Current Model For Storing Nuclear Waste May Not Be Sufficiently Safe, Study Says (go.com) 208
pgmrdlm quotes a report from ABC News: The current model the U.S. and other countries plan to use to store high-level nuclear waste may not be as safe as previously thought. The materials used to store the waste "will likely degrade faster than anyone previously knew" because of the way the materials interact, according to research published Tuesday in the journal Nature Materials. The research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, focused primarily on defense waste, the legacy of past nuclear arms production, which is highly radioactive, according to a press release from Ohio State University. Some of waste has a half-life -- the time needed for half the material to decay -- of about 30 years. But others, such as plutonium, have a half-life that can be in the tens of thousands of years, according to the release.
The plan the U.S. has for the waste is to immobilize long-lived radionuclides -- mixed with other materials to form glass or ceramic forms of the waste -- in steel canisters and then dispose of them by burying them in a repository deep underground, according to the study. Countries around the globe largely store and dispose of the nuclear waste in a similar fashion. However, scientists found that under simulated conditions, corrosion of the containers could be "significantly accelerated," which had not been considered in current safety and performance assessment models. The newly formed glass or ceramic compounds, confined in the steel containers, have been observed corroding those containers at surprising rates due to new chemical reactions. The reactions significantly altered both the waste and the metallic canisters, according to the research. The researchers warned that the interaction between the materials, which then impact the service life of the nuclear waste, should be "carefully considered" when evaluating the performance of the waste forms. A more compatible barrier should be selected to optimize the performance of the repository system.
The plan the U.S. has for the waste is to immobilize long-lived radionuclides -- mixed with other materials to form glass or ceramic forms of the waste -- in steel canisters and then dispose of them by burying them in a repository deep underground, according to the study. Countries around the globe largely store and dispose of the nuclear waste in a similar fashion. However, scientists found that under simulated conditions, corrosion of the containers could be "significantly accelerated," which had not been considered in current safety and performance assessment models. The newly formed glass or ceramic compounds, confined in the steel containers, have been observed corroding those containers at surprising rates due to new chemical reactions. The reactions significantly altered both the waste and the metallic canisters, according to the research. The researchers warned that the interaction between the materials, which then impact the service life of the nuclear waste, should be "carefully considered" when evaluating the performance of the waste forms. A more compatible barrier should be selected to optimize the performance of the repository system.
maybe (Score:2)
Re:maybe (Score:5, Informative)
but the glass/ceramic shell inside the container should still be intact yes???
That's not how this works. Nuclear waste is processed into a solid piece of glass, it's not a glass shell containing the waste itself. The idea is to dissolve the waste in molten glass and then let it solidify; the intention was/is that the waste is rendered chemically inert and so much, much easier to store for long periods. The process is called vitrification, if you want to look it up.
This research has found that if salt water is present between the glass pieces and the steel liner of the container in which they are held, then some of the waste ends up in the water. The worry is that this water could potentially end up in the water table underground and pose a risk to health
The obvious solution would be to coat vitrified waste in a layer of plain glass, but the problem with obvious ideas is that if they're good ones someone much smarter than oneself has already thought of them.
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The obvious solution....
..is to get rid of the steel lining of the shell entirely? I mean, why do we need a shell at all? Pour the molten glass + radioactive waste into moulds that include carry handles for whatever is used to move these things around. Make them on a square base, not round - so they don't roll, and so you can use spacers to maintain an equal distance between them when packed together (like when laying floor tiles), getting a higher density of waste material per square meter of floor space.
I mean, I don't know any
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
...how about just dump all of it into a 1 km deep hole?
anyway most of it is just stored outside globally speaking. you kinda want the container for that stage and just for moving the stuff.
short term it all works. it's just that academics like to argue about how to store it for thousands of years. if you want to see it taken to the extreme see Into Eternity, a documentary about finlands solution onkalo("cavity"/"hole").
making a structure to store something for 100 000 years gets really academic really fast
Re:maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
...how about just dump all of it into a 1 km deep hole?
Thus creating a 1 km deep radioactive geyser.
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[The obvious solution....] is to get rid of the steel lining of the shell entirely? I mean, why do we need a shell at all? steel lining of the shell entirely? I mean, why do we need a shell at all?
Because the radioactive atoms are right up to the surface of the glass core. Also because, as they transmute, they become different chemicals, often still very radioactive, and pretty necessarily very reactive, because they're no longer the element that had been bonded into a reasonably stable molecule. Put wate
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It's not necessarily unfeasible. The current system was simply thought to be good enough so they had no perceived need to try and come up with a more complex process that adds an extra glass layer... That glass would probably be best added to the interior of the steel cans rather than the lump of vitrified waste itself - it'll be a bit more expensive than unlined barrels but straightforward to make.
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Except when it's not. There have been too many cases of hazardous waste mishandled, mislabeled, and discarded by abusive companies. Small amounts are very likely to be mishandled, dliveries misslabeled and lost and generally lead to this kind of industrial waste:
* https://losangeles.cbslocal.co... [cbslocal.com]
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The process is called vitrification,
There were some studies (I can no longer find links for) about capturing spent fuel into uranium crystals to make them impermeable to water, which is the goal of vitrification.
