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Past Shows
September 18, 2004
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Nuclear Waste - Burying a Problem, or a Solution?
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Darlington Nuclear Power Station - Copyright © 2002 Ontario Power Generation Inc., all rights reserved
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In Canada, we are now storing more than 20-million kilos of nuclear waste in pools and concrete storage facilities around our nuclear reactors. If no new reactors are built, when the current reactors are decomissioned, there will be twice that amount. The waste will be lethally radioactive for hundreds of years, and toxic for tens of thousands of years. At the moment, we have no long-term policy for dealing with it.
For thirty years scientists have been working on ways to deal with this waste but, to date, the only permanent solution that seems workable is burying the waste in stable geological repositories -- chambers built in ancient and undisturbed rock, where it can remain forever. Scientists like Dr. David Shoesmith, a professor of Chemistry at the University of Western Ontario, and Lawrence Johnson, senior scientist and research and development coordinator at NAGRA, the Swiss government's nuclear waste management agency, believe in geological disposal. They worked on developing a plan for a Canadian repository at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited's Whiteshell research Laboratory.
That proposal, however has met with considerable criticism from people like Norm Rubin, director of Nuclear Research at Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group. He doesn't trust the idea of burying nuclear waste in the ground and forgetting about it. He'd like to wait to find a better solution in the future.
Liz Dowdeswell, President of Canada's Nuclear Waste Management Organization, says that may be a viewpoint shared by much of the Canadian public. The problem is, scientists think there is no better solution on the horizon, and delay may not necessarily be reasonable. We could lose the technical ability to dispose of the waste over time, and if we don't take responsibility for solving the problem now, it might never get solved.
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Space Waste
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Shane Howard feeds stabilized waste slurry to different plants to see how they react - Courtesy, Dr. James Alleman |
Going to the bathroom in zero-gravity is one thing. But what to do with the stuff afterwards is another challenge. That's the problem NASA, along with a team of scientists from Purdue University in Indiana, is trying to solve. Dr. James Alleman is associate director of the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training at Purdue. He and his colleagues have developed a sewage treatment system that takes recycling to a whole new level, turning human waste into fresh food and water for the astronauts.
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Co-extinction
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A male mite found only on the endangered Cassowary bird from Australia. Courtesy - Dr. Heather Proctor |
When an animal or plant becomes extinct, it’s lost forever. But removing a species can also have a trickle-down effect on the entire ecosystem. Everything is connected in nature -- species depend on other species for survival. That’s why a group of scientists argue in a new paper that when we talk about species being at risk of extinction, we should also look at which other species might disappear with them. They call this “co-extinction”. One of the scientists behind the report is Dr. Heather Proctor. She’s an associate professor of biology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Her specialty is mites, but the co-endangered species aren't just parasites. The list also includes butterflies and moths.
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Question of the Week: Saturn's Rings
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Don Eaton from Redwater, Alberta, wants to know why the rings of Saturn are all aligned in the same plane.
For the answer we go to McMaster University in Hamilton, where Dr. Allison Sills is a professor of Physics and Astronomy.
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