Amec Working on Long-Term Nuclear Waste Solution

Ckwop writes "The Daily Telegraph is reporting that Amec, the company that cleaned up Ground Zero, have developed a new process for storing nuclear waste that lasts two hundred thousand years - far longer than any radioactivity will last. The process works by mixing eighty percent soil with twenty percent waste and then heating the mixture to three thousand degrees centigrade. When the mixture cools it forms into a glass harder than concrete. While this is not the first waste process of this type it is the first to be cost effective and produces a glass much harder than previous methods. " We'll see if we still need a ten mile field of spikes I guess. A pilot facility is being built in Washington State.

Cue the inevitable!

[jimhill]

Bring forth your ignorant, your undereducated and uneducated, your readers of dubious websites, and maybe, just maybe, one or two people who actually know what they're talking about.

Time for another nuclear waste disposal imbroglio!

Re:Cue the inevitable!

[strictfoo]

Oh my god! NOW THEY"RE using glass to protect us from the NUKES? I CAN see through glass! THose in glass houses should not store nukes, the old adage goes!

WTF _ damn BUSH ! WHo does he THINK WE ARE? HE and this company are in it totghther! BUSH did 9/11 SO THISESE guys could GET MONEY! THEM ANd Halle-bruton!

Re:Cue the inevitable!

[GigsVT]

Bah, its simple. They just need to encase the waste in nickle, bury it 100 feet underground, or maybe just dump it in an old missle silo. Then keep records in the computer so they don't loose track of it.

The people soley responsible for it is the government. If they have to, they could pass an amenment to the charter of the DOE to take care of it. The heirarchy of government would probly ensure accountability. Its rediculus to think that no one has thought of this before.

Of course, all these plans have a kernal of validity to them, but most of them are just BS that the CEO of these companies can talk about at some speach to investors.

Thank $diety that those people usually don't get much political power. ;)

Re:Cue the inevitable!

[Zorilla]

And now, nukular waist. We won't loose it any time soon.

Nice!

[Opalima]

Cool - imagine an entire line of quasi-radioactive collectibles to decorate your Xmas tree and decorate that shelf above the fireplace that needs that something special.

Re: Nice?

[Alwin Henseler]

Turning it into a glass isn't so much to reduce radiation in any way, but to immobilise the radioactive material. It can remain highly radioactive.

This sort of thing is done already, and often glass is packed inside a metal layer/container. Take transport: if you got fluid components, dust, or pressurised gasses, and there's an accident, the stuff spills all over the place, and into air, ground water. If it's glass, it may go in pieces, but the pieces stay were they are, with the radioactive material trapped inside.

Re: Nice?

[AndroidCat]

Since they mix the material with soil to form the glass, maybe they should use soil from a place where it's been contaminated by lead? (Safe storage and toxic cleanup, bonus!)

Lead vapor

[Anonymous Coward]

Heating the soil up that high to melt it into glass will also vaporize the lead and send it into the air.

Re:Lead vapor

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Heating the soil up that high to melt it into glass will also vaporize the lead and send it into the air.

...which you capture and sell - Profit!

Use amber..

[mikael]

... this stuff [emporia.edu] has been proved to last millions of years.

Re: Nice?

[T5]

Sometimes you don't get immobilization. We had a prototype of this years ago here in Oak Ridge, TN, developed by Martin Marietta Molten Metals (M4) where they tried in situ vitrification by sticking these huge carbon electrodes into a prepared testbed in an open field. What little water was trapped inside caused a massive steam explosion that blew hot dirt for a radius of hundreds of feet.

I'm now the technical support for the financial servers for the federal bankruptcy court for M4.

Re:Nice!

[Aumaden]

I can see it now:

Are you sick of this!

(shot of man sturggling with tangled Xmas lights)

Or this!

(woman looks on in dismay as pet runs into wires toppling the Xmas tree)

Or even this!

(Xmas light bulb pops, shoots sparks, tree ignites)

Well, you need all new Amec PermaLights!
Amec Permalights never wear out and never need replacing!

(flash disclaimer "actual life expectancy ~10,000 years")

Order before midnight tonight and we'll include this nativity scene complete with glowing baby Jesus, absolutely free!

(flash disclaimer: "5% of all profits donated to the American Cancer Society)

Nothing new?

[pedestrian crossing]

After R'ing TFA, it looks like this is nothing new, just a slightly better method of vitrification. I don't know, the tone of the FA was a little, um, enthusiastic for an incremental improvement to an established method...

Not exactly incremental

[Anonymous Coward]

The article stated that the current processes uses concrete and lasts 200 years. I would say that the "incremental change" to 200,000 years IS significant. Now, I would have doubts that it actually lasted that long. And I would be interested in seeing how they determined that deterioration rate. Is 200K years a conservative estimate or a best case scenario one?

RTFA!

[pedestrian crossing]

They've increased the performance of this technology by a factor of 80 - 100. That's impressive.

You are comparing apples and oranges, and I believe that the fact that you've been "tricked" into making this comparison makes my point that the article isn't exactly without bias.

The 200-500 year figure is for CONCRETE ENTOMBMENT, which is NOT vitrification.

Vitrification is not new. And I would doubt anyone who claimed even 20,000 years of containment. There are a lot of factors that can come into play on those kind of timescales, and these numbers have nothing to back them up. Of course I haven't backed up my doubts of these numbers, but hey, I'm not the one saying "problem solved"...

Re:RTFA!

[GigsVT]

God, isn't it obvious?

Do you see any way to experimentally back up their claims of 200,000 years longevity? "Accelerated weathering" isn't a valid answer.

The burdon of proof is on the person making the extreme claim, not on the person who doubts it.

Re:Nothing new?

[Smidge204]

341 years of safe storage to 200,000 years of safe storage, done at 75% of the cost... that's a pretty big increment! Not to mention that this appears to be the first truly viable long-LONG-term solution to preventing the waste from leaking out of where it's stored. Still have to agree on a spot to put it, but once it's there you don't have to worry about it. That's half the battle won, and that's what makes it news.

=Smidge=

Re:Nothing new?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Can't help but wonder if that's "200,000 years under ideal, laboratory conditions" and this is projected (unless they've been working on it for a really long time.