All of which brings us back to the DOE's original specification of "Defense in Depth" for the creation of a waste repository which specified a repository made from crystalline rock structures like granite and bentonite clay to handle the cracks in the rock. Granite seems to have the capacity to form these uranium crystals which de
Re: maybe (Score:2)
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You can't dip solid (cool) glass into molten glass -- the cool glass will shatter.
True, but one can dip solid (hot) glass into molten glass.
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Sounds difficult. You can't dip solid (cool) glass into molten glass -- the cool glass will shatter.
Maybe a better idea would be to coat the vitrified glass in some plastic.
Recycled McDonalds straws should do it. They last for millions of years.
Containment is physically impossible. (Score:5, Interesting)
All of this does not work. Plastic just decomposes with time and radiation.
Glass cannot hold nuke waste for long.
Nuke waste itself is unstable : it transmutes(decays) into other elements(nearly all elements of the mendeleiev table will be present after some time)
So in fact you have to hold together a random mix of various isotopes of nearly all of those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Notice 1: some of them are liquids, that will dissolve your glass, and migrate out the edge
Notice 2: some of them are gasses, that will increase pressure your containment until rupture or leaks occurs somewhere
Notice 3: some of them will aggregate into molecules like for example the funny HF, that decomposes glass, or H2O and NaCl, or any other molecule
Notice 4: This "changing soup of every possible chemical" is very highly radioactive, ionizing and weakening your structure
Notice 5: Containment time is 10 million years.
Notice 6: There are strange creatures around with 2 arms and 2 legs doing really stupid stuff, at least for the next 50 years.
In short : there is no physical material capable of solving all of this.
Containment is physically impossible. Point.
Re:Containment is physically impossible. (Score:5, Insightful)
https://cs.corp.google.com/android/external/qemu/android/third_party/libkeymaster3/trusty_keymaster_context.cpp?q=trustykeymastercontext&sq=package:%5Eandroid$&dr=CSs
Of course it's unstable... that's what makes it radioactive! But it's not correct that "nearly all elements of the Mendeleyev table will be present after some time". The decay paths are narrow and well-understood. For any given waste, it's easy to predict exactly how much of what elements will be there, and when.
Notice 1: some of them are liquids, that will dissolve your glass, and migrate out the edge
For example? I don't know of any likely decay products that are liquids. I'm not an expert, but I have done some reading about this topic and I've never heard of this concern. It's not the point at issue in the referenced article, either.
Notice 2: some of them are gasses, that will increase pressure your containment until rupture or leaks occurs somewhere
See previous.
Notice 3: some of them will aggregate into molecules like for example the funny HF, that decomposes glass, or H2O and NaCl, or any other molecule
None of the elements in the compounds you cite are likely decay products, which means that none of those molecules would form.
Notice 4: This "changing soup of every possible chemical" is very highly radioactive, ionizing and weakening your structure
Virtually every part of this statement is wrong.
Notice 5: Containment time is 10 million years.
Anything that is radioactive for such a very long time is only weakly radioactive and doesn't need this sort of containment. 10K years is about the most that could be required... and the really dangerous stuff is only radioactive for decades. High levels of radioactivity mean short half-lives. Long half-lives mean low levels of radioactivity.
Notice 6: There are strange creatures around with 2 arms and 2 legs doing really stupid stuff, at least for the next 50 years.
Can't argue with that, though they mostly won't last very long if they're mucking about with highly-radioactive waste.
In short : there is no physical material capable of solving all of this.
Nonsense.
Why lock it away forever? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It is much more expensive than generating the same amount of energy in a different way because this stuff need to be contained carefully and the radiation keeps chipping away at the containment.
Re:Why lock it away forever? (Score:4, Informative)
We already know how to extract work from low grade* heat. We don't do this with nuclear waste because it's uneconomical to do so. Waste heat is commonly used, but nearly always in cases where most energy is coming from something else, such as using the exhaust from a coal burner to preheat the incoming water. When using heat from radioactive decay, that's all there is to work with.
The maximum efficiency we could expect from using heat from decaying nuclear waste is on the order of 20%. In real life we would be lucky to achieve a quarter of that.
The best thing to do with spent nuclear fuel is to reprocess it, but I understand that doesn't happen in the US. Failing that, there's no point in trying to use it; just put it in the ground where it's not going to hurt anyone and mine more fresh fuel. By the time it's run out the world will either have gone full solar, finally managed to get fusion to work, or the species will have wiped itself out.
I've read that the waste ranges from 100 to 200 degrees C. I'd say that counts.
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100 to 200 degrees Celsius ? ... but free afterwards :) )
Make RTGs out of it ! Even if that RTG produces only 100W of power - it's free power 27/4, for a long time.
( very expensive initial cost power
Re:Why lock it away forever? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reprocessing is hazardous and thus expensive. They reprocess some waste in France and it substantially increases the cost of nuclear power there, it doesn't make it cheaper. So actually, the best thing to do with nuclear waste is not to produce it. Strange game, the best move is not to play.
