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Science

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.

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Current Model For Storing Nuclear Waste May Not Be Sufficiently Safe, Study Says

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  • but the glass/ceramic shell inside the container should still be intact yes???
    • Re:maybe (Score:5, Informative)

      by newcastlejon ( 1483695 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @09:00PM (#59666426)

      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.

      • by jezwel ( 2451108 )

        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)

          by gl4ss ( 559668 )

          ...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

        • [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

      • 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.

      • 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]

      • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        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

      • Actually, even better, is finish the transmutation first, yielding a fraction of unstable elements, and all will be safe within 200 years.
  • by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @08:44PM (#59666398)
    It's radioactive, which means it's producing energy. Seems to me we should stuff the stuff somewhere for the time when we know how to usefully extract that energy. Burying it where it will be safe for thousands of years seems counter-intuitive to me.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      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.

    • by newcastlejon ( 1483695 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @09:19PM (#59666470)

      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.

      • by psergiu ( 67614 )

        100 to 200 degrees Celsius ?
        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 ... but free afterwards :) )

      • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:19PM (#59666632) Homepage Journal

        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.

        • 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

          • Glad you caught the reference before the butt hurt nuclear playboys modded me down. That makes it all worth it :)

        • by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseer@earthli[ ]net ['nk.' in gap]> on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @05:11AM (#59667152)

          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.

        • They reprocess to get the Plutonium for their subs and missiles out.

      • The best thing to do with spent nuclear fuel is to reprocess it
        Then you have 1000 times more waste. Or is it 10,000 times ... I forgot.

    • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:11PM (#59666616) Homepage Journal

      > 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)

        by phantomfive ( 622387 )

        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.

        • 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)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:33PM (#59666656)
      The spent fuel is radioactive for so long because it still has something like 93% of the uranium's energy still in it. If you run that "waste" through a breeder reactor (called reprocessing), it extracts energy from it, and converts it into fuel which can be run in regular reactors. After you run it through regular reactors again, it results in using all but about 10% of the energy in the original uranium, and the resulting waste is then only "hot" for a century or three. France does not have a long-term nuclear waste storage problem because this is what they do.

      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.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        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.

        • by _merlin ( 160982 )

          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

      • by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @06:07AM (#59667228) Homepage Journal

        If you run that "waste" through a breeder reactor (called reprocessing), it extracts energy from it, and converts it into fuel which can be run in regular reactors.

        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)

    by kiviQr ( 3443687 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @08:57PM (#59666414)
    at some point we will find a way to re-use it and we will mine these sites.
  • by vanyel ( 28049 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @09:05PM (#59666430) Journal

    I think Hanford has already proved them right...

  • 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?

    • We need to change the name from reprocessing to something that makes is sound more positively - like recycling or cleaning or something like that.
    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Aighearach ( 97333 )

      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.

    • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

      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.

  • ... or the model that anti-nuclear protesters forced us to use of keeping it sitting in rusty fucking barrels onsite? Which model? Oh, and those same anti-nuclear protesters are the same ones that think that not 'turning on' a nuclear reactor means the nuclear fuel fueling it will not decay over time.
  • Wind, solar, geothermal, energy storage affordability may as well be a certainty so stop letting that excuse hold you back. It's going to happen, it's been happening, and eventually we will have cheap grid energy storage. You may as well build the clean power generation and upgrade the grid while you develop the affordable storage technology. Nuclear costs will probably go up for a long time while renewable willmostly fall. Geothermal may also have a lot more potential and peaker plant CO2 can be offset un
    • 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.

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      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

  • 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.

  • by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @09:55PM (#59666568)

    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

    • 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

  • Zero deaths worldwide in 60 years. Seems pretty safe. This is just more antinuclear pro fossil fuel fearmongering and propaganda. Nuclear waste is a non problem. After it cools off (ten years in water) you would have to eat it to hurt you.
  • The we can party in space like it's 1999.

  • 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.

  • by ShoulderOfOrion ( 646118 ) on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @01:38AM (#59666932)

    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.

  • 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.

  • Seriously, we need mix this with U and run it through a breeder reactor (ARC, or Moltex), but in a mode designed to finish the reaction. It will then produce relatively safe end products that is either stable, or will be within 200 years.

Were there fewer fools, knaves would starve. - Anonymous

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