Nothing that a human hand has made has lasted much past 10,000 years, much less 10,000 years with no maintenance. It's safe to say that 200,000 years is a guess at best.

Re:Nothing new?

[jstave]

The point is that it passes a significant milestone, i.e. the length of time it takes for the radiation to fade. If it just increased the storage time to, say 500 years, then I would agree with your assessement. TFA, however, claims that this basically keeps the stuff safe until its no longer a radioactive threat. That's important. Lowering the cost of processing is a nice bonus, but less important (IMO) than that 200,000 year figure.

Re:Plutonium has a half-life of 24,300 years.

[mikec]

The idea that plutonium is "one of the most poisonous substances on earth" is complete nonsense. In fact, plutonium barely qualifies as a toxin at all. Yes, it can cause cancer, which may eventually kill you. But lots of substances will kill you far more quickly at far smaller dosages. Some that are quite likely present in your neighborhood include digitoxin (foxgloves), convallaria (lily-of-the-valley), and aflatoxin (food molds). And substances such as Indian cobra venom, ricin, botulism, or anthrax are so much more toxic than plutonium that there is really no comparison.

Storage, not technology, is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

While it's good to see another neat/good idea, the problem is having a place to put it. Until such a site exists AND IS ALLOWED TO OPERATE, we're left twiddling our thumbs. Since nothing is 100% safe and secure, I'm not optimistic such a site will be operational.

To head off some flames, I'm sure people are fully secure living near dams, powerplants, coal mines and transmission wires. Oh, and I assume they're suitably slathered with SPF 30+ outside in the sun...

Re:Storage, not technology, is the problem

[joib]

While it's good to see another neat/good idea, the problem is having a place to put it. Until such a site exists AND IS ALLOWED TO OPERATE, we're left twiddling our thumbs. Since nothing is 100% safe and secure, I'm not optimistic such a site will be operational.


Unfortunately, that is the political reality.

However, IMHO any reasonably well thought out burial method, flaws and all, is still orders of magnitude better than how nuclear waste is currently stored in the world.

In a way, this is just another case of the NIMBY crowd winning against the best interests of the rest of mankind.

Re:Storage, not technology, is the problem

[CustomDesigned]

It seems to me that there is a potential synergy here.

1. People don't want to live near nuclear waste disposal sites.
2. We want to preserve large tracts of land in an undeveloped state for a variety of reasons including biodiversity and aesthetics.

So put the storage facilities in the middle of national parks you want to protect. No one wants to build house there, and the stream of tourists is reduced to those who can overcome irrational fears enough to be within a few hundred miles of some rocks that are slightly more radioactive than the rocks they are hiking on.

Re:Storage, not technology, is the problem

[gadget junkie]

"So put the storage facilities in the middle of national parks you want to protect. No one wants to build house there, and the stream of tourists is reduced to those who can overcome irrational fears enough to be within a few hundred miles of some rocks that are slightly more radioactive than the rocks they are hiking on.

This is slighly OT, but that's what happens in military training areas. No one wants to risk being run over by a tank, and Voilà! wildlife has a place to call home.

Re:Storage, not technology, is the problem

[RCulpepper]

The NIMBY thing is particularly tragic because the Yucca Mountain debate is painted as though, because the site isn't 100% safe, we shouldn't store our waste there, as though our waste were currently stored in some kind of interdimensional X-zone, instead of spread around the country in vast stretches of poorly defended and leaky containment vessels. Yucca may not be 100% stable -- but it's orders of magnitude more stable than the system we have in place now.

Re:Storage, not technology, is the problem

[yog]

I'd really like to see this type of technology implemented to store nuclear waste and perhaps other kinds of toxic compounds that are otherwise too expensive to treat.

200,000 years sounds long enough that we'll either not care by then or have evolved into beings that can withstand the radiation.

Perhaps this combined with pebble bed nuclear reactors [slashdot.org] will at last make nukes a realistic and safe alternative to oil.

A hundred nuclear fission plants using the safer pebble technology and a really solid waste storage approach would go a long way to weaning the U.S. and its allies off the Wahhabi oil machine. They could generate hydrogen during low demand times for use in fuel cell vehicles and straight power for peak time use, and solar power could fill in the gaps.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

NO; Politics, not technology is the problem

[museumpeace]

the answer, without going into a lot of phyics is that between proven sources and the regenerative capacity of so-called breeder reactors, we could could go [at present power consumption levels] for centuries. This was the original "power too cheap to meter" argument made for nukes back in the [naive, optimistic] '50s. It would outlast oil by several generations. Politics always trumps science and acute accidents like Chernobl always change peoples minds more effectively than diffuse accidents like our overheated bioshpere slipping by with little alarm despite wiping out entire species. If one percent of what our nation spends to secure an oil supply [you may even leave out the cost of the Iraq misadventure] were spent on building nuke plants that were idiot proof and safe disposal methods, we would not be worried about another three mile island, and we would be able to afford to turn on our air conditioners.

Re:NO; Politics, not technology is the problem

[Ralph Spoilsport]

museumpeace wrote:

"the answer, without going into a lot of phyics is that between proven sources and the regenerative capacity of so-called breeder reactors, we could could go [at present power consumption levels] for centuries."

This is true, however: as you noted in the title: POLITICS is the problem. And it's not the kind of politics of Republicrats vs Demoblicans - it's the politics of CRAZY insane and desperately poor nations getting their mitts on fissile material for ugly bomb making. Breeder reactors make plutonium, and the last thing I want to do is let people like North Korea, Sudan, Chechnya, Congo, Burma, etc. get any of it.

Proliferation of breeder reactors will permit theft and sale of Pu - even if the reactor isn't in the troubled country. All it has to do is be in a Ally's land and that ally may not be on the up and up. Example: Pakistan.

I agree - in the Best OF Worlds, we should be able to do breeders, but due to political realities, we can't and shouldn't bother "going down that road".

I think a much more fruitful direction would be to
1. make present fission plants safer and more efficient,
2. increase research and development of other sources of power (geothermal used to crack water for hydrogen - I trust Iceland a lot more than Saudi Arabia...) such as geothermal, hydrogen, tidal, wind and solar.
3. improve efficiency of consumption, so as to reduce load
4. Reduce the population. A lot.

point 4 is probably the most important and oddly, the most obvious, but will be the most difficult policy to implement, and would tend to obviate a lot of the power problems.

cheers,

RS

Wrong technology

[Engineer-Poet]

... breeder reactors must use molten sodium metal as the primary coolant.

