Better Nuclear Waste Storage Plans than Yucca Mountain 466
NuclearRampage writes "Technology Review has an in-depth article about A New Vision for Nuclear Waste based on the premise that 'storing nuclear waste underground at Yucca Mountain for 100,000 years is a terrible idea.' The article looks at the current DOE plans for Yucca, its shortcomings and what temporary solutions we have to use while a better permanent plan is formulated."
Everyone is so negative (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't it possible that within a few hundred years there will be a method found to actually use these stored materials for further energy extraction? Not impossible. So let it lay there for a while.
So much energy (Score:5, Interesting)
WWFD? (Score:3, Interesting)
what about... (Score:4, Interesting)
Refine It (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, if this waste is so awful, why don't we try to create as little waste as possible by using everything we reasonably can? You'd think people would be clammoring to cut down the number of times waste (and live fuel) needs to be shipped, and cut down the quantities that need to be stored away for extended periods of time. Though it isn't like there's that much volume of waste. If I remember correctly, one of WI's biggest, Point Beach, produces something like a quarter of a phone booth's worth of waste in volume per year and provides a heck of a lot of power.
TO THE MOON ALICE! TO THE MOON! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Easiest solution (Score:2, Interesting)
1) It's really expensive to lift chunks of metal into space, and
2) The pollution associated with burning untold seas of rocket fuel is perhaps worse than the dangers of leaving the stuff where it is.
Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away (Score:5, Interesting)
Because orbital mechanics mean that it's harder to send stuff into the sun than it is to send it into interstellar space. Plus, the heavy-lift rockets you'd need to get it into orbit (let alone to cancel Earth's orbital velocity) are not designed to be reliable, which means they blow up now and again. Uh... no.
(Yes, you can build boxes designed to remain intact while rockets blow up around them; they're used for RTGs. There was an RTG that was in an exploding rocket. Once they found it, it got dusted off and used again for another satellite. I believe it's still out there somewhere... But they're bloody expensive and very heavy, and there's an awful lot of stuff to get rid of.)
Better, cheaper, simpler solutions:
Basically, radioactive waste is not a problem. It's just the politics around the waste that's the problem. Yucca Mountain is a really, really bad solution and everybody knew that from the start, but the project has now entered that strange, necromantic state where it'll suck up money until someone finally cuts its heart out and it will never, ever achieve anything worthwhile. Except lining someone's pockets.
Go for Heavy Metal (Score:3, Interesting)
Yucca is not PERFECT (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Everyone is so negative (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Never mind about 100,000 years time! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the neat things about extremely deep burial is how the properties of rock change. At extreme depths, rock starts to become soft; consequently, the heavy elements found in fuel rods would likely migrate downward. Of course, you don't need such deep burial; just deep enough that there is no realistic way erosion or any other factor could release the radioactive waste.
One of the problems, of course, will be radioactive gasses that form, such as iodine, from percolating to the surface if the fuel rods break down. I would suppose that with proper selection of burial sites you could make sure that there were appropriate "cap rock" layers above it, and then choose an appropriate sealing material for the hole itself. It'd take some research. Perhaps you could make the first level of material used to close the hole be highly reactive with iodine. Another option would be to reprocess all spent fuel rods (which some countries do anyways), and in the process separate all radioiodine and get it securely chemically bonded up before burial (say, sodium iodide). That might pose an economic problem, however.
I once read about an interesting proposal concerning deep waste disposal. The idea was that enough heat would be generated down there that you could use it for extra power if you used a thermally conductive cap and had insulated water pipes run down to the cap. Sort of an "artificial geothermal energy" situation.
Re:reprocessing and geologic storage (Score:1, Interesting)
Fun facts:
Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, nothing has lasted for 10,000 years, certainly no civilization has lasted 10,000 years.
Part of the problem is that if the waste is accessible using today's technology, then, in the event of social collapse, or extreme corruption, it is accessible using today's technology.
If you argue that in a couple hundred years, a better solution for disposing of waste is devised... one might also argue that a better solution for recovering and re-storing any problems in Yucca mountain can also be devised.
But if there is complete social collapse, future generations may not have the ability to store the waste....
So what do we do? Assume that we can effectively protect and store the waste for a couple hundred years, or assume that we can't and stuff it in a mountain?
Is it possible to stuff it in a mountain in a recoverable fashion, and seal it in the event of funding cuts which would prohibit its continued monitoring?
Seems obvious but (Score:1, Interesting)
It's:
* central
* big
* paid for
* already has big gaping holes in it to put said casks
* nobody will notice as it's already planned
* you can leave it there for 100 years just fine
I mean really combine the two ideas! Or send the stuff to iraq
Re:Common sense still eludes us (Score:2, Interesting)
The nuclear power industry is just another bunch of subsidy whores, sucking money out of the government and at the same time begging for impunity for the damage they cause to the environment and to their workforce.
