Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumFuture of America's Nuclear Power Plants
There are 50 some locations where there are 104 Nuclear Power Plants in the US. All of them produce deadly waste that must be maintained for 100's of years before the waste can be casually tossed aside and be of no concern to future inhabitants. 100's of years.
Presently most waste is stored on site at each plant. There are thousands of tons of waste being stored. Some of it - the most recent waste - has to be kept cool by means of circulating water in very large pools. Just as the reactors need cooling.
Pools such as these in the US are what dried up and caused explosions at Fukushima. Pipes broke from the earthquake and pumps quit working and the pools and reactors overheated, the water boiled off, and BOOM!
The electricity for the pumps came from the grid and since the grid collapsed, there was no ready electricity to power the pumps, so the pools and the reactors overheated and well, you know.
This link is to an article about what may happen to the grid in the US in due time: http://truth-out.org/news/item/7301-400-chernobyls-solar-flares-electromagnetic-pulses-and-nuclear-armageddon
Such a scenario would be utterly catastrophic. What can we do to prevent such a catastrophe?
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bananas
(27,509 posts)“Danger: Radioactive Waste”: A Message in a Bottle to Last… a Million Years (French Waste Agency)
"For long-lived waste such as that produced through reprocessing, we need to demonstrate it will be secure for millions of years."
"A million years should not be viewed as a definitive statement by the French Nuclear Safety Agency (NSA) on what is acceptable because, really, the timeline could extend much further"
<snip>
31. No, it wasn't a "smokescreen".
The EPA wanted a 10,000 year standard and wouldn't change it until they were ordered to by a court in one of the lawsuits over Yucca Mountain. This Slate article has links to the NAS report and the court order: http://www.slate.com/id/2212792
<snip>
The Externalities of Nuclear Power: First, Assume We Have a Can Opener . . .
<snip>
While the impacts of global warming are described as “intergenerational,” the impacts of the nuclear waste cycle are better described as inter-civilizational.<2> Nuclear fuel wastes remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands to as much as a million years.<3> By contrast, recorded human history goes back only about 5,000 years, and human civilization is only about 10,000 years old. Globally, none of the generators of nuclear fuel waste have successfully implemented any permanent disposal option for nuclear waste, leaving this externality of nuclear energy production as a problem for future generations, or, more likely, for future civilizations. Put simply, the nuclear industry, with government complicity, has transferred and deferred the most expensive part of the cost of the nuclear fuel cycle to future generations and civilizations unknown.
<snip>
ladjf
(17,320 posts)RobertEarl
(13,685 posts)Here's a bit more info about Fukushima that could one day be an American horror story.
-----------------
Fukushima Daiichi site: Cesium-137 is 85 times greater than at Chernobyl accident.
"Japan’s former Ambassador to Switzerland, Mr. Mitsuhei Murata, was invited to speak at the Public Hearing of the Budgetary Committee of the House of Councilors on March 22, 2012, on the Fukushima nuclear power plants accident. Before the Committee, Ambassador Murata strongly stated that if the crippled building of reactor unit 4 - with 1,535 fuel rods in the spent fuel pool 100 feet (30 meters) above the ground - collapses, not only will it cause a shutdown of all six reactors but will also affect the common spent fuel pool containing 6,375 fuel rods, located some 50 meters from reactor 4. In both cases the radioactive rods are not protected by a containment vessel; dangerously, they are open to the air. This would certainly cause a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced. He stressed that the responsibility of Japan to the rest of the world is immeasurable. Such a catastrophe would affect us all for centuries. Ambassador Murata informed us that the total numbers of the spent fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi site excluding the rods in the pressure vessel is 11,421 (396+615+566+1,535+994+940+6375).
I asked top spent-fuel pools expert Mr. Robert Alvarez, former Senior Policy Adviser to the Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for National Security and the Environment at the U.S. Department of Energy, for an explanation of the potential impact of the 11,421 rods.
I received an astounding response from Mr. Alvarez :
In recent times, more information about the spent fuel situation at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site has become known. It is my understanding that of the 1,532 spent fuel assemblies in reactor No. 304 assemblies are fresh and unirradiated. This then leaves 1,231 irradiated spent fuel rods in pool No. 4, which contain roughly 37 million curies (~1.4E+18 Becquerel) of long-lived radioactivity. The No. 4 pool is about 100 feet above ground, is structurally damaged and is exposed to the open elements. If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident.
The infrastructure to safely remove this material was destroyed as it was at the other three reactors. Spent reactor fuel cannot be simply lifted into the air by a crane as if it were routine cargo. In order to prevent severe radiation exposures, fires and possible explosions, it must be transferred at all times in water and heavily shielded structures into dry casks.. As this has never been done before, the removal of the spent fuel from the pools at the damaged Fukushima-Dai-Ichi reactors will require a major and time-consuming re-construction effort and will be charting in unknown waters. Despite the enormous destruction cased at the Da-Ichi site, dry casks holding a smaller amount of spent fuel appear to be unscathed.
