Message from Mexico: U.S. Is Polluting Water It May Someday Need to Drink

In my mind the worst-case scenario is that the core melts, the containment shell is cracked and the whole mess goes through the floor and into the ground. Has that been simulated at all? I'd love to read a paper if it has. I haven't seen anything with a cursory search.

You mean the seawall that was protecting the switchgear for the backup diesel generators? That didn't fail; it was simply not high enough to keep out the tsunami. Which, as you note, was not the case for other similar reactors:

it's also well known (documented) that this was an identified risk, and that other reactors along the coast did have sufficiently high shield walls.

Agreed. Which shows that reactor designs of that generation can be operated safely. See below.

You've omitted stockpiling reactive waste from your calculus.

Which is a lot easier if you reprocess the spent fuel, as every nuclear-using country except the US does (US policy forbade it from the mid-1970's until about 2000, since then there have been, IIRC, contractual issues getting it started).

Ditto the inadvertent release of contamination.

Which, once again, is much smaller than other major energy sources when evaluated per unit of energy produced.

Treehuggers like me are looking for solutions, not more rhetoric.

And once again, of all the other major energy sources--by "major" I mean "capable of sustaining the required base load capacity for a country the size of the US at first world standards of living"--nuclear is by far the safest. What opposition to nuclear power by treehuggers like yourself has done is to force people to make a choice: either drastically reduce our standard of living, or use energy sources with much greater health and environmental impacts like coal and oil. Guess which choice people picked?

I completely agree that, now that we have safer nuclear reactor designs, we should be building them, and not building any more of the older, less safe designs. (I don't know that traveling wave reactors are at the point where we can build operating plants, btw; but there are other inherently safe designs that are further along.) But given that we have plenty of existing plants that are perfectly capable of being operated safely, we can get cleaner energy from them than we can from coal and oil.

I'm puzzled. If the land is forested, it's no longer usable for crops in the sense that land occupied by trees cannot simultaneously be occupied with something else. So, even if you interspersed crops among the trees somehow, you're not going to have higher food production than fields that consist of nothing but food crops.

> …from which it evaporates, leaving the salt. Not a great plan.

I see you're cherry picking my comments without full context. Although I can't remember specifically why I mentioned drainage basins. I suspect it was because of run-off storage. See below.

Anyway, the point of solar desalinization (or rather, any desalinization) is to, well, evaporate or separate the water to separate salt and other unwanted things in solution, so unless you're willing to accept that desalinization is going to yield dissolved salts, then there's no point in doing it, is there? The salt doesn't magically disappear.

I also suspect that you may not live in a climate like I do, which is largely classified as a high desert, mountainous region. You don't have to design for run-off. Run-off is a given. An inch or less of rain leads to heavy flooding of lower areas simply because the soil isn't conducive to drainage or absorption of precipitation, and the steep canyons upstream serve to collect and concentrate rainfall. So, you wind up with low-lying areas that fill up with brine collected upstream from various salts and minerals, and eventually settle in subterranean aquifers that are entirely non-potable without desalinization. The drainage basins already exist. Oftentimes, salt lakes appear and persist for weeks following a rain because the atmospheric humidity is too high to allow for quick evaporation. The upshot is that if you were using a solar greenhouse, you wouldn't have to pump the water particularly far. Or you could pump it out of the ground.

> The Ogallala aquifer is currently pumped 6x faster than it's being recharged,

I wasn't talking about potable water. I was humoring the "seawater greenhouse" as a method of treating non-potable water, pumped from underground briny aquifers. I think you have this idea in mind that all subterranean water deposits are fresh water. They're not.