Since the cat's already out of the bag, we'll need long-term storage. But to prevent the problem from getting worse, this should be coupled with an initiative to shut the nuclear industry (including weapons production) down completely, starting in the US and eventually worldwide. The problem is not regulation: it's nuclear power itself.
Oh, and those of you who thing that space disposal makes sense: look at the enormous volumes of low-level waste that are produced, and the cost per kilo of payload based on even the most optimistic scenarios. You get some ridiculously large numbers.
My Solution: Use waste for power generation... (Score:3, Interesting)
BTM
Man-made Barriers vs. Natural Barriers (Score:1, Interesting)
Sen. Reid (and the rest of the NV Congressionals) aside, there is nothing legally that can really be done about the opening. It will open. When? Not likely in 2010. But, it will open.
That being said the DOE has also reiterated a NAS position that a "deep geologic" repository is needed. Fact is DOE already has one. It's called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) [www.wipp.ws]. While it is only holding TRansUranic (TRU) wastes, I see no reason it couldn't handle Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF), as well. (In fact, some of the TRU waste has radioactivity levels as high as SNF.)
Alas, the DOE has spent so much money and spent so much time with Yucca, that it is what they have to use. On the bright side, it will be interesting to see if engineered barriers can really work. (At least I'll be dead long before they can make this determination.)
Re:Refine It (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, it doesn't matter here in Canada, as we use Candu reactors. No refining necessary so you don't have to worry about refinery accidents (like that mess in Japan) but they use deuterium as a medium and generate plutonium as waste.
Re:Everyone is so negative (Score:2, Interesting)
For more info click here [wikipedia.org].
Stick it there it doesn't matter????? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So much energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Excerpt:
Pros:
- Subcritical, cannot meltdown
- Uses Thorium fuel (abundant, easier to process than Uranium)
- 500 year halflife (instead of 10,000+)
- Can break down existing nuclear waste
- Does not produce by-products usable for weapons
Cons:
- Requires a cyclotron to be built ($$$)
Why we don't invest in something like this seems quite irrational, although typical.
Re:My Solution: Use waste for power generation... (Score:1, Interesting)
Abandoned uranium mines? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps /. readers could explain the problems with this plan.
Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away (Score:1, Interesting)
2. Tiny cheap solar ion booster
3. Planet-fall into the sun
Much cheaper and safer than Yucca Mountain.
But that's not the goal...
JSMS III
P.S.
I attended a seminar on the Clock of the Long Now at Stanford some years ago. For whatever reason there were a bunch of DOE and Military types in attendance and there followed some discussion of Yucca Mountain. There was talk of marking the area with large berms or pyramids.
I immediately thought, hmm, I wonder what's buried under the Great Pyramid?
p.p.s
Bruce Sterling was also in attendance. Strange gathering...
Re:Refine It (Score:2, Interesting)
The cost of reprocessing irradiated plant materials is considerably higher than simply making them from new materials. Add to that, the fact that everyone that works with former plant materials will require special radiation training... and a bigger paycheck (both to account for their training/knowledge and their radiation exposure).
Also the preprocessing plant would generate huge volumes of waste on its own. Steels are relatively dense and stable wastes. Reprocessing would generate a lot of liquid waste. Also, with many of the reactor wastes, the main danger is radioactivity... the reprocessing wastes would present heavy metal and a variety of interesting chemical wastes. Have you ever tried to dispose of radioactive, heavy metal, hazardous chemical, liquid waste?
On top of all that relatively high level waste is the medium and low level stuff... tools, anti-contamination clothing, analytical equipment, etc. Reprocessing most emphatically does not reduce the amount of waste.
Waste and burning libraries of congress. (Score:5, Interesting)
How much energy in burning Libraries of Congress could a phone booth of nuclear waste produce?
If we assume that only the books are burning, and that they weigh a couple of pounds each (say 1 kg), and that they give off the same energy from combustion that an equivalent weight of carbon would (very rough approximation), we can estimate the BLoC energy unit as about:
115M books * 1 kg/book * 390 kJ/mol CO2 / 0.012 mol C/kg
Let's assume the phone booth contains about 2 cubic metres of nuclear waste. Let's assume that it has a density of about 10 g/cm^3, as it's oxides, and that virtually all of this represents the weight of the heavy nuclei. We'll take a value of 10 MeV as the total decay energy of each heavy metal nucleus as it traverses the decay chain down to lead (or some other stable isotope, if it starts off lighter than lead, though most of the fuel rod will still be U238). We'll assume an atomic weight of 250 AMU for each nucleus, to make the math easier. As 1 AMU is approximately equivalent to 1 GeV (i.e. mass of a proton or neutron), we have a rest energy of each nucleus of 250 GeV, meaning 1/25000 of its rest mass is converted to released energy.