Wrong. A fast breeder reactor can use anything with a low neutron absorption cross-section and low moderation capability (to keep the neutrons fast); the Soviets were looking at lead-bismuth for the purpose. Second, that only applies if you are breeding Pu-239 from U-238; if you are trying to make U-233 from Th-232, light water will do just fine.

Second, breeders require reprocessing-- PUREX, plutonium/uranium extraction-- to be useful.

That's water-based chemistry; there are now alternatives based on electrolysis of molten salt solutions. Google "Integral Fast Reactor" and "pyroprocessing" for enlightenment. (The IFR would have sealed all of its fuel in the reactor building, and the only thing that would have left the building would have been extracted fission products in vitrified form ready for final disposal. Further, the re-refined fuel would have had sufficient contamination from fission products that it would have been nearly impossible to steal without killing the people trying to steal it. There goes your proliferation threat.)

One hundred PBMRs would produce 17,000 MWe

[Jack_Frost]

That's about the same amount of output as 17 modern LWRs. THe PBMR is well suited to areas without an existing electrical infrastructure. Using PBMRs to power the U.S. isn't practical and that's not what they're designed to do.

Now if you built 100 additional LWRs and double the nuclear power production in the U.S. (up to 40% from today's 20%) you'd have a massive impact on greenhouse gas emissions (We'd be able to join the Kyoto protocol) and reduce our reliance on foreign sources of natural gas. Very little oil is used for electricity generation in the U.S.

Why not back in the Uranium mine ?

[anti-NAT]

After all, my Uncle says that is what they do with the radio active mining equipment, and he has been down the largest uranium mine in Australia - Olympic Dam [mining-technology.com].

Re:Eh?

[Nutria]

Dumping this glass on the sea floor still means we'd wind up with irradiated fish and coral.

Or we drop them into tectonic subduction zones. The glass would (eventually) get pulled into the earth.

Re:Storage, not technology, is the problem

[maxpublic]

But with the Great Satan of nuclear power you're bound to get the environmentalists in an uproar. From the way they react to both current technology and just about every planned development, I've concluded they'll only be happy when humans give up technology altogether and return to a hunter-gatherer tribal structure. Oh, and after slightly less than six billion of us die off in the process of 'returning to our roots' - minus the environmentalists and their friends, of course.

If you want to get a clear i

Wiley Coyote

[tgv]

Was I the only one that read "ACME" instead of Amec?

Re:Wiley Coyote

[ViolentGreen]

I believe his name is Wile E. Coyote but I could be mistaken. Not that it really matters anyway...

Half-life

[doodlelogic]

lasts two hundred thousand years - far longer than any radioactivity will last

There will be some residual radioactivity in any nuclear waste forever - I presume that they meant far longer than the half-life...

Re:Half-life

[joib]

There will be some residual radioactivity in any nuclear waste forever


Of course, but after a few hundred thousand years it will IIRC be at about the same level as background radiation.

Re:Half-life

[Ckwop]

There will be some residual radioactivity in any nuclear waste forever - I presume that they meant far longer than the half-life...

I assume they probably mean until the radio activity falls to around background level.

Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation I computer that if the half-life is 10,000 years than after two hundred thousand years the radioactivity is about one hundred thousandth of a percent what it is today.

Simon.

200 billion million trillion years

[aussie_a]

Ground Zero, have developed a new process for storing nuclear waste that lasts two hundred thousand years

I won't believe them until they have done it just once. Until then it theoretically lasts two hundred thousand years :P

The acceptable cost of disposal?

[gilgongo]

Couple this story with the recent pronouncement by James Lovelock and others that nuclear power may in fact be the only way to save the world after all, how does this square?

Nuclear energy seems to boil down to two things: cost and danger. If we sort out the first one, will we learn to live with the second? After all, in terms of simple loss of life, cars kill about the same number of people every year as a jumbo jet going down with all hands, and we accept that as necessary.

Re:The acceptable cost of disposal?

[richie2000]

cars kill about the same number of people every year as a jumbo jet going down with all hands

I can't seem to figure out which planet you're from, but if your homepage URL is any clue, the British cars kill just under 3,000 people every year. In case you're a yank, that figure goes up to a bit over 40,000. I'd like to see this super-duper-hyper jumbo jet of yours.

Re:The acceptable cost of disposal?

[tap]

Cars kill around 40,000 people each year in the US alone. Just a bit more than a jumbo jet, wouldn't you say?

You know what the most dangerous form of power is, based on real disasters that actually happened and not ignorant peoples' imaginations? Hydroelectric power. On August 8th 1975, the Banqiao and Shimantan dams in China burst during a storm. The flooding, water born diseases, and destruction of farm land is estimated to have killed over 200,000.

Re:The acceptable cost of disposal?

[cowscows]

Obviously, he was talking about a jumbo jet crashing into a football stadium during a game. Where's the imagination?

Re:The acceptable cost of disposal?

[gadget junkie]

.... really, it boils down to a matter of "perceived" vs. "average" risk.

The technologies available to dispose nuclear waste, imperfect as they are, render the risk comparable, in terms of damages, to alternatives ways to obtain the same amount of usable energy in comparable quantities.

the point is that the human being is incapable to assess low probability events [sjsu.edu].

As you said, you see the same psychology at work in air transport: people that habitually use a car (and drive recklessly, BTW) regard air travel as "dangerous", while statistically just the opposite is true.

Geeky mutant coolness

[AndroidCat]

Glowing glass spikes would be even cooler than lava lamps. (Yes, you'd have to mix stuff in to get the glow.) And they'd last for generations of stunted mutant troglodytes with no use of fossil fuels--talk about your green power!

Re:Geeky mutant coolness

[swv3752]

A Phosphur coating like the inside of a CRT or Flourescent Light would do it. Only a small fraction of the radiation would be converted to light though so it would not be safe.

If the phosphur could be combined with the soil so it was evenly distributed, it would make the whole thing a bit safer in so far as it would make it easier to to find all the shards if the glass breaks. "Hey Bob, there is some glowing dust on your butt, you better go through decon."