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Reprocessing is hazardous and thus expensive. They reprocess some waste in France and it substantially increases the cost of nuclear power there, it doesn't make it cheaper. So actually, the best thing to do with nuclear waste is not to produce it. Strange game, the best move is not to play.
War Games
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Glad you caught the reference before the butt hurt nuclear playboys modded me down. That makes it all worth it :)
Re:Why lock it away forever? (Score:4, Interesting)
Reprocessing is hazardous and thus expensive.
Reprocessing as it is done now is hazardous and expensive. Much of the problem is the form the spent fuel is in. This fuel is most often in delicate zirconium tubes, bundled together into large and heavy fuel elements, which contain radioactive gasses and broken up ceramic pellets.
This changes with fourth generation reactors, which use fuel in the form of a salt or metal, and often include a means to separate out the fission product gasses as they are produced. The spent fuel will then be in the form of a powder that can be poured into containers of a convenient size and shape, or cast into ingots as it is removed from the core.
What is likely to happen along with the development of fourth generation nuclear reactors is the use of "pyroprocessing" of spent fuel bundles. One such process starts with burning the fuel bundles in a chamber filled with fluorine gas. From this burning is produced many gasses that can be separated much like is done with current techniques for refining and enriching uranium. Noble metals remain as ash. The gasses, once separated chemically from each other, can then be processed into fuel for molten salt reactors, reduced to metallic form for later use in medicine or industry, and so on. This is a process that is very similar to what is used to produce the fuel for molten salt reactors, and the process used in the continuous reprocessing that is proposed for some interpretations of the molten salt reactor.
This will no doubt be an expensive process but the ability to turn what was once considered waste into a number of valuable materials will certainly be worth the effort, and may in fact prove to produce profit instead of being a cost.
So actually, the best thing to do with nuclear waste is not to produce it. Strange game, the best move is not to play.
That is proving to be not an option. We have become too dependent on nuclear fission power to not use it in the future. Without nuclear power it is likely we would not have sent humans into space. Without nuclear power we will not be able to send humans into space in the future. There is no wind in space. There is no coal, and even if there were there is no air to burn it. Beyond the orbit of Mars solar power is useless, and even on Mars it has proven problematic. We will have to solve these problems to go into space and once solved then nuclear power is as viable on Earth as it is anywhere else in the solar system.
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They reprocess to get the Plutonium for their subs and missiles out.
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The best thing to do with spent nuclear fuel is to reprocess it ... I forgot.
Then you have 1000 times more waste. Or is it 10,000 times
Re:Why lock it away forever? (Score:5, Informative)
> for the time when we know how to usefully extract that energy
We had the technology ready to commercialize in the early 90's. Al Gore as VP led the charge to first defund and then kill the project - assisted by then Senator John Kerry (supposedly hot-fusion lobbying) and Hazel O'Leary.
There were *many* groups that benefited from not having abundant clean energy as a side-effect of cleaning up the nuclear waste problem.
The goal in the late 80's was to have about 8-900 of these things online by, oh, this year, radically decentralizing the power grid and massively reducing the need for fossil fuels and the wars to support them. Oop.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages... [pbs.org]
It's only since 2017 that DoE has started actually supporting this research again.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
radically decentralizing the power grid and massively reducing the need for fossil fuels and the wars to support them.
Worth mentioning we fight wars for oil, which is generally not used in power plants, it's used in cars. Getting nuclear does nothing to get us off oil, unless we also get electric cars.
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Worth mentioning we fight wars for oil, which is generally not used in power plants, it's used in cars. Getting nuclear does nothing to get us off oil, unless we also get electric cars.
Not true. We know how to produce hydrocarbon fuels from nuclear power. The US Navy proved this is possible with their experiments from a decade or so ago. This process is merely a variation on a theme from a much older process, a process used by Nazi Germany to produce liquid fuels from coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Right now we see investments to bring this process to the commercial market.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
The process can run on only electricity for the energy it needs to turn th
Already been solved (Score:4, Interesting)
The U.S. has a long-term nuclear waste storage because in the 1970s, we decided to ban reprocessing of spent fuel from commercial reactors. Why? Because one of the byproducts of reprocessing is weapons-grade plutonium. So we banned it in the interest of non-proliferation. Nobody can steal/sell weapons-grade plutonium from a reprocessing plant if you don't create it in the first place. In other words, the nuclear waste problem isn't a technical problem. It's a political problem.
If you think about it, as more and more countries get to the point where they can create nuclear weapons, the political problem that weapons-grade plutonium represents gradually disappears. No terrorist group is going to go to the trouble of trying to steal the plutonium from a reprocessing reactor, if North Korea will sell them a complete nuclear bomb for a lot less money. When we reach that point, all this spent fuel that we've been burying so we can feel better about not contributing to nuclear weapons proliferation, suddenly becomes a huge untapped reservoir of energy.