Based on U.S. Energy Department data, assuming a total of 11,138 spent fuel assemblies are being stored at the Dai-Ichi site, nearly all, which is in pools. They contain roughly 336 million curies (~1.2 E+19 Bq) of long-lived radioactivity. About 134 million curies is Cesium-137 - roughly 85 times the amount of Cs-137 released at the Chernobyl accident as estimated by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP). The total spent reactor fuel inventory at the Fukushima-Daichi site contains nearly half of the total amount of Cs-137 estimated by the NCRP to have been released by all atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, Chernobyl, and world-wide reprocessing plants (~270 million curies or ~9.9 E+18 Becquerel).
It is important for the public to understand that reactors that have been operating for decades, such as those at the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site have generated some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet."
--------------
Copied From this post, but read before elsewhere:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=639365
ladjf
(17,320 posts)Jacques Cousteau was warning us about the dangers of using nuclear material over 60 years ago. Even his native Country of France ignored his warning. In fact, the French Government tried to get him to support their nuclear initiatives. France is being as foolish as
Japan.
PamW
(1,825 posts)The only reason spent nuclear fuel has a long radioactive lifetime is due to the actinides, like Plutonium.
However, ALL the actinides are usable nuclear fuel. If one reprocesses / recycles the actinides back to the reactor as fuel; then the only nuclear waste one has to dispose of are the fission products, which have much shorter lifetimes.
Here is part of an interview that Pultizer-Prize winner Richard Rhodes conducted for PBS's Frontline with nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till, then Associate Director of Argonne National Laboratory:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Q: The fission products.
A: Fission products. But none of the long-lived toxic elements like plutonium and americium or curium, the so-called manmade elements. They're the long-lived toxic ones. And they're recycled back into the reactor ... and work every bit as well as plutonium.
Q: So they go in, and then those are broken into fission products, or some of it is. Right?
A: Yes.
Q: And you repeat the process.
A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.
PamW
kristopher
(29,798 posts)As we have seen, statements that 90 or 95 percent of the material in spent fuel can be used are completely invalid without breeder reactors. In this section we will examine some of the implications of a policy that seeks to deal with existing spent fuel by trying to convert the mass of the material into fuel and using it for energy, assuming that breeder reactors will work and can be deployed on a large scale.
We start with a heuristic calculation. A 1,000-megawatt nuclear power reactor fissions about one metric ton of heavy metal per year in the course of energy generation. At present, there are over 60,000 metric tons of spent fuel in the United States. With reactor re-licensing, the total amount of spent fuel could amount to well over 100,000 metric tons by the time the reactors are retired; 95-plus percent of the content of this spent fuel is uranium or transuranic elements (mainly plutonium). We will use a round number of 100,000 metric tons92 of uranium and plutonium content in spent fuel that would be converted into fuel. This corresponds approximately to statements that 90 or 95 percent of existing spent fuel has “energy value” and hence should not be regarded as waste. For instance, such a scheme would appear to be the one that Dr. Miller had in mind and that NRC Commissioner Bill Magwood made explicit in his discussions of spent fuel management.93
Setting aside for the moment a variety of difficult issues, including those associated with the rate of conversion of uranium-238 into plutonium, it is easy to see that it would take 100,000 reactor years (assuming 1,000 megawatt reactors) to convert the heavy metal content of spent fuel from the existing fleet of U.S. power reactors into fission products in a manner that extracts essentially all the physically possible energy value in it.
Assume a reactor operating life of 50 years, accumulating 100,000 reactor years would mean building 2,000 reactors to extract the energy in the total spent fuel from the existing fleet of reactors. This is about 20 times the size of the existing U.S. nuclear power system. It is four times the total electricity generation of the United States and seven or eight times the baseload requirements under the present centralized electricity dispatch system. If the material is consumed in a smaller number of reactors, the time to consume it would be proportionally increased. For instance, it would take 200 years to consume the material in 500 reactors.
The matter gets more complex when the time required to breed plutonium out of uranium-238 is taken into account....
THE MYTHOLOGY AND MESSY REALITY OF NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING, Page 37
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. April 8, 2010
On the Web at http://www.ieer.org/reports/reprocessing2010.pdf
A 1,000-megawatt nuclear power reactor fissions about one metric ton of heavy metal per year in the course of energy generation.
At present, there are over 60,000 metric tons of spent fuel in the United States.
With reactor re-licensing, the total amount of spent fuel could amount to well over 100,000 metric tons by the time the reactors are retired; 95-plus percent of the content of this spent fuel is uranium or transuranic elements (mainly plutonium).
We will use a round number of 100,000 metric tons92 of uranium and plutonium content in spent fuel that would be converted into fuel.
...Assume a reactor operating life of 50 years, accumulating 100,000 reactor years would mean building 2,000 reactors to extract the energy in the total spent fuel from the existing fleet of reactors.
This is about 20 times the size of the existing U.S. nuclear power system.
It is four times the total electricity generation of the United States and seven or eight times the baseload requirements under the present centralized electricity dispatch system.
If the material is consumed in a smaller number of reactors, the time to consume it would be proportionally increased.
