DRY CASK: Steel and concrete casks encase more than 9,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel rods in the U.S.--and a more permanent solution for the radioactive waste appears no closer.
Image: Courtesy of IAEA
More In This Article
-
Overview
The Future of Nuclear Power
-
Overview
Finding Fissile Fuel
-
Overview
Reactivating Nuclear Reactors for the Fight against Climate Change
-
Overview
Comic Books from the Atomic Age
-
The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
Read More »
[This is Part 3 of an In-Depth Report on The Future of Nuclear Power.]
A 98-foot-wide, two-mile-long ditch with steep walls 33 feet deep that bristles with magnets and radar reflectors will stand for millennia as a warning to future humans not to trifle with what is hidden inside the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) outside Carlsbad, N.M. Paired with 48 stone or concrete 105-ton markers, etched with warnings in seven languages ranging from English to Navajo as well as human faces contorted into expressions of horror, the massive installation is meant to stand for at least 10,000 years—twice as long as the Egyptian pyramids have survived.
But the plutonium ensconced in the salt mine at the center of this installation will be lethal to humans for at least 25 times that long—even once the salt walls ooze inward to entomb the legacy of American atomic weapons. And WIPP will only hold a fraction, though a more deadly fraction, of the amount of nuclear waste the U.S. plans to store at Yucca Mountain in Nevada or some other site designated to replace it as a permanent repository for the residue of nuclear reactions.
The Desert Space Foundation, an arts group in Las Vegas, Nev., sponsored a contest to come up with a similar warning system for that site. The winner: genetically-modified yucca cacti turned cobalt blue that would be planted across the entire Yucca Mountain site—to serve as a warning to future civilizations of the radioactive waste within the mountain fastness.
But eerie blue cacti or massive monoliths in the desert may attract rather than repel future explorers—the warnings of the Egyptians did little to deter modern archaeologists. There already are those who see what would be hidden inside Yucca as a resource rather than a curse—after all, as much as 95 percent of the energy in fissile uranium remains in the waste. "The majority of the energy is still in the spent fuel," says Rod McCullum, director of the Yucca Mountain project at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), an industry group. "With Yucca Mountain, you can pull [the nuclear waste] out and reprocess it."
Lonely mountain
In 1987 Congress passed legislation that required the Department of Energy (DoE) to take possession of and properly store the spent fuel from the nation's 104 nuclear reactors by the then far-off date of February 1998. Now 11 years behind schedule, the DoE's primary response—to bury it deep within Yucca Mountain—is no closer to being a permanent solution.
The Energy Department last June finally applied to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal government agency that oversees the nation's nuclear power plants, for a license to build the repository at Yucca. But taxpayers still spend roughly $1 billion a year in fines paid by the federal government) to utilities to compensate them for the delay.
All told, the nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year, according to the DoE—and most of it ends up sitting on-site because there is nowhere else to put it. "When we remove fuel from the core after its final usage, we store it in a pool on site. We have the capacity to store it there for many years," says Bryan Dolan, vice president of nuclear development at Duke Energy Corp., which operates three nuclear power plants in South Carolina. The amount of space required to store it, after all, is "incredibly small."
See what we're tweeting about
53 Comments
Add CommentThe article includes a statement that needed more analysis. "Ranging from workers' coveralls to water filters, some of this stream of nuclear waste no longer has a place for its disposal eitherparticularly the highly radioactive materials rated as classes B and C, such as reactor vessel heads. "That stuff has only one place it can go," says Ralph Andersen, chief health physicist at NEI, "a deep geologic repository," like Yucca Mountain."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe worker's coveralls were worn by a worker. They cannot possibly be so lethal as to need to be stuffed underground for millennia. They are, perhaps, slightly radioactive and will remain so for a while.
Let us treat the very serious radioactive waste components with enormous respect, but let us not live in fear, for generations, of the overalls Bob wore Thursday.
Excellent article that clearly addresses a topic that the nuclear industry and its apologists want to avoid. Unless the waste can be economically recycled, we should admit that nuclear power was a mistake and toss it in the trash bin of history. Storing waste for thousands of centuries is ludicrous, not to mention the outrageous taxpayer subsidies the industry has received for decades. The cost/benefit/risk equation clearly points to other sources of energy to power our future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Unless the waste can be economically recycled, we should admit that nuclear power was a mistake and toss it in the trash bin of history. Storing waste for thousands of centuries is ludicrous, not to mention the outrageous taxpayer subsidies the industry has received for decades. The cost/benefit/risk equation clearly points to other sources of energy to power our future. " -discipline
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat other sources do you propose? with nuclear at least the waste is small and we know how to protect ourselves from it. I'm not a big supporter of Yucca mountain, but I'd rather live next to a couple storage casks than a coal plant.
I think that this article raises a valid issue. We are blindered by our own tecnhology, and we cease to understand that others will stand on our shoulders. Some bright spark may find a way to turn our trash into gold. Perhaps part of the $ trillion stimulus package package should be spent on this?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKill two birds with one stone; clean up real live problems (not imaginary ones like AGW ) and make strides towards energy independence. Sounds like a win-win to me (except for the 3rd world despots who will be out their eagerly awaited carbon tax transfer $$. No Gulfstream for you!)