So realistically, the longest we'd have to store spent fuel is only as long as it takes for shady countries (those willing to sell nuclear weapons to terrorists) to acquire nuclear weapons. By my estimate, that's on the order of 100 years. Once we pass that point, we will be tripping over ourselves to dig up this "waste" so we can use it as new fuel - both because it's nearly free energy, and because doing so solves the long-term storage problem. So realistically, there's really little need to store this "waste" for more than a century or two.
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Problem is that every breeder reactor ever built so far has been some kind of disaster. Either it broke or it ended up costing vastly more than is economically viable, or usually both.
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There's no point trying to respond to ignorant posts like this. Reprocessing doesn't involve breeder reactors at all. It's a chemical process using redox reactions to separate useful uranium and plutonium from fission products and decay products. It requires the spent nuclear fuel to be in aqueous form, so the fuel rods have to be dissolved in nitric acid, and then very nasty solvents have to be used throughout the process. In addition to the useful uranium and plutonium, it yields high-level nuclear wa
Re:Already been solved (Score:4, Informative)
Reprocessing isn't running fuel through a breeder reactor. Reprocessing uses chemical processes (e.g. PUREX [wikipedia.org]) to separate useful uranium and plutonium from fission products. It involves nitric acid and nasty solvents.
mine it (Score:4, Insightful)
Hanford (Score:3)
I think Hanford has already proved them right...
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Yeah, my first though was, "Golly, they could have just asked Washington State."
I have always wondered (Score:2)
why they didn't just dump the spent fuel into an ocean trench that was being subducted under another plate.
Or alternatively why not just reprocess the fuel?
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why they didn't just dump the spent fuel into an ocean trench that was being subducted under another plate.
Because a radioactive cask leaking in the ocean is a bigger problem than a cask leaking in a deep hole under the desert.
Or alternatively why not just reprocess the fuel?
Because reprocessing is prohibitively expensive.
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Dumping it in the ocean is safe
Burying it in the desert is safer.
Spent fuel can be converted into liquid chlorides or fluorides for salt fueled reactors
Molten salt reactors are unproven technology.
in a simple process at low cost.
When dealing with radioactive materials, nothing is simple or low cost.
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Molten salt reactors are unproven technology.
The technology was proven viable in the 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Dumping it in the ocean is safe;
So putting something highly toxic into an uncontrolled environment is safe? Not a chance, that's why it isn't being done ---- except for dumping nuclear submarines into international waters because of legal loopholes that allow it.
the reasons we don't are political.
The reason we don't is because sane people are looking at proposals like that and saying that it is utterly insane.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
why they didn't just dump the spent fuel into an ocean trench that was being subducted under another plate.
Future Man: Yikes, why is this volcano suddenly erupting radioactive material? This is supposed to be statistically impossible!
Or alternatively why not just reprocess the fuel?
Because nuclear industry boosters are stuck under a pile of their past lies, which prevents them from supporting LFTR or other types of processes that make effective use of reprocessed fuel. Idiots on "both sides" are against technical solutions to the waste problem.
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why they didn't just dump the spent fuel into an ocean trench that was being subducted under another plate.
because contact with the salts in the water would produce plutonium chlorides from the plutonium and a bunch of other things that would be easily absorbed into the food chain via a process called bio-accumulation. Very nasty. Best to keep it dry and underground.
Or alternatively why not just reprocess the fuel?
because it's an expensive messy process that creates a lot of waste and produces fuel contaminated with plutonium that makes an accident with the stuff that much worse. As seen at reactor 3 (IIRC) at Fukushima which was using MOX.
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I thought you cared about nuclear power.
I do care about nuclear power, which is why I give the Democrats such a hard time about it. The Democrats have complained about the growing problem of spent nuclear fuel and the stockpile of nuclear weapons while spending the last 40 years holding up every effort to do anything about it.
Also during the last 40 years the Democrats have complained about America's dependence on foreign sources of energy, air and water pollution, and CO2 emissions while holding up the one known energy source that has been prov
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So no, you don't get to pin this one on the Democrats.
Yes, I do get to pin this on the Democrats.
If the Democrats were really as concerned about lowering CO2 emissions as they claimed then they'd be doing a better job on policies to do that. They'd support nuclear power to replace coal. They'd support pipelines for oil and natural gas so the oil isn't moved by diesel powered trains, trucks, and ships, and the natural gas burned off on site because it costs too much to ship it elsewhere. They'd stop the bullshit of burning our food for fuel with ethanol subs
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So no, you don't get to pin this one on the Democrats.
Yes, I do get to pin this on the Democrats.
If the Democrats were really as concerned about lowering CO2 emissions as they claimed then they'd be doing a better job on policies to do that.
Turns out Nuclear is about the same as gas for CO2 emissions, except gas doesn't have all the liabilities as nuclear. Converting Nuclear plants to natural gas would also give the utility companies an extended return on investment for the turbines whilst the plant produced enough profit to sustain the spent fuel.
That would be a political win for the Democrats or the Republicans!
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Turns out Nuclear is about the same as gas for CO2 emissions
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] says Gas emits much more than Nuclear. 110 times more in the "best case" (410/3.7), 3 times more in the worst (410/110).
Do you have a different source?
