraq, when the uranium that was removed (2 years ago...) has been known about for decades and stored under supervision of the U.N.

As far as I can tell there is literally no news whatsoever contained in the OPs linked article.

Nizaris

Belgium2230 Posts

December 14 2010 13:01 GMT

#265

On December 14 2010 21:47 searcher wrote:

Show nested quote +

On December 14 2010 21:44 Nizaris wrote:

On December 14 2010 21:29 Jswizzy wrote:

On December 14 2010 21:23 Nizaris wrote:

On December 14 2010 21:00 Jswizzy wrote:

On December 14 2010 20:37 nehl wrote:

On December 14 2010 19:35 Jswizzy wrote:

On December 14 2010 17:33 shannn wrote:
So to be very simple. They had the ingredients to make WMDs / nuclear reactors. But they already had oil so nuclear reactors would be stupid to have. So because of this assumption the US goverment (Bush?) thought it was only for WMDs?

Am I correct to think like this?

Hum Yellowcake doesn't really mean they were going to make nuclear weapons. It is commonly used to make fuel rods with but it needs to be enriched atleast twice which Iraq didn't have the capabilities to do to get a high enough percent of U235 to make a bomb or even use in a naval reactor. Commercial plants don't need highly enriched uranium so unless the US can prove that Iraq had a way to weapon the yellowcake it could of been just for a reactor. I mean Nuclear Technology should be a goal of any modernized country it is the only viable clean energy source.

i totally agree with this up to the last point.
how can nuclear power ever can be clean? it is not. it will never be! so it is not an arcievement you want to archive if cou care about nature and the future!

The waste that a plant produces decays after a few thousands years and while this happens the material is stored onsite or in a large underground site so how is it bad for the environment?

You answered your question yourself. I'll bold the important parts....

Stuffing crap underground that stays there for 'a few thousands years' is the opposite of protecting our environment :O

How does it have an effect on the environment? It is normally in lead encase caskets and miles underground. Most of the materials half-life has already been depleted before its allowed offsite anyways.

Think for 1 sec. Burying it or not it's still nuclear waste.

Even if you put it lead. What if somehow one day it gets released. You can't guarantee the thing will stay there unaltered for 1M years.

Drilling holes in the earth and stuffing highly toxic and dangerous materials is destroying our planet aka our environment.

Its radioactive decay will strongly influence the long-term activity curve of the SNF around 1 million years

SNF = Spent Nuclear Fuel. 1 million years it stays there....

You haven't mentioned a single way how this remotely affects the environment.

You can guarantee the thing sill stay there untouched for 1m years ? You have no idea what could happen in 1m y.

I agree that its the smartest thing to do atm but it could bite us in the ass one day. However saying it's a clean energy source is crazy. What about Chernobyl?

vGl-CoW

Belgium8305 Posts

December 14 2010 13:07 GMT

#266

On December 14 2010 22:01 Elwar wrote:

Show nested quote +

upon further review, you're right - i'm just going to close this thread because it's ridiculously misleading

- this 'revelation' seems to be a part of WikiLeaks' publications on the Iraq War, so it's old
- no WMDs, the OP's article is terrible
- was in the mainstream media 2 years ago