US NRC guidelines are for a security force of around 250 per nuclear power plant. That's paramilitary forces, not just rent-a-cop shopping mall guards.
Roll that out per nuke plant. It's a considerable payroll overhead.
Plus you've got to trust the crew with the semi-auto weaponry. Or more.
Of course it's not just the plant itself because there's substantial amounts of infrastructure and people needed in the whole industry. Which means more surveillance on 1st and 2nd degree contacts at least. Then there's the fuel, waste and processing. Pretty soon, you've got to keep the whole populace under lock and key to prevent any possibility of action against the system. Then there's the spectre of a Stuxnet style attack from enemies of the state whether it's Anonymous or foreign states.
It's just one example of the problems with big centralised systems run by governments.
James Lovelock was promoting the idea that nuclear waste really isn't that bad. You can store the waste on site for 50 years or so and that gets rid of the majority of highly radioactive elements with short half lifes. Then reprocess the rest to split out the stuff with very long half lives. You get left with a very small volume of stuff that you need to worry about indefinitely. Like a few oil drums worth from the worldwide nuclear industry. I'm reasonably comfortable with just putting this in a concrete block in a compound in Siberia with plenty of barbed wire and keep out notices. If somebody turns that into a dirty bomb in 3000 years time, well never mind.
This does pre-suppose that we can work out how to dismantle old power stations, but that's just an engineering-economic problem.
To borrow a SciFi idea. Maybe that's where you keep the self maintaining server farm that runs the Kurzweil-ian Matrix after the singularity rapture. You want to keep out the meat things, so surround it with dirty plutonium. Error correction should deal with the bit rot caused by increased local background radiation.
Running active nuclear plants at a scale of, oh, say, 15,000 reactors worldwide (average lifetime: 40 years, why? embrittlement, bitches. consequence: commissioning & decommissioning 375 reactors every year). From now until Doomsday (which we really hope will be a ways off). In the face of wars, revolutions, earthquakes, asteroid impacts, tsunamis, volcanos, etc., etc.
Roll that out per nuke plant. It's a considerable payroll overhead.
Plus you've got to trust the crew with the semi-auto weaponry. Or more.
It's just one example of the problems with big centralised systems run by governments.
I've also pointed out that the record of 10,000 - 1,000,000 year institutions among humans is fairly sketchy.
Even just talking to people from 400 years ago might prove difficult (writing's generally somewhat easier).
This does pre-suppose that we can work out how to dismantle old power stations, but that's just an engineering-economic problem.
To borrow a SciFi idea. Maybe that's where you keep the self maintaining server farm that runs the Kurzweil-ian Matrix after the singularity rapture. You want to keep out the meat things, so surround it with dirty plutonium. Error correction should deal with the bit rot caused by increased local background radiation.
Running active nuclear plants at a scale of, oh, say, 15,000 reactors worldwide (average lifetime: 40 years, why? embrittlement, bitches. consequence: commissioning & decommissioning 375 reactors every year). From now until Doomsday (which we really hope will be a ways off). In the face of wars, revolutions, earthquakes, asteroid impacts, tsunamis, volcanos, etc., etc.
http://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html
sgcollins on FixYT does a really good job of describing the long-term issues, better than virtually anyone I've seen:
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=KOBEloymLQA
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=S5hvY3atwUg
(about 10m each)