Far longer than what exactly?

[fstanchina]

Well, "far longer than any radioactivity will last" is obviously wrong, because it depends on which kind of radioactive isotopes we're talking about. It's far longer than *most* radioactivity will last, because the most abundant isotopes in this kind of waste have half times of a few hundred years, but some radioactivity will last for millions of years.

Re:Far longer than what exactly?

[renoX]

Yes, but of course what is needed is not a package that will last until any radioactivity has disappeared, but a package that will last until the remaining radioactivity is negligible compared to the normal background radioactivity.

The usual design standard used...

[abb3w]

...is a radioactivity level of the waste component would equal that of the original ore.

Hey, if Mama nature can do it [curtin.edu.au], we should be able to pull it off.

Re:Far longer than what exactly?

[RsG]

So who says you gotta get rid of every last millirem? Hate to burst you bubble, but you're probably carrying around a few rads right now. And if radiation scares you that much don't ever go near an x-ray machine.

If this process can hold the nastier stuff inside until it decays into something harmless (I'm thinking Strontium 90 here) I'm happy. Remember the _really_ nasty stuff is the least stable. By extension it is the shortest lived (half-lives in decades instead of millenia). And if vitrification (

Re:Far longer than what exactly?

[RsG]

There's plenty of Uranium in spent fuel rods. Trouble is, the Uranium is not longer "enriched" and cannot be used in a conventional nuclear reactor. You can build reactors to run off the waste, and you can re-proccess waste to get the fuel out, but both approaches lead to their own problems.

Also, the grandparent seems not to realize that the "main isotope" of Urainium is U-238, which is mostly harmless (you'll notice I didn't say "totally harmless"). You can't built a fission bomb out of it, it's worthl

Slings and arrow.....

[hcob$]

Why don't they just form it into a nice little arrow/bullet shape and use that instead of depleted uranium in the military.... That way it will be in one of 3 places, a firing range, a foreign country, or an enemy of the US. :) Ready.... aim.... glow.........

Half life anyone?

[vg30e]

No offense intended to the people of the article, but some of that waste (if we are talking used fuel elements) still contains Uranium and Plutonium which has a half life of 10^8 years. While I am pretty sure I won't live to see that, It still is a pretty messy thing to deal with.

One thing that this sort of storage technology is good for is for the short lived stuff with half lives in the hundreds of years.

My humble opinion is that this technology is used after the really long lived nasty stuff is separated and destroyed (neutron bombardment looks promising). There was an Argone National Labs Experimental Sodium reactor that in "proof of concept" separated all the uranium from spent fuel (electro refining)but the program was cancelled due to budget cuts.

Believe it or not, there is technology being researched to destroy radioactive waste products with accelerators that actually looks like it may work.

Chernobyl

[hartba]

The real question is, how can we apply this technology to finally seal up the leakage from around Chernobyl permanently? The last time I read anything about it, the sarcophagus that was built around the plant was leaking terribly and radiation is permiating the area. This sounds like a great application of the new process, but I wonder what sort of hurdles will have to be overcome to actually implement the design in that part of the world.

This was done 20 years ago

[gtoomey]

This does not address the underlying problem. Synthetic Rock [uic.com.au] for securing nuclear waste has been around for decades.

The problem is factoring in the cost of running a nuclear waste compound for 200,000 years, into the price of the electricity generated today by nuclear power.

Re:This was done 20 years ago

[R.Caley]

The problem is factoring in the cost of running a nuclear waste compound for 200,000 years

You only need to run it for long enough to get to the point where the waste mixed with the carrier is slightly less radioactive than the ore you originally mined. Then shove it back down the mine (or dig a new equivalent) and the whole cycle reduces the radiological hazards in the world.

Value added....

[tcdk]

They need to shape it as something interesting and pass it on as prices or bonuses.

Like you get a small glow-in-the-dark Wolverine figure, when you see X-Men n, and you even get a chance at having X-Men like kids of your own!

It's just at questing of selling it right.

Storage and long term availability

[Un0r1g1nal]

If we are able to develop means to 'safely' store radioactive waste (and we are just taking them on their word at the moment) then surely nuclear power will become a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Now we just have to develop decent security to keep terrorists out...

30 years...

[reluctantengineer]

The Vitreous State Lab at The Catholic University of America has been doing this for 30 years. Read a recent article here [cua.edu].

Harder than Concrete? How about Solubility

[G4from128k]

Although "harder than concrete" sounds "strong" it does not address the chief danger in long-term storage. Chemical erosion and leaching are a bigger issue than brute strength. Anyone who has ever thought about geology and objects like geodes will realize that quartz is both much harder than concrete, but also (over the long term) water soluble. The real trick is to encapsulate the waste in something that won't dissolve or allow the migration of waste isotopes in the heat, potential liquids, and long timescales of waste storage. (I'm sure hardness is somewhat of an issue when trapped alpha particles and decay products create expansion stresses in the glass)

I do think that vitrification is the way to go, but statements like these do the public no good when they mislead them on what characteristics actually make for a good containment system.

Subduction zones?

[david.given]

What's wrong with simply burying the waste at the bottom of a very, very deep hole somewhere in a geologically active subduction zone? That way the waste will get sucked into the mantle fairly quickly (on a geological timescale). The material will then dissolve and disperse.

And since the mantle's already highly radioactive --- radioactive heating is one of the things that drives Earth's geology --- the fact that the waste is radioactive is hardly going to be a problem.

Provided you make sure that the initial hole is deep enough to be well under the water table, this form of disposal should be both cheap and entirely safe.

Re:Subduction zones?

[jstave]

Its an idea I've heard mentioned before (can't remember where) and on the face of it, seems like a good one. However, I'm not so certain it would be a cheap method of disposal. If I remember my college geology, most of the subduction zones are under water, which would raise the cost of drilling the disposal hole. Also there tend to be earthquakes along plate boundaries (including subductions zones) which might collapse the disposal hole, making re-drilling necessary.

Also there there tend to be volcanoe [nodak.edu]

Re:Volcanoes you say?