For instance, it would take 200 years to consume the material in 500 reactors.
The matter gets more complex when the time required to breed plutonium out of uranium-238 is taken into account....
Once again Kris shows he doesn't understand what was said.
Take the portion he highlighted about the 95% of spent fuel. I said NOTHING about burning 95% of the spent fuel in a breeder.
The composition of spent fuel is about 95% - 96% U-238. I said absolutely NOTHING about burning the U-238. The 96% of spent fuel that is U-238 poses ZERO waste disposal problem because it is EXACTLY the same as the U-238 that we dug out of the ground. Natural Uranium contains 99.3% U-238; and hence we could take 96% of spent fuel and just put it back where we got it; in the ground.
The part about recycling as fuel that I said above applies to the long-lived Plutonium. ( Try working on that reading comprehension; so that you don't confuse the Plutonium which is about 2% of spent fuel with the 96% that is U-238 ).
The 96% of spent fuel that is U-238 is not a problem to dispose of; just separate it out and put it back where you got it. U-238 is no more radioactive out of a reactor than it is out of the ground.
It is the Plutonium that needs to be burned as fuel.
Arjun is giving a calculation as to what it would take to burn all the U-238 as fuel; not the Plutonium.
Yes - it takes 500 years to burn U-238; that means we have 500 years of power in the Uranium that is already mined.
With fast actinide burners; we have 500 years of power without mining any more uranium. Sure puts a LIE to all those that say we will run out of nuclear fuel in 50 years or whatever.
Kris; try better next time at keeping your nuclides straight.
You've confused burning U-238 with burning Plutonium.
PamW
kristopher
(29,798 posts)This link shows your history of disregard for the truth:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112711618
And the paper quoted above is a complete refutation of your present line of bullpuckey. It can be downloaded by anyone with an interest in objective facts instead of nuclear industry hype.
THE MYTHOLOGY AND MESSY REALITY OF NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING, Page 37
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. April 8, 2010
On the Web at http://www.ieer.org/reports/reprocessing2010.pdf
PamW
(1,825 posts)Once again Kris doesn't understand what the truthful
answer to the question is; because once again he has
completely FAILED to understand the question.
We see that in his quoted statement about the time it
takes to transmute U-238 into Plutonium. Who said
anything about transmuting U-238 into Plutonium?
In fact, in my response I specifically said that I was
NOT talking about burning U-238 but merely putting
it back into the ground. That doesn't take time.
This is what happens when one relies on one's own
beliefs as the authenticator of truth, as opposed to
any real intellect or advanced education. I forget
that I'm not talking to my colleagues. All of us have
documented high IQ's and advanced degrees from
prestigious universities.
This is going to be like attempting to explain quantum
mechanics to the cat. It's difficult to explain the meaning
of the Schroedinger equation when there just isn't that
much mental horsepower on the receiving end. However...
First, natural uranium is about 0.7% U-235 and 99.3% U-238
(In a recent post, Kris attempted to tell us that about half of
natural uranium was U-234.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_uranium
Natural Uranium (NU) refers to refined uraniumwith the same isotopic ratio as found in nature. It contains 0.7 % uranium-235 99.3 %uranium-238,..
The typical fresh reactor core is 100 tons of uranium with about 4% enrichment.
So a new core has 4 tons of U-235 ( 4% of 100 tons). In order to get that amount
of U-235 from natural uranium, I need 400 tons of natural uranium to get 4 tons
of U-235 ( 1% of 400 tons = 4 tons ). The 4% fuel will also contain 96 tons of U-238.
So of the 400 tons of NU; the 4 tons of U-235 will be used in the fuel. 96 tons of the
396 tons of U-238 will also go into the fuel; leaving 300 tons of U-238 tailings ( which
is called depleted uranium ). However, somewhere there is a hole in the ground that
used to contain 400 tons of uranium.
Now what is the composition of spent reactor fuel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
About 96% of spent fuel is Uranium, mostly U-238:
96% of the mass is the remaining uranium: most of the original 238U and a little 235U...
The U-235 is <1%. So a 100 ton spent nuclear core has
about 95 tons of U-238 and 1 ton of U-235.
Is it the uranium that makes spent fuel so difficult to dispose of?
NO - that U-238 and U-235 is no different than what came
out of the ground. So nobody should have any objections to just
putting it back.
What else is in spent fuel. Our 100 ton core has 3 tons of fission
products:
3% of the mass consists of fission products ...The fission products include every element from zinc through to the lanthanides
Is this what makes the spent fuel problem have such a long longevity?
NO - fission products decay in a relatively short amount of time. Again
from the PBS Frontline interview with nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Q: And you repeat the process?
A:Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.
So it is not the fission products that have the long life times.
What else is in spent fuel? There is Plutonium:
About 1% of the mass is 239Pu and Pu-240 resulting from conversion of 238U, which may be considered either as a useful byproduct, or as dangerous and inconvenient waste.
Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,110 years.
The entire reason for the longevity of spent nuclear fuel is due to the 1% that is
Pu-239 and other actinides.
