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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
[...] France is a major player in the nuclear industry: in 2012, about 75 percent of its electricity came from nuclear reactors. But since the Fukushima disaster that same year, the country has been pushing to retire some of its older reactors (although not as aggressively as Germany did). According to Power Magazine, in 2014 France's lower house of parliament passed a bill that would have capped nuclear power at 50 percent of the country's energy mix by 2025. Since then, the cap has been removed and reinstated by legislative bodies, and while reducing nuclear reliance to 50 percent of the country's energy mix seemed to be certain, the timeline to do it was far from certain.
[...] As France moves away from nuclear, Japan is slowly turning some of its nuclear reactors back on. After the Fukushima disaster, Japan suspended its nuclear fleet for safety inspection, leaving the country with no nuclear power. Instead, Japan currently burns more coal, oil, and natural gas. In 2015, two reactors came back online for the first time, and a handful of reactors have been approved to reconnect with the grid every year since then.
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(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday December 03 2018, @03:00PM (1 child)
Lets not pretend there is no radioactive waste from fusion reactors. Anything that comes in contact with the plasma is going to absorb some neutrons. Tritium is rather radioactive, but because of this, its half-life is short. While Tritium is a fuel and not a by product, it is possible some could leak into the environment.
However, both of these are better than the sludge that current fission reactors produce and don't require storage of thousands of years.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Monday December 03 2018, @11:20PM
If you have to store it for thousands of years, it's not that dangerous anyway, short and intermediate half lives are what get you. Particularly when biologically concentrated. Plutonium for example is quite poisonous.
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Short half life - decays away and is only dangerous for a relatively short time (e.g. I-131 hl ~8 days) concentrated in thyroid (take your KI after the bombs hit...)
Intermediate Half life - e.g. Sr-90 (hl~28yrs) concentrated in the bones, pretends to be calcium.
Long Half Life - Thousands of years, put out radiation slowly and are typically more dangerous as poisonous things your body has no idea how to deal with than specifically from their radiation.
Very/extremely long half life - Banana's for example contain radioactive potassium. If they figure out how to freeze us without damage for thousands of years, potassium in our bodies will continue to decay and we die of radiation exposure anyway when we thaw out.
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