The phone booth contains 2 m^3 * 10000 kg/m^3 = 20000 kg of material. This has a rest energy of about 1.8e+21 J, meaning we get about 70 petajoules out if we wait long enough for all of its constituent elements to decay.
So, a phone booth full of nuclear waste could produce about 18 BLoCs worth of energy.
In practice, you'll only get around 1% of this out in any reasonable timeframe (short-lived isotopes, vs. the U238 that you'll have to wait a few billion years for unless you stick it back in a reactor).
Expense of reprocessing (Score:3, Interesting)
While the time waiting for it to cool off is a legitimate argument, the cost relative to mining uranium ore is not. Why? Because the costs for short-term and long-term storage have not been applied.
If you reduce the volume of waste by half, you have already saved a huge amount of money in the long run. Cooling pools are expensive. Spent fuel caskets are expensive. Homeland security measures for all the spent fuel is expensive. Yucca Mountain is ridiculously expensive. Reprocessing so that the fuel can be used again is cheap by comparison.
Fast neutron burner reactors. We've already got the waste, and burner reactors reduce the volume of waste while simultaneously producing large amounts of power thus reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Why is this even an issue anymore?
Because we're waiting for close to 100,000 square miles of solar cells or millions of new windmills to be built? Please!
Drop it (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, if we are leaving a problem for generations to come, isn't it better to leave the problem in the desert under ground that may (according to some people, at some time thousands of years in the future) need attention, rather than in casks above ground that will NEED attention for SURE? Future generations are just as likely to solve the Yucca problem as invent a miracle disposal system.
And one more thing. Even if the costs of fixing Yucca 1000's of years into the future are very large, the PDV* of the cost will be practically nothing.
*PDV = Present Day Value, an economic calculation to evaluate a future cost as a present cost.
Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, blowing things off till your children have to pay for your misjudgements is a bad idea. A not unusual idea, but bad, nonetheless.
An alternative disposal method (Score:1, Interesting)
The answer is that nuclear detonation doesn't create the huge quantity of heavy, long-lived daughter radionucleides that are created in the "slow, low-temperature stew" of nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors, by their design, won't allow any high-temp combustion because the spent-fuel would be a radioactive slurry making it much harder (if not impossible) to handle and dispose. Obviously, nuclear plants can't be designed to operate by way of nuclear detonation but such detonations do provide a solution to the spent fuel problem.
I propose this solution for the nuclear waste issue: As suggested in the article, reprocess the fuel rods to retrieve the valuable components of the rods (or not, as the economics and politics dictate). Dig a deep hole in the Nevada nuclear test site. Lower the unsalvagable waste to the bottom and line the cavity. Add hazardous biological and chemical waste for good measure. Lower an outdated nuclear weapon or the newest model fresh off the showroom floor or, perhaps, even design a device particularly suited to the task. Have a dramatic countdown. Detonate.
The overpressures and heat will reduce the high-level waste to much lower-level radionucleides. The bio and chemical waste will be an elemental vapor. Your long-term storage problems are solved. Terrorists are a non-issue because the area is virtually unreachable. The issue of ground water contamination is solved because the heat fuses the silicates in the cavity creating a glass enclosure.
Since one of the issues of the Yucca Mountain debate is that they'll be taking a radioactively pristine area and fouling it with some very nasty stuff, those contamination issues are minimized at the Nevada test site because it is already "crapped up". It's unlikely you're going to do much more radiological harm than already exists. Politically, I see a much more agreeable path for this disposal method.
Economically, this disposal method would require only a few of these detonations to eliminate all of America's waste. Ever the entrepreneur, I say go commercial and charge foreign nuclear nations a hefty fee to take care of their nuclear waste in this manner.
Quite frankly, I'm at a loss as to why this idea has never been proposed. But, then, this solution doesn't provide a multi-billion dollar boondoggle for the politicians campaign "donors".
Comments?
Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away (Score:3, Interesting)
Gravity will pull it closer to the sun, but it will not pull it into the sun. If you drop your speed relative to the sun, all you will get is a closer orbit around the sun. Witness the wacky path we took with Mariner 10 [nasa.gov] and the even longer and even crazier path we're using for MESSENGER [jhuapl.edu]. And that's just to get to Mercury.
The grandparent is right. You basically need a velocity of about 31.8 km/sec [Gurzadyan 1996, Theory of Interplanetary Flights, pp. 58-60] to actually get to the sun from Earth, unless you use a gravity assist from other solar bodies.