[jstave]

Three words "Missile Tracking Systems" -- can you imagine the consternation of the various nuclear powers as an ICBM is launched? Would *you* trust the reassurance of a foreign power that "you have nothing to worry about, that scary looking missile is going to impact in a volcano in the middle of nowhere. No, really. And besides, it has no payload, well it has a whole bunch of highly radioactive material that would be act as an appallingly destructive 'dirty bomb' if it were to impact in the wrong place,

Re:Volcanoes you say?

[Dun Malg]

Why can't they use some of their fancy GPS-guided ICBMs to deliver the nuclear waste into the heart of volcanos in remote sites for disposal? A few million metric tons of lava will disperse the waste readily, intermixing it with the earth's magma. and like the parent poster said, the stuff is already radioactive.

Find me a volcano that sucks in molten rock and it might work. As I understand it, though, volcanos only spew out. Trying to shoot radioactive waste down a volcano to the earth's core is like tr

Re:Subduction zones?

[MustardMan]

GREAT, just what we need, radioactive volcano-monsters!

Re:Subduction zones?

[Paulrothrock]

It's a good idea, but we don't know enough about the subduction zones to ensure it will be trapped underneath the crust.

It would really suck if we have highly radioactive lava spewing out of a volcano a few thousand years after we put this stuff in the ground.

Re:Subduction zones?

[Malc]

You do know what minor geological feature is associated with subduction zones, right? Volcanoes. It's been a while since I studied geology, but I believe they also tend to be the explosive types of volcano, which tends to put more in to the atmosphere. Whether the subducted plate ends up in the uprising magma, I don't know. Any geologists here?

Another issue with subduction zones is the accretionary prism. If you don't dig deeply enough then I believe you run the risk of the material being scraped off

Re:Subduction zones?

[LaCosaNostradamus]

(I was going to post this seperately, but decided to ride along in reply to your existing posting.)

The first question that comes to mind about nuclear "waste" is: is it really waste? Heavy atoms are still difficult to come by in Human manufacturing processes. I think that if we really want to keep such heavy atoms around in such quantities, that such "waste" should be "disposed" of in a manner that is recoverable ... by geographic location and by internment process.

The second question that comes to mind, if we decide to actually "get rid" of the "waste", is: what lasts for along time? The "long term storage" locations and processes currently under consideration and development are all uniformly absurd. The public really doesn't understand how much they are being fooled about these things. We'd be lucky to get a 2 centuries of storage out of Yucca Mt. before a serious leak or theft occurs. We need a combination of internment and storage that is rated for millenia.

A space elevator would be the minimum transport system for any serious consideration of launching the material away from Earth. Until we have that, I must reject all space-launch ideas.

But note that we are talking about storage for geologic times. So, it seems natural to consider geological methods. Yucca Mt. was the outcome of that, but we can take things a step farther: why not put the nuclear material deep into the Earth? Let's call it "Earth injection". (Please put aside jokes about "fucking the Earth".)

We can use two methods for Earth injection.

1. Drill a very deep hole in continental crust ... kilometers deep. Pack the hole's depth with diffuse waste. The vitrification method seems basically sound since they are effectively making rocks out of the stuff, and you can always choose the density of nuclear material in such a method. The hole is obviously conducive to receiving cylindrical objects, and the engineers can tweak the variables to produce an optimal size of hole diameter. Then the forming company can clunk kilometers of cylinder glass, in meter-long chunks. They can be inserted into the hole, and the engineers can figure out how to pack them down kilometers of pipe. A 11-kilometer long pipe, .2m in diameter, can hold over 300 cubic meters of waste (which must include the vitrifying matrix) assuming the top kilometer is the cap. Assuming 20% of the mass is actual waste material, this means each 10k hole can hold 60 cubic meters ... which is enough waste to fill a container 4 meters on a side.

2. Drill a hole like #1, but in oceanic crust. You'd face the barrier of packing the hole from a drillling ship, kilometers above on the surface of the ocean ... but that would add security, since only a major government or corporation could afford to make the same investment to go back and drill your hole open.

3. Use an oceanic trench. This brings up all kinds of engineering problems, but if you can pack the material in the trench bottom, then after 1 million years it will be securely subducted under the encroaching continental plate. After 5 million years, it may come up in the volcanoes above the deep subduction zone, but with the half-life involved, it should be no more radioactive than lava is usually.

I'd like to see how vitrified blocks act in sea-bottom mud. If they are stable for thousands of years, then that's long enough for them to be deeply buried in the bottom of a trench like the Marianas, and after that the material will slowly subduct into the mantle. That means they can be pipe-dropped from a ship instead of being actually injected into a drilled hole. "Pipe-dropped" means lowering a pipe from the ship down the trench to just above one of the lowest sections of the bottom, and sliding the cylinders of vitrified waste down like a piece of mail down a mail chute. The ship could move along and dump piles of cylinders.

And for security purposes, only a major government or corporation could spend the money to undertake a mission to go into the trench, dig it up and recover material. We should be safe from it, and it should be safe from us.

Hot volatiles!

[redelm]

At 3000'C many compounds break down and/or vaporize! There's a whole slew in spent nuclear fuel.

Vitrification is nice (better be multi-layer), but there'll have to be one hell of a vapor recovery system.

One thing to say about Nuclear Waste

[Slick_Snake]

We are not creating more radioactive material than was already on this planet. All we are doing is moving it around. So If we can safely store it there is no harm. The problem in the past has been storage. This method seems like a safe way to store the waste material until a better solution such as recycling it into a usable product is found.

Technical details on the process used in France

[c_ollier]

It's been around here since 1969, and still used today in La Hague nuclear repocessing plant. You will find many details (in english) on the web site of the CEA [www.cea.fr] (Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique), a governmental agency. They say that glass packages are guaranteed for millions of years [www.cea.fr].

I trust that 200,000-year figure...

[dpbsmith]

...about as much as I trust the statements that CD-R's will last for a century.

After all, it's such a confident, unqualified statement. The process, they say, "will enable nuclear waste to be stored safely for 200,000 years." Now, me, I'm no expert and I'm constantly getting taken by surprise by little adjustments in our understanding of the physical universe... you know, like plate tectonics and black holes and asteroid collisions causing the extinction of the dinosaurs.