So if we bury spent fuel; we have to have a facility that can handle the 1% of the
spent fuel that is long-lived Plutonium and other actinides.
Is there something else we can do with the 1 ton of Plutonium from our 100 ton core?
YES - we can burn it as fuel. Plutonium and actinides are useful reactor fuels and we
have 1 ton in our spent fuel. When we refuel the reactor, we need 4 tons of fissile material.
So we send our spent fuel to be reprocessed. We can separate the components. We need
4 tons of fissile material for the new core; we have 1 ton of U-235 in the spent fuel, and
we have 1 ton of Plutonium and other actinides. So we have 2 tons of the 4 tons needed.
So we put the 2 tons of U-235 and Pu-239 and actinides back into the reactor. ( We agument
with another 2 tons of fresh fissile material, for a total of 4 tons )
We also have 95 tons of U-238. We can combine that with the 300 tons of U-238 from the
waste stream of the enrichment plant to get 395 tons of U-238. We can put that 395 tons
of U-238 back where we got it; back into that hole in the ground from which we took 400
tons of natural uranium. Nobody should have a problem with that, as we are just putting
back most of what we took out.
We have to store those fission products for the timescales mentioned by Dr. Till above.
However, we don't have anything in the waste stream that has lifetimes of thousands of years!
So the long lifetime problem of nuclear waste is solved by the scheme outlined above.
Now what Arjun is talking about is something completely different He's talking NOT
about putting the U-238 back into the ground as I proffer; he is talking about converting
it all to Plutonium before burning it as fuel. That is going to take a long time. I think that
would be a good idea; because it means we would have power for a long time, and it sure
puts a LIE to the claim by the anti-nukes that we only have 20 or 40 years or whatever
worth of nuclear fuel left.
But Arjun's scheme and my scheme are different. My U-238 goes back into the ground, which
one can do immediately, and Arjun has the U-238 converted to Plutonium which takes hundreds
of years. Unfortunately, Kris can't tell the difference between these two schemes.
PamW
So where is a unit such as you describe built and operational?
How much did it cost?
What will the price of burning a ton of plutonium?
You do realize nuclear is not looked upon favorably by financiers, right?
And, while we are at it, PW, what do your friends say we should do about Fukushima?
Oh, here is web cam link to FUKU:
http://mfile.akamai.com/127380/live/reflector:51361.asx
All that is needed for the scheme I outlined is to have a reprocessing plant.
The French have a reprocessing plant at LaHague. That plant also reprocesses fuel for Sweden, and anyone else that contracts for services.
The British have a reprocessing plant at Sellafield.
The Japanese used to have the French reprocess their fuel; until they built their own reprocessing plants at Rokkasho.
The USA has a reprocessing plant at the Savannah River National Lab in South Carolina. We don't use it for commercial fuel.
The scheme I outlined above is being done in countries other than the USA.
The part of my scheme where you need to refuel the reactor with 4 tons of fuel in which you use the Plutonium from the spent
fuel and you mix it with some new Uranium to make the new fuel. Do you know what they call that mixture?
It's called MOX. You know that MOX is being used in other countries, right?
The only thing that sours financiers is the uncertainty. If we can get rid of the uncertainty of the politics, they'd love it.
PamW
THE MYTHOLOGY AND MESSY REALITY OF NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING, Page 37
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. April 8, 2010
On the Web at http://www.ieer.org/reports/reprocessing2010.pdf
PamW
(1,825 posts)Once again Kris has had the opportunity to realize
the difference between burying Uranium back where
we got it, and transmuting all that Uranium into
Plutonium; as well as the differential in the time it takes
to do those two DIFFERENT tasks.
Anyone can see it doesn't take a long time to put
Uranium back where you got it; and it most
certainly doesn't take hundreds of years.
The article by Arjun that Kris references as a
rebuttal to my posts, is concerned with transmuting
all that Uranium into Plutonium. Clearly, the
process Arjun is describing is different than what
I detail in my posts.
So one wonders why Kris would offer Arjun's
article as a rebuttal; not just once, but multiple times.
Perhaps it's a "one-trick pony" problem; the Arjun
article is the only one he has on the issue, the fact
that it's totally inapt, notwithstanding.
Evidently, he doesn't WANT to understand the
difference; or he is UNABLE to understand the
difference in the two disposal methods.
I really can't determine which of the two cases
we have here. It's moot anyway. In either case,
like always, Kris is JUST PLAIN WRONG
PamW
kristopher
(29,798 posts)And the proven limitations of nuclear power in the areas of cost, waste, proliferation and safety. You haven't got an actual plan, you have a line of BS. Makhijani's paper is a lot more comprehensive than the one narrow section you want to limit it to and it completely explains why reprocessing is a failed approach.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112711618
THE MYTHOLOGY AND MESSY REALITY OF NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING,
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. April 8, 2010
On the Web at http://www.ieer.org/reports/reprocessing2010.pdf
PamW
(1,825 posts)Once again Kris has labored to produce another
post that is completely INAPT.
Kris has not demonstrated any ability to rationally discuss
the issue. He has to let Arjun do all his talking and probably
thinking for him.