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Turns out Nuclear is about the same as gas for CO2 emissions
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] says Gas emits much more than Nuclear. 110 times more in the "best case" (410/3.7), 3 times more in the worst (410/110).
Do you have a different source?
Sure, Nuclear Power’s Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Smokescreen [fairewinds.org] which calculates the difference to be 3% difference between gas and nuclear.
However another answer is on the page you provided:
In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change harmonized the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) findings of the major electricity generating sources in use worldwide.
At that time the IPCC was using the Vatenfal figures for CO2 production of nuclear. Their figures used in-situ acid leech mining instead of the
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Sure, Nuclear Powerâ(TM)s Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Smokescreen which calculates the difference to be 3% difference between gas and nuclear.
That's not what your source says. Do you have another source for this bullshit claim?
The Wikipedia page linked above show multiple sources where nuclear power has greenhouse gas emission as low as solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro. Among those sources are IPCC, Yale University, the UK government, and University of Sydney. I think I'd take those sources over the obviously biased source you gave, which by the way doesn't support your claim.
which model? the one that we wanted to use? (Score:2)
Nuclear is a waste of time for most areas (Score:2)
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China and India will coat the planet with solar panels before western nations figure out how to actually make nuclear truly viable and publicly accepted.
Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, China has 12 nuclear power plants under construction and India is building 7. It is astonishing what stupid comments people make when reality is the complete opposite. You would think they would be embarrassed, but I'll bet the parent post won't even bother to read any comments and will just go along living his life in complete ignorance.
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If they were smart they would put the solar panels on tall poles above the pollution. Or they could use wind turbines to blow the pollution away.
Re: Nuclear is a waste of time for most areas (Score:2)
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Why is this not at +5 Funny and Insightful?
I'll give you another one - the soot we emit from burning fossils acts as a permanent grey filter in the atmosphere. If we clean that the Earth will warm up faster...
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Well....duh. That is why they are building 12 new ones to reach 88GW by this year. And then after that they will build more.
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Correct. It will take them up to 11GW with those 7. Then they will continue to build more as they transition from coal. I don't know what you are arguing about. My point is that India and China are building (lots of) nuclear power plants, despite the OP stupid comment.
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China energy is over 71% from coal. They are switching from coal to renewable and nuclear power which is a heck of a lot better than coal. I'm not sure what my "agenda" is. I am not a nuclear power fan. What is your problem? I am literally saying that they are building 12 nuclear power plants. They are doing this as a part of a mixed strategy.
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Actually, nuclear power could actually be part of the solution to the waste storage problem!
Reprocessing that separates the really nasty highly radioactive stuff from the actinides isn't that hard, and the mixed actinides are a terrible source for weapons grade material. The nasty stuff will decay to background levels in 260 or so years. It's the actinides that can last 10,000 years. OR, we can "burn" them in a suitable reactor for a great deal of energy.. That will convert the 10,000 year waste into the mu
There is no "sufficiently safe" way (Score:2)
We only have to store it until the pesky humans are gone, and there's no way we'll be around in 10,000 years.
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We will be well established throughout the Galaxy by then. Possibly other galaxies as well.
Re: There is no "sufficiently safe" way (Score:2)
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You sound like a hyperloop nutter.
Sure, binary bro, we'll just build a zillion spaceships and fly off to...ummm...errr....remind me again what the nearest potentially habitable planet is? Oh yeah, a rocky planet slightly over four light-years away [wikipedia.org], supposedly in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri.
So, all we gotta do is develop a practical FTL drive, launch a bunch of ships and in 4 or 5 short years we'll arrive at...a rocky planet that may or may not be habitable. Sounds super easy, I can't imagine why
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Awww...its sweet you save all of my comments. We can read them together (on Mars).
Radiation for the ages! (Score:3)
This sounds like a ridiculous premise to me.
The materials used to store the waste "will likely degrade faster than anyone previously knew"
Which "who" are they talking about? For my entire life it has always sounded like we bury the stuff and hope that no one digs it up. Everyone knew that concrete doesn't last. Everyone knew that glass doesn't last.
When the final word of this is "How do we let the people 10,000 years in the future know to not dig this stuff up?" you know you have an issue.
The responsible thing is to figure out a way to reprocess this stuff and make it usable, or at least not deadly on contact.
--
The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. - John C. Maxwell
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When the final word of this is "How do we let the people 10,000 years in the future know to not dig this stuff up?" you know you have an issue.
This is all a bunch of anti-nuclear bullshit propaganda. In 10,000 years all the short and medium lived isotopes will have decayed away. What will be left are the long lived isotopes like the uranium that we dug out of the ground to begin with. If this is something we have to warn some future civilization about then we may as well have to warn them that fire burns the skin and water can drown them. These will be people too stupid to know not to eat rocks. If this is a civilization that is even near the
Don't eat it. (Score:2)
Store it on the moon (Score:2)
The we can party in space like it's 1999.
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When I leave to live on Mars I'll take some with me in a suitcase. You can thank me later Earthlings.
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The we can party in space like it's 1999.
Indeed. I saw the documentary on how this turns out on Comet TV.