So, I'm really glad there are people that know what will happen over the next 200,000 years. People who can also assure me "We know that nuclear plants work and are safe." I'd been getting a little nervous after things like Browns Ferry and EBR-1 and Detroit Fermi and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

But those Brits are real experts. After all, they've hardly had any nuclear accidents except Windscale [nucleartourist.com].

Re:I trust that 200,000-year figure...

[egomaniac]

Except glass is actually a liquid, and flows quite readily on a scale of centuries, let alone millenia, and you wouldn't want groundwater carrying any surface contamination off those glass blocks.

Christ, is that urban legend still around? No, glass is not a liquid. [google.com]

200000 years is not longer than radiactifity lasts

[angel'o'sphere]

An error in the story:

Plutonium has a half time of 44.000 years.
If you put 1 kg plutonium in a glass block, after 44.000 years 500 grams are still there. After 88.000 its down to 250 grams, after 200000 years still 30 grams are left. So if you put 10 kg into such a block, after 200000 years still 300 grams are left.

The press release of the research team is missleading as well. In germany the deposition of waste, radioactive or not, in different kinds of glass is a long researched topic.

At my town where I live is the research center, and I know people involved in such researches.

Most glasses are somewhat vulnerable to acids. So the question, still to answer is: where to deposite the glass blocks? In germany it was for a long time an idea to place them in salt mines (we have a lot under surface piles of old stone salt).

Salt mines are considered "dry", very dry. However: a lot of salt compositions contain so called "crystal water". That means a crystal, a kind of big mollecule, contains captured water.

The ionisating rays of decaying material can break up such molecules and the water is set free. As such water can dissolve salt it can become to an aggressive acid which even harms very robust glass kinds.

Now you would think about a protecting surface over the glass blocks, that wont help much. Most places where you would store the glass blocks, will eventually be covered by the montain. The pressure if the mountain moves likely cracks a block once a while, and that block then is vulnerable to aggressive acids.

That said, glass blocks surely are a "quite save" way to handel our current problems. But they are no holly grail like the industrie likes to tell us.

Interesting is: in germany the research results are not public disclosed. In politics its still talked as if salt mines would be a perfect storage, but a granit mountain would be likely much better. I guess if you ask (or search for PDFs) you might get the information easyly, its an EU sponsored research project. However in media its not covered: htp://www.fzk.de (or probably the institute site: www.ine.fzk.de -- I did not check if they have their own site)

angel'o'sphere

Plasma Torch

[skroz]

This is an interesting application of the basic premise of the plasma torch. A company called Startech Environmental [startech.net] has been working on the technology [startech.net] for quite some time. The basic gist is that if you heat just about anything hot enough, molecular bonds will break down, and you'll be left with a uniform mixture of all of the elements found in whatever you were trying to destroy. When cooled, you get a black glass and a flammable gas that can be used to power turbines that provide the power necessary to run the torch itself.

This is the first I've heard of it being used for radioactive disposal, but Startech uses it for disposing of toxic waste, biohazardous materials... all kinds of dangerous stuff.

With enough research and development, it may be possible to "skim" individual elements from the melted slag based on their density. Perfect recycling!

Misconceptions driving much of the posting:

[Big_Breaker]

Radioactive compounds and their isotopes are dangerous for two reasons.

1. They are radioactive and emit energy in dangerous quantities/frequencies. This energy destroys DNA and tissue causing burns and genetic mutations.

2. The elements are inherently toxic in the same way that lead and mercury vapor is toxic. Uranium is a toxic heavy metal separate from its potential radioactivity. This is why depleted uranium bullets and shells are such a bad idea.

Radioactive waste that is dangerous for reason #1 is low volume, high level and short-lived.

Radioactive waste that is dangerous for reason #2 is high volume, low level (radioactive intensity) and is long lived. In fact is is always toxic just like lead is always toxic.

#1 Radioactive waste turns into #2 radioactive waste pretty quickly. The half lives are between years and decades (maybe centuries).

Long-term storage requires a combination of "burning out" the high level stuff with breeders or keeping it safe for a few decades and then burning the resulting low level waste with all the other low level waste somewhere relatively safe. This low level waste is not going to kill anyone anytime soon. In fact diluting it is probably better than keeping it in the same place. These elements of low level waste are found in nature as a matter of course but at lower concentrations. A few thousand year round trip under the earth's crust would elminate the risk.

The bigger risks come from transporting the waste to the waste disposal site. Glass beads/bricks that can take the impact of a train wreck may be more important than beads that can take 5000 years of pressure sitting under a mountain.

Let's also not discount the fact that we will have amazing technologies in the next few centuries. If we blow ourselves up instead then the disaster of that outcome will probably sterilize the earth for eons. But if we do last a few more centuries than we will be burning this "waste" as fuel anyhow. It's not that big of a problem.

What's the energy budget for this idea?

[TigerNut]

Say you have one ton of radioactive waste. You need to heat this up, along with four tons of dirt, to 3000 degrees and let things melt into a big happy ball of goo. So how much energy is spent on mining, pre-processing, and finally disposing of that one ton of material, compared to the electrical (and maybe heat) energy extracted from it?

two hundred thousand years....

[tiger99]

Radioactivity does in fact last that long, and a lot more. The point is that with exponential decay, the amount halves every half life, but it never gets to zero. Some isotopes may have very long half-lives, after 20 half lives for example, the activity may have reduced by a factor of about a million, but might still not be negligible. But it should probably be safe to handle for short periods, but probably not ingest or inhale, after that time.

But this idea is not entirely new, in fact it would have first been mentioned in the 1960s if not before. Still, it is a good idea, whose time maybe has come at last.

Re:200,000 years my ass

[Effugas]

You do realize that the longer the half life, the slower it's breaking down, so the less radioactive the object is, right?

Right?

Ah.

--Dan

Re:200,000 years my ass

[joib]

You'd rather I didn't correct it?


I'd rather you not correct it with a half-truth like say, oh, picking an extremely long-lived compound whose contribution to the total radioactivity of the waste is minute at best.


Plutonium also has a very long half life.


24000 years, IIRC. As you admit yourself, after 10x the half-life (=240000 years, in the same ballpark as the 200 000 years claimed) most of the radiactivity from plutonium has disappeared.


I assume you wouldn't eat it for breakfast.