Orbits just don't "decay" in the sense that radioactive materials decay. Some are stable, some are instable, and some are affected by interactions with atmospheres or collisions with other particles. All are affected (however slightly) by the gravitation of everything else. This makes long term precise orbital calculations in the real world very difficult. Bank shotting radioactive material around the solar system sounds pretty dangerous to me. Even if we had rocket motors that could get us to Sol directly, there's a chance you could miss and put the stuff on a highly elliptical orbit with aphelion near the Earth's orbit. We could shoot ourselves nicely with that.
Re:Can I have some of what you're smoking? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do this per household. You will be enlightened.
The numbers I hear are along the lines of 10 kWh/day per household. Solar panels have about a 10% duty cycle, due to sunlight and weather. Let's take 10% as a ballpark efficiency value (by the time it became economical to roll this out, the technology would have improved, but this is a reasonable minimum). That means you need 10kWh / (0.01 * 24h * about 1 kW/m^2) = about 40 square metres of solar cells, per household.
Around here, in a medium-sized city, a typical lot that's not downtown is 20 m^2. This makes the panel area most definitely comparable to the area being lived on. Multiply this by 400M people, and sure, you'll get a scarily-large number, but remember - you're already building over a comparable area for roads, sidewalks, houses, and so forth, so the scariness is a red herring.
Let's give it an amortized lifetime of 10 years (some of it lasts longer, but it needs to be replaced, time value of money, and so on). You need to pay for 4 square metres per year. An equivalent power bill for that time period is $180 (at 5 cents per kWh; quite cheap, but we get that up here). That means you have about $40/m^2 for your panel costs for it to be _better_ to put in panels than to pay for power off the grid.
Can we expect thin-film cells that are 10% efficient be produced for $40 per square metre within the next couple of decades? You're darned right we can.
In summary, the numbers work out just fine. Re-check them yourself if you like.
[Your power consumption numbers are about 10x higher than the figures I've heard quoted. This likely includes industrial power use and equivalent figures for things like vehicles. That pushes the price per unit area for breakeven to $4 per square metre, though your longer maintenance interval pushes it back to $12 per square metre - assuming that home-owners are the ones footing the bill for industry, which is questionable. Main impact of accepting the higher power fictures is space, which is still far smaller than the farmland already allocated to human use, and can furthermore be in areas we don't currently care about, as opposed to nice, arable land.]
Re:Nuclear Energy Belongs in the Technology Museum (Score:1, Interesting)
Huge amounts of water, yes; huge amounts of drinking-quality water, no. We're talking about running heat exchangers. It just so happens that a large natural body of water is a pretty good heatsink, so drawing cold water from a lake and dumping warm water back into it works well. It's also notable that this doesn't actually use any water. Even water turned to steam isn't used up, as every third grade student knows.
Is there anything to suggest that the risks are, in fact, insurmountable? A nuclear reactor is just a big process control design problem: it's not very different from a large chemical plant. In and around every major city are chemical plants with tanks of high pressure sulfur dioxide, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, sulfuric acid, benzene, and a million other deadly chemicals. Accidents are rare, and when they happen (Bhopal anyone?), they can be a LOT worse than the worst conceivable nuclear disaster. Yet, for some reason, we still make plastics and refine oil.
Maybe they're denounced as uneconomical because, well, they are. I would love to see it proven otherwise... the renewable energy industry needs to put up or shut up. Start making large amounts of power and selling it at a profit.
Yes, this is part of the strategy - except it's not trivialization, but rather a refusal to continue blowing it out of proportion. We can debate the death toll all we want. Both the nuclear and chemical industries have had their disasters, but no one is suggesting we live without plastics. For the record: Bhopal: 2000 people dead immediately, 6000 dead later, estimates of 150 thousand injured. But really, the thing that makes Chernobyl practically irrelevant today is that it was the result of braindead operating procedures at plant in a crumbling soviet system, run by unqualified personnel, with important operating characteristics kept as military secrets, based on a fundamentally flawed design. It's ridiculous to compare modern nuclear energy to that.
True. It's also notable that the author called $22B on renewable power research "practically nothing." I'd say that's actually a lot of money for power sources that have yet to contribute anything meaningful to the nation's electrical output. That said, there have been legitimate reasons to question whether nuclear power could survive without government subsidies. No one these days is saying that nuclear power is the cheapest option... if we want least-cost, we continue burning coal. Renewable energy can't survive without subsidies either. I'm not an economist, and this is a complex topic about which much more could be said.
I'm getting somewhat tired of seeing this statement thrown around. For the last bloody time, the mining industry quotes reserves based on known minable tonnages. If demand for U goes up, companies start exploring for it. Uranium prices go up, allowing previously uneconomic deposits to become reserves. The price of nuclear fuel is almost trivial compared to the