Contrary to Kris' vacuous assertions; there is absolutely
nothing in the Arjun article that addresses the scenario
I offer. The downside that Kris keeps quoting Arjun is that
it will take hundreds of years; and anyone knows that it
won't take hundreds of years to put Uranium back where
you got it.
Kris, why don't you even attempt to explain why you "think"
you understand the issue?
It's almost like you have Arjun's article on "speed dial"; so
that it can be reposted ad infinitum with out any thought.
THREE STIKES, KRIS - YOU ARE OUT!!!
Thanks for "playing"; if one can call that playing.
PamW
PamW
(1,825 posts)Contrary to Kris' claim; Arjun doesn't "prove" anything in that paper.
Arjun merely asserts that the volume of waste will increase, but he doesn't prove it or explain why.
The reason is because he can't.
Reprocessing is performing chemical processing on the waste. Chemical processes don't create radioactivity. The same amount of radioactive material that goes into a chemical reaction is the amount that comes out.
Contrary to a popular misconception among anti-nukes, radioactivity is NOT "contagious". You don't make some non-radioactive material radioactive merely because it was in the vicinity of some other radioactive material.
That's how it appears in the movies, for those that get their science education from Hollywood.
University of California - Berkeley Physics Professor Richard Muller makes this point in his book, "Physics for Future Presidents" on page 121:
http://books.google.com/books?id=6DBnS2g-KrQC&pg=PA121&lpg=PA121&dq=Muller+radioactivity+contagious&source=bl&ots=_0kXRDDnzu&sig=Wk6u3EEXz7vsIkNdqGAwG-OzCOw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=N2WlT--EL4rYiAL8htDuAg&ved=0CFoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
In fact, reprocessing actually reduces the amount of waste that we have to handle in a special manner. This is best seen by using an analogy to a doctor's office.
Next time you are at the doctor's office, look around the exam room for a special waste container for medical waste. It will have a covered top, display the biohazard symbol, and it is where the doctor and nurses put stuff like used needles or gauze pads with blood on them. You don't want those items in the regular trash, especially when much of our trash is picked over by sorters recovering recyclable materials. You don't want them to encounter medical waste.
Somewhere else the office will have regular trash cans for regular office waste; used envelopes, discarded papers, and the remnants of the receptionists lunch and the bag she carried it in. The office trash is disposed of by the same service that disposes of our household trash. It's much more expensive to dispose of the medical waste which gets special handling.
Suppose the doctor and his/her staff were to dump both types of waste into a common dumpster. That wouldn't make sense, because the dumpster would contain medical waste, the entire contents would have to be treated as medical waste and receive the expensive handling. It's much better to have the ordinary trash separate from the smaller volume of medical waste that needs special handling.
Recall the composition of spent reactor fuel that I cited above:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel
3% of the spent fuel is fission products that are radioactive. This is analogous to the medical waste; this stuff needs special handling and needs a special repository to lock it away while it decays.
1% of the spent fuel is Plutonium and other actinides. This stuff also is analogous to the medical waste, and requires special handling.
96% of the spent fuel is Uranium - both U-235 and U-238. This is EXACTLY the same stuff we took out of the ground. Why not just put it back where we got it? The Uranium is like the office trash that is mixed in with the medical waste. By itself, it would be easy to dispose of; but because it is co-mingled with other nasty stuff, we have to handle it all as if it were all nasty stuff.
Reprocessing separates the above classes of materials. Once you get the 96% that is just Uranium separated by itself, just like having separate office trash; it's easy to dispose of.
For 96% of the stuff that is in nuclear waste, burying it in Yucca Mountain or what ever we decide to do; is overkill.
The only stuff that needs the special treatment is the 4% of spent fuel that is NOT Uranium.
Therefore, reprocessing reduces the amount of stuff you have to treat special; by a factor of 25!!!
Damn the cost. At the bussbar, nuclear generate electricity costs about 2 cents per kw-hour. Of that, about 0.1 cents is for waste disposal. Reprocessing increases the disposal cost by about 80%. Lets say it increases it by 100%, i.e. doubles it. So now our nuclear generated electricity costs 2.1 cents per kw-hour at the bussbar.
That extra 5% in cost buys us a dramatic reduction in how much waste we need to process specially. It also allows us to return the really long-lived stuff, the Plutonium and actinides, back to the reactor which is the only thing that can transmute those long-lived radioisotopes into short-lived radioisotopes as Dr. Till points out in the interview with Richard Rhodes for PBS's Frontline:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Q: The fission products.
A: Fission products. But none of the long-lived toxic elements like plutonium and americium or curium, the so-called manmade elements. They're the long-lived toxic ones. And they're recycled back into the reactor ... and work every bit as well as plutonium.
Q: So they go in, and then those are broken into fission products, or some of it is. Right?
A: Yes.
Q: And you repeat the process.
A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.
Arjun doesn't like reprocessing because he's just anti-nuclear and it deprives him of something to complain about.