Of course not. I wouldn't want to eat any other heavy metal for breakfast either, they all tend to be quite toxic to biological life.

Re:200,000 years my ass

[Fastolfe]

I think that he's trying to say that if a radioactive isotope has an exceptionally long half-life, that means it will be emitting dangerous radiation at a small percentage of the rate that other isotopes will. Generally speaking, this makes the isotope less of a threat. The same amount of an isotope with a shorter half-life (15k years versus 1.5M years) will expose you to 100 times the radiation over the same period of time. A radioactive isotope with a long enough half-life might even be considered safe

Re:200,000 years my ass

[azaris]

One of the waste products produced by nuclear reactors is Iodine-129. The half-life of I129 is 15.7 million years.

You'll have a greater risk of radiation exposure from going outside on a sunny day than from all the iodine-129 in the world. The point about keeping an eye on iodine-129 is because it's found together with the more dangerous isotopes, iodine-131 and iodine-133, which have half-lifes of 8.02 days and 21 hours respectively, making them very active and dangerous substances:

From http://www.jaeri.go.jp/english/press/2001/011017/ (Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute):

Among the radionuclides emitted during a nuclear accident, the Iodine (131I, 133I) isotopes exhibit strong radioactivity that affects the human body but they are difficult to quantify because they have short half-lives and turn quickly into stable, non-radioactive substances. On the other hand, the iodine-129 that is hardly hazardous at all due to its long half-life period is emitted at a certain ratio with respect to iodine-131 and iodine-133. The measurement of iodine-129 makes it possible to estimate the emission of radioactive substances such as iodine-131

Iodine-129 by itself is hazardous for roughly 0 seconds, 0 minutes and 0 years. So which physics course did you take again?

Re:200,000 years my ass

[KirkH]

...more dangerous isotopes, iodine-131 and iodine-133, which have half-lifes of 8.02 days and 21 hours respectively, making them very active and dangerous substances.

I'm not disagreeing with the statement, but just wanted to point out that iodine-131 saved my wife's life:

http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/dept/thyroid/RAI.html [columbia.edu]

Re:I wonder if this can be used for other applicat

[EvilSS]

The problem is not how hard glass is, but how brittle it is. Normal glass is harder than most metals (steel, for example) but it is very brittle, and chips/breaks easily. Concrete isn't exactly immune to this either, while we are on the subject. So hurray! It's hard enough to survive a journey though the ass of an RIAA lawyer, but will it shatter into a trillion radioactive pieces if some bozo drop's it?

Re:I wonder if this can be used for other applicat

[mwood]

There's glass, and then there's glass. "Normal" doesn't tell us much. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, IL, US has (had, anyway) a room full of glass springs, etc. and a glass block which has had a large iron ball dropped on it many times daily over *years* so people can see the effect on polarized light passing through it as it is stressed.

Well-made glass is not just hard, it is *tough*. Proper formulation and annealing yields a very durable material. Not much at all like that cheap stuff they use to make jars for spaghetti sauce.

Re:I must say...

[Cenuij]

Of the top of my head... There was some discussion and research done a while back to establish what sort of symbolic warning to future generations we could use on the surface above extremely hazardous waste such as long half-life radiactive material. The idea of using a lot of large monolith type needles came up, these were supposed to be truly massive and the idea was to convey 'dont dig here', or something. It seems pretty sensible to at least try and warn future generations about an area such as a geologic waste depository but what if the warning signs get misconstrued? If we ever wipe our selves out, which is more than likely in my opinion, then would the next round of intelligent life understand what we ment? Might not such a legacy raise the same kind of curiosity that we have and lead to some archealogical dig only to get themselves zapped...

Re:I must say...

[KieranElby]

I remember reading a fascinating article on how to warn an unknown future civilisation about high-level nuclear waste. One suggestion included a huge field of spikes.

Quite a tricky problem - the researchers reckoned one of the key tasks was to make it look important but obviously valueless in order to prevent tomb robbers (after all, the Egyptian curses in the pyramids din't work too well).

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it online, though some of the same material is covered in:

"An Architecture of Pe

Re:Just a thought

[just_gecko]

The rocket would melt before getting there. They'd have to send it at night.

Re:Just a thought

[PhuCknuT]

It would take more energy to launch the rocket into the sun than you'd get from the nuclear fuel in the first place. People think that the sun is an easy target because it's "down" in the gravity well, but you have to remember that you're starting with earth's orbital velocity, which you need to cancel out to 'fall' to the sun. That's about 18.5 miles/second.

Re:Just a thought

[julesh]

People think that the sun is an easy target because it's "down" in the gravity well, but you have to remember that you're starting with earth's orbital velocity, which you need to cancel out to 'fall' to the sun. That's about 18.5 miles/second.

Easily achievable. 18.5 miles/sec is roughly 30 km/s. So, you need to cancel that energy? Well, that's 450 megajoules per kilogram you'll need to put in. I believe you get _substantially_ more power than that out of fission reactions.

Re:nice location

[Anonymous Coward]

The server is being very very slow, so here's the article text:

A British company claims to have found the "holy grail" of the nuclear energy industry - a solution to the problem of radioactive waste disposal.

Amec, the London company that cleaned up Ground Zero in New York and rebuilt the Pentagon after the September 11 attacks, says that its latest process will enable nuclear waste to be stored safely for 200,000 years - longer than the radioactivity will last.

The company says that the method could transform the nuclear energy industry and offer a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

The technique, called geomelting, has been tested successfully by the American government, which is building a $53 million (£30 million) pilot plant in Washington state. It intends to use the method on 300,000 gallons of liquid waste from atom bomb tests in the 1940s.

Amec has already held talks with British Nuclear Fuels, the state-owned nuclear energy company that owns the reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria and employs 23,000 people in 16 countries. It plans to send a team to America to look at Amec's site in the next few months.

The Department of Trade and Industry will also study the process. Earlier this month an official said that a huge expansion of the nuclear power industry - including the construction of 45 new reactors - was essential if the Government were to meet its Kyoto target of cutting "greenhouse gases". Many environmentalists, including James Lovelock, have embraced nuclear power because it does not generate greenhouse gases.