Why store it at all (Score:2)
Use it instead. Reactors designs that work on what was previously considered nuclear waste already exist. Russia had one on the grid since 2016. China is building one. We, instead, are wasting money on solar and wind bullshit which can't supply the baseload requirements, because sun is not always there, and wind isn't always blowing.
Re:Why store it at all (Score:5, Interesting)
LOL. Trump came into office because of the fact that the general public is rapidly losing trust in the basic institutions of society, including both government and private industry. (And in fact, he's been pouring more gasoline on that particular fire.)
This means that the public is not going to trust either the government or industry to build new fission reactors, solve the waste problem, or develop new fuel cycles, no matter how safe they claim they'll be.
Mark my words: Regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge, there are not going to be any new fission power plant sites provisioned and built in this country in this century.
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Mark my words: Regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge, there are not going to be any new fission power plant sites provisioned and built in this country in this century.
We don't need new sites to build new power plants. We can just build new power plants on the same sites as the old power plants.
This means that the public is not going to trust either the government or industry to build new fission reactors, solve the waste problem, or develop new fuel cycles, no matter how safe they claim they'll be.
That's irrelevant.
The waste problem we have now won't just evaporate because the public lacks trust in the government or whomever to deal with it. We will have to do something with the waste. This means the people will have to place trust in someone to deal with this. Also, there's more than one way to deal with the waste. At some point the current policy of allowing the waste
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You're right that they may retrofit current nuclear sites with new reactors. However, that's not going to make a dent in our energy mix or address climate change because there's not enough cooling water on the current sites to support increasing output.
By the time the public has been convinced that all this new stuff is OK to expand to new sites, after decades of design, development and construction, followed by decades of operational track record, my end-of-century deadline will have passed. By that time,
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You're right that they may retrofit current nuclear sites with new reactors. However, that's not going to make a dent in our energy mix or address climate change because there's not enough cooling water on the current sites to support increasing output.
We know how to make air cooled nuclear power reactors. The lack of water is not an issue because with air cooling we aren't going to run out of air.
By the time the public has been convinced that all this new stuff is OK to expand to new sites, after decades of design, development and construction, followed by decades of operational track record, my end-of-century deadline will have passed. By that time, fission power in general will have been made utterly obsolete by cost improvements in renewable energy sources, energy storage, and maybe even fusion power.
Renewable energy replacing nuclear energy is a fantasy. As it is now nuclear power takes far less land, raw materials, and labor to produce the same energy output, and produce power in any weather conditions at any time of day. This difference in land, materials, and labor is not small either, it's an order of magnitude or three of a difference. There may be
Remember that deep, deep hole in Russia story? (Score:3)
The one where the Russians tried to drill down to the mantle and finally had to give up because it was so deep it was getting too hot for the drill bit to continue? Well, here's an excellent use for that hole.
Lies of omission (Score:2)
Love how the summary conveniently forgets to mention the half-life of depleted uranium (which is still 50% as radioactive as the refined uranium was) has a half-life of literally billions of years.
How about finish the transmutation? (Score:2)
Re:Half lives and radiation levels (Score:4, Informative)
Only if you are utterly ignorant to the way biological damage from radiation works.
For example, PU has a very long half-life but the stuff is named for the god of hell for a reason: The Alpha-particles it emits are shielded even by a sheet of paper, but if it is in tissue (such as lung-tissue), it creates gene-damage sure to cause cancer even at very very low dosages. These Alpha-particles do not travel far, but they have a lot of energy. So, you can sleep on it, no problem. But if you breath a few milligram as dust or smoke, you are dead.
Re:Half lives and radiation levels (Score:4, Interesting)
But if you breath a few milligram as dust or smoke, you are dead.
Citation needed.
Here's mine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."
I know Wikipedia is not a source, the article mentions several sources showing that the health risks from plutonium are minimal. That doesn't mean people should eat it, it means it should be treated like any other heavy metal like lead or copper which also have minimal health risks when handled properly.
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But if you breath a few milligram as dust or smoke, you are dead.
Citation needed.
Here's mine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Here's mine:
Pathogenetic Process of Lung Tumors Induced by Inhalation Exposures of Rats to Plutonium Dioxide Aerosols [rrjournal.org]
Your analysis focuses only on pu-239 as dust...
"There were about 25 workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory who inhaled a considerable amount of plutonium dust during 1940s; according to the hot-particle theory, each of them has a 99.5% chance of being dead from lung cancer by now, but there has not been a single lung cancer among them."
...and not as an inhalant in oxide form which gets lodged in the lungs. If they were exposed in a laboratory it stands to reason encountered the purified refined form that, whilst toxic, did not organically bond.
In the chloride form pu-239 organically bonds inside the body which is a lot worse because internal organs get radiation exposur
Re:Half lives and radiation levels (Score:4, Interesting)
Virtually none of the properties of Plutonium were known when it was named. It was named after the planet, completing the Uranus, Neptune, Pluto sequence.