I frequently asks anti-nukes what they want to be done with nuclear waste. The answer I get is that they never wanted it created in the first place. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed, so their response is really a non-answer. However, I take it that they would like not to have a repository with Plutonium in it somewhere. They want to get rid of that Plutonium. That's their main concern.
The scenario I outline above is the one way that we can get rid of all the Plutonium. Unfortunately, the anti-nukes don't want the best solution to their problem, even when it is handed to them. I guess they're having too much fun complaining about the problem than to want to solve it.
PamW
kristopher
(29,798 posts)It is sourced to the Dept of Energy's EIS on the Bush proposal to set up a reprocessing program in the US. We've had this conversation before so you know that.
Why are you therefore saying something you absolutely know to be false?
THE MYTHOLOGY AND MESSY REALITY OF NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING,
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. April 8, 2010
On the Web at http://www.ieer.org/reports/reprocessing2010.pdf
This is more of the typical WEASEL WORDING that some people engage in.
It reminds me of a question that has been used on IQ tests:
Q: How many legs does a horse have if you count the tail as a leg?
The unintelligent part of the populace falls for the bait and says 5.
The intelligent part of the populace says 4 reasoning that just because someone says to count the tail as a leg, doesn't really make it a leg.
Kris, I don't give a damn about what you, or Bush, or anyone else for that matter says about disposing of Uranium. I only care about what the SCIENCE says. Scientifically, there's ZERO reason for putting Uranium in a facility like Yucca Mountain and treating it like Plutonium or High Level Nuclear waste; just because you or some politicians want to call it that.
PamW
RobertEarl
(13,685 posts)Here are the other questions you ignored:
How much did it cost?
What will be the price of burning a ton of plutonium?
You do realize nuclear is not looked upon favorably by financiers, right?
(really not answered. yes or no would suffice. and i note the reactors you describe are all government owned, yes?)
And, while we are at it, PW, what do your friends say we should do about Fukushima?
PamW
(1,825 posts)i note the reactors you describe are all government owned, yes?)
=========================
First, the facilities I named were not reactors; they were reprocessing facilities.
The French facilities at LaHague are government-owned because in France the government owns the whole electric network, the nuclear power plants that produce the energy, the grid, the reprocessing plants that deal with the waste - so there's nothing special about the reprocessing facility being government-owned.
The US facility I mention is government owned; but why is that?
I wish the anti-nukes would be consistent, or at least study the history to know what decisions their anti-nuke predecessors made. Back in the '70s, the nuclear industry was prepared to take on the task of cleaning up the "backend" of the nuclear fuel cycle. The industry was building reprocessing facilities. West Valley Nuclear Fuel Services undertook building a reprocessing facility in West Valley, New York. Another facility was undertaken for Barnwell, South Carolina.
However, the anti-nukes at the time said, "We don't trust you evil corporations to do the job of nuclear waste disposal properly. You won't do it right, and you'll cut corners. We don't trust you." So they got Congress to outlaw reprocessing by private industry. The policy would be that the Federal Government would do the job of waste disposal, but the industry would pay for it by paying a special tax to the Nuclear Waste Fund. That's the situation we have today. Congress made the industry scrap their plans for doing it themselves.
Now the anti-nukes ask, "Why isn't the industry stepping up to the plate to deal with their waste. Why does it always fall to the Government to take care of the waste?"
It's that way because a previous generation of anti-nukes wanted it that way.
PamW
RobertEarl
(13,685 posts)Finally, you nailed something. And your baby, Fukushima proves it.
Now what are you brilliant people gonna do about Fukushima?
PamW
(1,825 posts)First, we recognize that the main reasons Fukushima happened was due to defects in the Japanese plants that the USA doesn't allow. The Japanese allowed the fuel tanks for the diesel generators to be above ground at dockside for easy filling. In the USA, the tanks are required to be buried. The Japanese allow the diesel generators themselves to be in non-watertight basements. In the USA, the diesel generators either have to be significantly above grade or housed below grade in water-tight vaults. When the Japanese attempted to fly in portable generators, they couldn't be connected to the plant because they had the wrong connectors. In the USA, the reactor licensees are required to have compatible generators ready off-site, and they are required to drill in flying them in. If they have incompatible connectors, you'll find that out on your first drill.
So the US plants don't have the deficiencies that the Japanese plants do. We anticipated those problems without having to have an accident first. Still, it is only prudent to examine the Japanese accident to see if there was anything that happened that we missed.
As for what to do with Fukushima; that's up to the Japanese, just as what to do with the even worse problem of Chernobyl, where you had the reactor innards open to the environment; was handled in a manner chosen by the Russians that built it.
PamW
RobertEarl
(13,685 posts)That's it? The best you and your brilliant nuclear physicists can come up with is leave it to the Japanese?
Ok, lets go with that. Know what the Japanese have decided? Shut down nuclear power.
That's the best answer in years, and it comes from direct experience, not theoretical BS.
You might remind all your brilliant friends and colleagues that they'll be needing a new line of work; My advice: learn plumbing. That's pretty much the conclusion Einstein came to, eh? "Shoulda been a plumber"
PamW
(1,825 posts)First, I can't comment on what to do because I don't know what the damage really is.
