Since uranium does not contain carbon, it cannot produce greenhouse gas. What does it produce?

Question

Are the waste products of nuclear fission considered green?Do green plants recycle nuclear wastes and make them into new cells like they do with carbon dioxide? If those products get into the soil, can we eat plants and animals that ingest those products? Could this be what causes glo-worms or does this cause a "radiant" personality?

Answer 1

if you just look at the emissions part, nuclear power looks pretty good. no emissions, apart from maybe heat due to the need to cool the reactors.

however there are several problems with nuclear power:

1. what happens if there's an accident: with conventional power stations, the worst disaster involves familiar things like fires and pollution of industrial sorts. a nuclear station meltdown can totally strip an area of any kind of life, and severely cause mutations to survivors that still show up in their children and children's children. the problem is that radiation is one of the things that can cause genetic mutation in living DNA. one can see the unique effects of this kind of destruction by looking at chechnya today. japanese survivors of the WWII bombing of hiroshima still have abnormally high cancer rates. civilians in countries where US troops had used depleted uranium weapons (waste material that's supposed to be less potent than the fresh stuff) also suffer cancer deaths, and children are born horribly deformed, because of the radiation. so while the safeguards in a nuclear reactor can be made to be very good, with extremely low probabilities of a meltdown happening, few people are willing to have a reactor sited where they live.

2. second big issue with nuclear power, even if you manage to site it somewhere, is the nuclear waste it generates. it ties back to the radiation problem. nuclear waste still has radiation at levels unsafe for humans and generally, life. and the materials used to generate nuclear power have half-lives that are measured in many thousands of years (this means the length of time it takes for the radiation levels are reduced by half - often you need the waste to degrade to many 'halfs' the original radiation level) . in order to protect living things from the radiation it's necessary to shield the waste with concrete and lead, and the best bet today is to bury it deep underground somewhere that (we think) is not seismically active and wouldn't be for the next tens of thousands of years, with a way to access it in case we need to move it someplace else, and figuring out how to label the stuff and the location in a way that can still be understood several thousand years later, when maybe people speak a different language and may have forgot about the waste.

so as you can see, there are many uncertainties involved (many say too many), and the very high stakes that need to be managed, before you can say that nuclear power generation is the way to go. hence why a lot of groups are extremely hesitant to endorse nuclear power, even in the face of global climate change.

and no, glo-worms do not obtain their glow from exposure to nuclear waste. :) you'd have to get a chemist to comment on whether the organic compounds formed with radioactive isotopes are toxic or not. i'm not too sure about that.

Answer 2

The big Greenhouse problem from nuclear is the energy involved in constructing the plant in the first place. Nasty nasty nuclear waste is quite useless, very poisonous and so ungreen that the govt have had to promise any 'market' companies that might build new nuclear power stations that they wont have to pay to throw the waste away - because the only way of dealing with it is to dig a very big hole in the ground (lined with lots of CO2 intensive concrete) and bury it - and then hope that there aren't any unforseen seismic shifts.