The visible outer planets are a genealogy. Mars/Ares is the son of Jupiter/Zeus is the son of Saturn/Cronus is the son of Caelus/Uranus. Neptune wasn't discovered until 1846, and by that time no one know who the hell Erebus was, so it was named after the deity of a different cold, dark deep. When Pluto was found in 1930, all that was left was Pluto of the underworld. The name was suggested by an 11 year old girl, and does not appear to be based on any serious analysis of traits.
Uranium had been discovered in 1789. It wasn't until 1940 that particle accelerators created elements 93 and 94. By 1940, if you asked anyone to name two things that come after Uranus, the obvious answers were going to be Neptune and Pluto.
So, Plutonium wasn't really named after the god Pluto, and even if it had been, very little was known about the metal when it was named, so any similarity at this point is a double coincidence.
Oh, and Pluto's domain isn't very similar to "hell" anyway.
And then there is this:
So, while I wouldn't recommend any contact with Plutonium, the evidence does not appear to justify the hyperbole.
(I assume that most people are clever enough to figure out where I copied that paragraph from, so I'm not going to clean it up at all.)
Re: Half lives and radiation levels (Score:2)
Or eating it. Or ingesting it with your water. Which is essentially what this is about.
Re:Half lives and radiation levels (Score:4, Interesting)
Uhm, yeah, so something with a half life on tens of thousands of years is effectively non-radioactive for our purposes. You could eat it, sleep on it, breathe in fumes from burning it. The levels of radiation being released are so low you'd be fine. That's what a long half life means. By definition.
You mean like a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long? Plutonium is effectively not radioactive. That doesn't mean we should use it as an ice cream topping. It means we should treat it like any other heavy metal, just like how we recycle lead, iron and steel, aluminum, and so on.
Depleted uranium has a half life of billions of years, and it's so lacking in radiation that this material is used to shield people from radiation from other materials.
OTOH, the stuff with much shorter half lives... uh... NIMBY!!!!
The stuff with shorter half lives are useful and highly valued for industrial, medical, and scientific uses. Instead of throwing this stuff in a hole we should be processing this for these materials. Because this is highly radioactive material this means the people that handle this should be monitored closely. We don't want a repeat of radioactive cobalt ending up getting melted down to make steel reinforcement for concrete walls in apartments.
We enjoy the lifestyle we have today because of nuclear power and other nuclear technologies. We simply cannot abandon nuclear power. We need to mine this material for it's valuable isotopes, not find deeper and deeper holes to drop it into.
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You mean like a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long?
No, like a candle in the wind never knowing who to cling to when the rain sets in.
Plutonium is effectively not radioactive.
Except that it is an effective emitter of alpha radiation that can be absorbed, quite readily in chloride form, into the body. That means if water is in contact with plutonium. So no.
Depleted uranium has a half life of billions of years, and it's so lacking in radiation that this material is used to shield people from radiation from other materials.
...but also has spontaneous criticality whilst decaying creating bursts of radiation 10 or more times its non critical level continuously until it decays. And also forms a ceramic oxide when used as a munition which is an inhalant.
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The problem is not the "storage" (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is calling it "waste".
Chemically, before it enters the reactor, the so-called "waste" is UO2 that is 95% U-8 and 5% U-5. When it gets out, it is 95% U-8, 1%U-5 and 4% of about 1000 radioactive isotopes. Several of them are immensely useful and even if the whole nuclear power industry collapses, someone somewhere will still run a small reactor and produce what's possible.
That is, less than 4% of the so-called "waste" has to actually be buried. Today it is not. Why?
Because the US government has, since the late 60s had a fear of "proliferation" and has pressed hard against used fuel reprocessing.
"Nuclear waste" is a problem mostly because of a stupid political decision.
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> Because the US government has, since the late 60s had a fear of "proliferation" and has pressed hard against used fuel reprocessing.
*sigh*
No, it's because it costs about three times as much to reprocess the fuel as simply buy new fuel. That is why. The only people that do it are the ones that do it for political reasons or for plutonium extraction, there is no economic benefit even if you consider disposal costs. France is the only major user of the end product, which provides about 10% of their input
Re: The problem is not the "storage" (Score:5, Informative)
"Nuclear waste" is a problem mostly because of a stupid political decision.
Was that the political decision to use nuclear power in the first place?
No, the decision was to not have a realistic standard for how these materials are processed. So some quick information, "nuclear waste" comes in roughly 3 different varieties: short-term, medium-term and long-term based upon the half-life. After 10 half-lives, material is 1/1024th as radioactive as it started and the standard for when its no longer radioactive is either 10 half-lives or the radioactivity of the natural ore. Also, shorter half-live, more radioactive and dangerous. So when material first comes out of the reactor you let it cool for usually around 10 years which allows the most dangerous stuff (short-term) to become "non-radioactive". The next batch is the medium term stuff (Cesium, Iodine, etc) and the longest lived of that is Cs-131 which takes 300 years to cool (30 year half-life). After that, all you have left are the Actinides (Pu, U, etc) and those realistically never cool. Pu's half-life is ~25,000 years.