The Amec process involves mixing nuclear waste with soil or other "glass-formers" in large, lined metal tanks. The mix - 20 per cent waste and 80 per cent soil - is heated through two graphite electrodes at temperatures of up to 3,000C. Gases, mostly carbon dioxide and traces of hydrocarbons, are drawn off and treated separately. The molten substance is then allowed to cool and forms a large glass block that is harder than concrete.

The process, known as vitrification, was devised by the Battelle research institute in Ohio, which also invented the photocopier and the compact disc.

Amec, which has worldwide interests in gas, oil, mining and forestry - and a turnover of £4.7 billion last year - bought the technology from Battelle. It has an international licence for the process.

British Nuclear Fuels stores much of its waste in concrete, which lasts up to 200 years. This has prompted widespread concern that radioactive material will leak into the water supply and pose a serious threat to public health and the environment. Some nuclear waste at Sellafield is already vitrified by British Nuclear Fuels, using a "continuous melting" method that stores the waste in 6ft containers resembling milk churns. The churns are sealed remotely and stored above ground. Last year 341 containers were filled with vitrified waste.

The vitrification does not, however, last as long as the radioactivity and "a certain amount of repackaging" is necessary, a spokesman said.

Amec said that its method produced a higher quality and longer-lasting glass than British Nuclear Fuel's at three-quarters of the cost.

The new form of vitrified waste is more durable than British Nuclear Fuel's because it contains fewer chemicals. Don Fraser, the global director of Amec's GeoMelt projects, said: "The nuclear industry has an image problem and most of the public concern is over the problem of dealing with radioactive waste. We believe that GeoMelt solves that problem and could transform the energy industry. It is more effective than any other process that has been developed so far."

Mr Fraser said that the glass would last for "geological times" and almost all the radiocative particles in it "would decay to non-radioactive elements or compounds long before the glass corrodes away to nothing". It would, he said

Is it really true this time?

[Futurepower(R)]

The head of the ultrasonics research group at Battelle Institute told me about the plans for "glassification" in 1975.

Is it really true this time?

--
Bush: Borrowing money [brillig.com] to give to the rich.

...USA has not built nuclear plants since 1970s

[reporter]

Please read fascinating information [pushback.com] about how nuclear energy is clean and safe and could drastically reduce our dependency on the oil from the Arabs. Unfortunately, we Americans have not built any nuclear plants since the 1970s.

So, this new way of processing nuclear waste will benefit all other Western nations besides the USA.

The USA is a great nation, and it is built by kind-hearted people with good values even though they have only an average intellect in areas of science. This average intellect is being manipulated by science frauds who claim that nuclear enery is a disaster waiting to happen. Most of Japan's electricity is generate by nuclear power plants.

Re:Nuclear energy is really bad

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The uranium in coal is reabsorbed?

The sulfur in coal is reabsorbed?

As far as that goes, is anything at all reabsorbed with oil/coal/gas burning? Even the carbon dioxide may take many, many thousands of years to reach a level that it was at before we started burning things.

Re:Nuclear energy is really bad

[AGMW]

The solution, of course, is fusion power with its essentially waste-free power production. However the stopgap to fusion should not be fission.

Fusion will indeed be the solution, but how long have we got before we can use it, always assuming that we actually get it working in the first place!

If we run out of power before we get fusion working how are we going to get the simply huge amounts of power we need to continue to experiment?

We need something that can (reliably) take over from fossil fuels, and

Re:Wrong Numbers!

[julesh]

Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years

Do you know how much of that stuff you'd need before you would even notice the difference from background levels? Remember that the longer the half life, the more atoms you need to produce the same amount of radioactivity. Doubling the half life halves the amount of danger posed by the radiation emitted. Its as simple as that.

Re:Wrong Numbers!

[joib]

Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years (our soloar system is not yet 5 billion years old). Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 Billion (10^9) years, Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 25.000 years. Half-life means that after some billion years, you still have half of your nuclear waste happily emitting radioactivity, while the other half has decayed to other, possibly also radioactive elements.


Correct. OTOH, the longer the half-life the less intense will the radiation be, as there are of co

Lesson learned?

[RKloti]

I think it is you that knows nothing about radioactivity:

Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years (our soloar system is not yet 5 billion years old). Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 Billion (10^9) years, Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 25.000 years. Half-life means that after some billion years, you still have half of your nuclear waste happily emitting radioactivity, while the other half has decayed to other, possibly also radioactive elements. After 7 times the half-life (7*47*10^9 years = 329*10^9 years), you still have round about 1 % of the original radioactive waste (2^-7 = 1/128 ~ 1%) and a lot of other radioactive products.

The faster a substance decays, the more energy it emits. Conversely, substances which only decay very slowly emit very little radiation. Thus U-238, with it half-life of 4.5 billion years is far less radioactive than, say, Carbon-14 with its half-life of approximately 5,730 years. There are, of course, different types of decay, and heavier atoms tend to decay producing alpha particles and gamma rays rather than the beta particles that are common in lighter elements. Even so, elements with half-lives measured in millions of years do not typically emit enough radiation to be a threat to humans or to nature. The intensively radioactive products tend to get rid of themselves, so it is the medium intensity materials, such as the infamous Sr-90, with half-lives measured in months to millenia, that are particularly dangerous. It is also worth noting that alpha, beta and gamma rays can not make materials radioactive - it is neutrons that do that - and that alpha particles, which are the least penetrative of the three primary radiative products of nuclear decay, are also the most strongly ionising, while gamma rays, the most penetrating, are the least ionising, given the fact that they consist of mere EM radiation rather than charged particles like alpha and beta rays.

Humans are exposed to ionising radiation every day, and have been during the entirety of history. For this reason we have a variety of genetic repair mechanisms [wikipedia.org]. The mere presence of ionising radiation is not a matter of concern; under normal circumstances the most significant sources of such radiation are natural. It is only when the level of radioactivity overwhelms the body's natural defenses that radioactivity becomes a threat to human health.

Re:Wrong Numbers!

[mpe]

Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years (our soloar system is not yet 5 billion years old). Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 Billion (10^9) years,

Which is why you find these isotopes naturally...Very long lived isotopes are not really a problem, life has been dealing with them since it first appeared.

Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 25.000 years.

This is why you don't find Pu239 naturally, though you do find it's daughter (U235) naturally.

It is practically impossible to guarantee a s