Secondly, as I have said many times on this forum; I have ZERO at stake in the nuclear power industry.
My job doesn't have anything to do with commercial nuclear power.
I and the other nuclear physicists work on research paid by the US Government.
We are not affected at all by the commercial reactors.
PamW
bananas
(27,509 posts)When Bush's GNEP reprocess/recycle plan was cancelled, I pointed out:
IIRC the NAS report is what put the nail in the coffin.
Tom Clements on the cancellation:
"This decision to halt the reprocessing EIS is celebrated by those who know the technical absurdity, proliferation risks and high costs involved with pursuit of commercial reprocessing of radioactive spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. We thank Secretary (Steven) Chu for taking this important step," said Tom Clements of Friends of the Earth. "The decision to cancel ... is a clear victory for the environment of South Carolina and taxpayers but a big setback to narrow special interests who had hoped to profit from a commercial reprocessing facility being built at the Savannah River Site."
An earlier article by Frank von Hippel in Scientific American:
Plans are afoot to reuse spent reactor fuel in the U.S. But the advantages of the scheme pale in comparison with its dangers
By Frank N. von Hippel
... It is exactly this failed reactor type that the DOE now proposes to develop and deploy ...
Some excellent earlier articles by Ivan Oelrich at the Federation of American Scientists:
This afternoon, a committee of the National Research Council, a research arm of the National Academy of Science, issued a report that is extremely critical of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, or GNEP, an administration plan to restart separating plutonium from used commercial nuclear reactor fuel, something the United States has not done for three decades. I have argued that the goals of GNEP, while scientifically possible and perhaps someday economically justifiable, are decades premature. I am relieved to discover that the committee report comes to essentially the same conclusion.
Links to sources for the above in this thread: I put some links in this thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x200775
GreenWin
(3 posts)With Fukushima confirming the extreme dangers of using nuclear fission as a base load energy source in the future - where do we go from here? One place is to the latest developments in nuclear fusion now called Low Energy Nuclear reactions. The past 23 years has produced some 1400 papers and peer reviewed articles on the Pons Fleishmann effect. Dr. Peter Hagelstein of MIT, Dr. Rob Duncan of University Missouri, three divisions of NASA including Langley Research under Dr. Dennis Bushnell all confirm the viability of this new source of energy to relieve the burden on fission.
But there are problems. In particular the resistance of old school nuclear science to anything new or disruptive. That arrives in the form of interference in the scientific method - recently explained by Dr. Hagelstein as follows:
"I recently had the experience of working with a large company in the U.S. who’s interested in pursuing experiments in this area and helping out. So we put in, we discussed with the technical people at this company of the possibility that they might put in some money for the support of the replication of the Piantelli experiment. So they got the agreement, they got the money, they got it to MIT, and we thought: good, now we can make some progress.
However, a very famous physicist at MIT who is involved in the energy program found out what we were trying to do, and he cancelled the program and he called up the vice president of the company and said some things that weren’t very polite about the research. And not only did the funding not come and the experiments didn’t happen, but my colleagues at the company were very worried about where the’re going to work next. As you know, there’re unemployment issues currently in our bad economy, so there’s a fundamental difficulty with respect to getting support for the experiments, and what that means is that the science can be expected to go very slowly for these reasons, until a solution is found to this problem.” May 4, 2012 Dr. Peter Hagelstein Prof. MIT Engineering speaking to Atom Unexplored Conference in Torino, Italy
In effect Dr. Hagelstein has blown the whistle on blatant, potentially illegal, intervention in the scientific method at MIT. As Pekka noted – in his country this would cause an immediate investigation and action in court. The United States cannot expect to excel in this critical technology unless political corruption of this caliber is apprehended and prosecuted.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)"baseload" is an economic construct built around obsolete centralized thermal technology, not a technical requirement for producing end-use power. Renewables can deliver more reliable, safer, cleaner, and cheaper power that isn't a tool of social control or a threat to world peace.
PamW
(1,825 posts)As always, Kris is in ERROR as to what "baseload" is.
It's very simple. Baseload is the fraction of your energy demand that is demanded for all 24 hours of a day.
It has a very simple mathematical definition. If you look at the plot for demand vs time of day over a 24 hour day; then the baseload is just the minimum value of that function.
Now watch the mathematically-challenged Kris come in and say that doesn't exist
Any of the mathematically cognizant out there kinows that ANY function has a minimum. It also has a maximum.
The max and min may not be unique; but they exist.
Even a function that is a constant. In that case, the maximum and minimum are the same, and the function takes on its max and min values, not a a unique point, but for the entire domain of the function.
Kris is just plain CONFUSED.
The fact that you have a non-zero demand for electricity at 2 AM in the morning has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether the distribution system is centralized or decentralized. It just has to do with the fact that there is a non-zero demand for electricity at 2 AM in the morning!!
GEESH!!
PamW
kristopher
(29,798 posts)Have you ever looked in the dictionary and seen that most words have a series of differing definitions for the same word, P/G?