The danger with the longer lived stuff is if its in a isotopicly pure state (ie enriched U or Pu) and that's only the case if you don't have a bunch of the other isotopes in there. Since fissionable isotope (U-235 or Pu-239) is what was "burnt" for fuel, what comes out isn't useful for weapons as it has more of the other isotopes than the fissionable isotope. It usually is even less useful for weapons than commercially extracted ore (e.g. yellow cake). So if you are only burning a small amount of the fuel (like current gen reactors) you are only worried about the U-235 or Pu-239 being separated out from the other kinds of U or Pu in the mixture. The worry is that somehow more Pu-239 will be created than Pu-238 leaving an enriched Pu mixture which can be separated out from the U. But that's not really a practical way to make weapons grade Pu as there is no commercial equipment made that can separate out Pu-238 from Pu-239 and the mixture from the reactor would be far too depleted to be used in a bomb (weapons grade Pu is made another way).
However, if you just want to process the waste and not separate out the fuel for reuse, you can separate out long lived, medium lived and short lived elements after 10 years of storage or so. At that point, the short term stuff is no longer radioactive, the medium lived stuff will be radioactive for 300 years or so and can be stored using mostly conventional techniques. Then all that is left is the Pu, U and other Actinides which can be mixed with sand and placed in deep salt mines, coal mines or Uranium mines. You don't get to reuse the fuel, but your storage is safe. Of course, with Gen IV MSRs, there are no Actinides left after the reactor is finished so the "waste" from those only lasts 300 years. It would be better to remove the Pu first as its 10000x more radioactive than the U but that's too near the reprocessing ban but its far easier to just use more sand to create a mixture that is similar to natural ore.
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>> No, the decision was to not have a realistic standard for how these materials are processed.
There is no processing possible that will get rid of them. You'll have to contain and wait. For millions of years. And that combined is not possible. it HAS TO leak.
Physics.
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No, the decision was to not have a realistic standard for how these materials are processed.
So everyone knew there was nothing in place to deal with the waste. But politics allowed it to happen anyway. Just like my "troll" comment before... Thanks for agreeing with me.
How on earth can you read my 3 paragraph post full of technical details that explain how processing and rendering safe nuclear materials is a known process using equipment that has been available for decades means nothing was in place? You know how I know you didn't read/understand my post...perhaps best to keep your mouth shut than to remove all doubt as to your ignorance.
Re: The problem is not the "storage" (Score:2, Informative)
Just about all (or all) the current nuclear plants were built without consideration of anything you said. It was all politics. Do you know how we can tell? All these decades later, there still isn't a workable solution for the waste.
If there was, everyone would be using it. We wouldn't be having this discussion, and nuclear plants would be being built all over the place.
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So everyone knew there was nothing in place to deal with the waste. But politics allowed it to happen anyway.
It was the only way to make nuclear weapons in the 1950s.
At first they didn't even try to hide the fact that the reactors were bomb factories, it was only later that they decided to sell it to the public as "electricity too cheap to meter".
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> Electricity too cheap to meter" was a quote by a scientist who was talking about fusion power
It is not.
The speech is online. Go and read it. There is nothing whatsoever about fusion. In fact, there's nothing about fission either. Strauss was talking about science in general:
“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter...will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifes
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Like I said, you're very ignorant about reactor physics. Instead of acknowledging this and trying to learn, you try to come up with arguments that sound plausible to you, but are complete bullshit.
A fission reactor is a factory for both isotopes and energy. The mechanism of production is fission in the reactor material that is caused by neutron flux. The distribution of the material, the time it is irradiated by the flux, and the properties of the flux determine how much energy, what isotopes and in what
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If anything should have used more because now they're panicking about the co2.
any nuclear waste is a highly, HIGHLY localized problem. anyways it's got "proliferation" in there to tip you off that.. it's not being reprocessed or used again because then you can(potentially) make bombs out of it.
look globally speaking we could just dump all of it, every single last kg, in canada in some single creek and be fine and it wouldn't bother anyone ever again. then we can start go around slabbing asbestos mines under
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Reprocessing is expensive because it is heavily regulated, which makes progress very slow, if not practically impossible and outright impossible where it isn't allowed.
The Fukushima accident has nothing at all to do with MOX fuel.
And MOX fuel is not more "dangerous" to "put into a reactor" than a fuel that has already been in the reactor for a while.
Go read a book on reactor physics, don't waste your breath spreading FUD.
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"A decision made by Democrats and continued for more than 40 years by Democrats." - the Republicans have not been in power for 40 years?
The few times Republicans had control of both houses of Congress and the presidency there was still the ability of Democrats to filibuster the Senate. What small pro-nuclear bills Republicans were able to sneak through the Senate and get signed into law by a Republican POTUS were simply reversed after the next election.
I'm thinking that this time it's different. The Democrats blew up the filibuster, the nuclear power plants we have now are getting to their retirement age, and Trump was able to put some fu
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It's cheaper to mine new uranium than to reprocess spent fuel. Reprocessing for the sake of reprocessing is going to be even more expensive, and nuclear power is already impossible to justify based on the batshit insane costs involved. And the solution is to make it even more expensive?
Yeah not so much. [bbc.com] France uses the same canisters in deep concrete bunkers that everyone else uses. Very little fuel is reproces