You are tying to confuse two related but different definitions of baseload. One is as you describe, the other definition refers to a type of generation that has a specific set of characteristics including being large-scale, thermal, and centralized. It is also difficult to switch on and off and is most efficient when operated at a constant load for as long a period as possible. These coal/nuclear plants are called "baseload" because for the past 40 years they have been the most economical way to fill the demand, not because they are technically the only way that the demand can be filled.
It is unquestionably possible to fill all demand (and do it with greater reliability) using the full array of renewable sources that nature offers us. The supply curves go together in a different pattern than when it is centered around coal/nuclear, but matching the demand curve is the objective and 100% renewables can and will match the demand curve perfectly.
If you didn't have dishonesty you wouldn't have anything, would you P/G?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112711618
XemaSab
(60,212 posts)is against DU rules.
PamW
(1,825 posts)WRONG - the definition of "baseload" is as follows:
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/baseload
Minimum load of a power generator over a given period of time.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Baseload
(Electronics) the more or less constant part of the total load on an electrical power-supply system
There's nothing requiring the power generator to be centralized.
Now it happens that most of our baseload power plants are also centralized, because most of our power plants in general are centralized. But the two concepts are different and distinct.
Just because there exists a fast red car, to say that being red also means being fast is dismally muddled "thinking".
The concept of color and concept of speed may intersect in a given vehicle; but they are distinct concepts.
Do you understand NOW???
PamW
kristopher
(29,798 posts)as if it was your original position. Where have I seen that tactic before???
Right, now I remember; it is what you tried to do after you falsified a citation from the NAS. You remember, right? When you said that you were quoting a 2004 paper that didn't exist you eventually had to make up a title and act like no one but you had a copy? Then you pretended you'd been quoting the 2010 paper I used to show your original quote was made up.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112711618
You have very, very very odd ethics. They remind me of this:
Ridiculous Romney Claims Obama Auto Bailout Was Really His Idea
http://www.politicususa.com/romney-obama-auto-bailout.html
Last edited Wed May 9, 2012, 10:21 AM - Edit history (1)
Kris,
Weren't you just warned that calling other people liars was against forum rules.
Additionally, I seem to remember it is also against rules to liken DU members to Republicans. I am NOT changing my position; so you have no reason to compare me to Republican Romney.
If you read my post above; you will see that I always contended that "baseload" meant minimum value; just as the dictionary definitions state. So where am I changing my position.
I didn't "pretend" to quote the 2010 paper; I DID quote the 2010 NAS study:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12619&page=258
A grid can support some intermittent resources without electricity storage if sufficient excess capacity is available to maintain resource adequacy. As described below and in Chapter 7, in many cases the amount of intermittent renewable resources that can be supported is approximately 20 percent, particularly for utilities that rely primarily on hydropower or natural-gas-fired generation..
I had been saying ALL ALONG that in the absence of a backup storage system, that the National Academy of Sciences say that renewables can only by 20% of the generating capacity due to their intermittent nature.
Contrary to the ill-considered contention above, renewables NEVER "match the demand curve perfectly. How can they? The amount of energy that you get from renewables is what Mother Nature is offering at the time. For solar, the output of solar is dependent on where the Sun is in the sky; and of course, land-based solar gives you ZERO power at night. Solar is also subject to variance due to clouds. Wind is also subject to the whims of Mother Nature. It was a quite warm day yesterday, and as I was driving home I can see the local windfarm, one of the largest in the USA, and ALL turbines were at a dead stop. ( If a nice high pressure system covers the area, you don't have a pressure differential for the turbines to work off. Everywhere is at the same high pressure ). Renewables only give you what Mother Nature is offering at the time, and that is totally disconnected with what the demand curve is.
Dispatchable power generators, like coal, gas, nuclear, geothermal, and hydro have throttles. You can throttle the power generation to match demand - in fact, you HAVE to in order to keep the grid stable. The grid is just wires, it doesn't store energy. So what ever is demanded has to be exactly matched by energy generation.
Renewables CAN'T do that. Renewables by their nature are intermittent, and have to have some other means to match the demand; either other dispatchable power plants or energy storage. That's why the National Academy of Sciences puts the 20% limit on renewables quoted above.
PamW
RobertEarl
(13,685 posts)Headed them off at the pass!! No telling what kind of futurama type Fukushima that person has saved humanity from.
As for work, try plumbing. It pays good and is really, really is safe.
PamW
(1,825 posts)In effect Dr. Hagelstein has blown the whistle on blatant, potentially illegal, intervention in the scientific method at MIT.
=================
Why do people fabricate all kinds of legal imperatives so that they can say something is illegal???
MIT is a private university, and the choice of what it wants to work on and not work on is up to MIT's administration.
If some professor dreams up a project that the MIT Administration deems as being foolish, and injurious to the Institute's reputation; then they can over-ride the professor and say they won't do that research.
There's no law that compels a University, especially a private one; into doing a particular line of research. Even if some legislature attempted it; it would be Constitutionally dubious.
MIT can decided what research it is willing to pursue, and in that they are responsible solely to the MIT Corporation which is the governing board in lieu of a board of regents.
PamW