Spent nuclear fuel is an energy source with the capacity to be productively renewed twice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe initial heat flux of the global inventory of spent nuclear fuel has the energy capacity of approximately 200 operational reactors. The energy return on investment for North America’s unconventional hydrocarbon reserves – shale and bitumen - are 3 and 5.2/1 respectively. This free, carbon-free energy source has the potential for the sustainable development of close to 6 billion barrels of synthetic oil annually. Importing foreign spent fuel insures a terrorist or proliferator can never access the plutonium within. Using the heat developed principally from fission products does not preclude safe reprocessing of spent fuel once this radioactivity has decayed. Excess weapons plutonium and plutonium from commercial sources can be eliminated in the sidewall or floor of a repository or the lower reaches of a borehole later filled with spent fuel thus eliminating the security risk associated with these materials.
A recently concluded study by French, Australian, Canadian and American scientists notes the unprecedented capacity of bitumen to sequester radiocuclides. http://nbbusinessjournal.canadaeast.com/journal/article/504736 The majority of Alberta’s bitumen also lies beneath a capping shale formation that would preclude either radionuclides or hydrocarbons from migrating to the surface.
Lord Oxburgh, one of the world’s leading geologists and former British chairman of Shell, has said of the Nuclear Assisted Hydrocarbon Production Method, “I have often myself wondered whether it would be feasible to harness the heat generated by sequestered nuclear materials. I suspect that the major problems might well be political rather than technological.”
The real political problem should arise from not capitalizing on existing opportunities to address existing existential threats.
This article is misleading, as it porports to offer the solution of converting nuclear waste into an energy source. This in itselfd is laudable, but the articles focus seems to be on the problem of nuclear waste, which we know is a problem. If it is true that we leave 95% of the energy in spent nuclear rods, then there should be a Manhatten-like efftort to get that energy, and that should have been the gist of this article, if there is anything new to ad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article is misleading, as it purports to offer the solution of converting nuclear waste into an energy source. This in itself is laudable, but the articles focus seems to be on the problem of nuclear waste, which we know is a problem. If it is true that we leave 95% of the energy in spent nuclear rods, then there should be a Manhattan-like effort to get that energy, and that should have been the gist of this article, if there is anything new to add.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSierra9093 see previous post. There is no need for Manhattan effort. Simply capitalize on the opportunity
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am disturbed and disappointed by the Scientific American editorial staff in allowing this article by David Biello to be published in their magazine. Biello obviously has little understanding of nuclear physics and even less about its application to nuclear power. And unfortunately, the SciAm editors don't have any more understanding; and, very apparently, didn't contact any reputable and knowledgeable person to review the article for them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI searched for some info on Biello on-line. The only significant items I found regarding his background were his collaboration on some children's books regarding railroads, and the fact that he was working for the "Hollywood Reporter" in 2005. Hardly a glowing recommendation concerning his ability to address the issues in this article.
By sensationalizing the issues, and using misleading terminology incorrectly, Biello continues the basic problem with nuclear energy - ignorance of the basics and the resulting confusion that such ignorance generates.
The increasing energy demand by humankind is a problem! However, clouding the issues of how/when/where to find solutions to this problem has to be considered as bad, or worse, as doing nothing about it! Biello is blatantly guilty of this, and SciAm tacitly so.
Some comments suggest that the author lacks the technical qualifications to have such an article published by SciAm. I have no such complaint. There are many aspects of this problem that are not technical. In a study by the National Research Council in 2001 of US and international programs to safely dispose of "spent" nuclear fuel and other forms of high-level radioactive waste, the point was made that "Today the biggest challenges to (nuclear waste) disposition are societal."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFew take the bother to actually review what is planned for Yucca and how it is expected to perform the intended purpose of safely isolating the waste underground at Yucca. More specifically the Department of Energy must convince the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the facility will protect workers (remember them?) and the public during the emplacement and for as long as one million years in terms of radiation dose standards set by the EPA. Readers and the public can review the license application submitted by the DOE at the NRC or DOE web sites.
My recommendation to President Obama is to respect the NRC license review process to evaluate the science of the Yucca Mountain repository rather than accept the unproven contentions by the State of Nevada, just because he might have been "influenced" to make a statement during the presidential campaign.
Without actually reading the article, I can't evaluate if Biello's treatment is just ideologically offensive to cdrkln or truly clueless. But I do know that if the issue can't be understood by laypeople (particularly a trained journalist vetted by SciAm), then it doesn't belong in a democracy or any other nonauthoritarian state.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a trained domestic engineer, I notice that none of these discussions about the energy people supposedly need ever references our actual NEEDS - clean air and water, healthy food, and warmth. As a trained mechanical engineer (MSME UCB), I can't understand why there is so little attention to the actual performance required for the best specification. The ends do not justify the means, mostly because the means are the ends in the making.
I think you all need to go home and talk to your Depression-era great/grandmothers about this.
Muriel Strand, P.E.
www.sustainablesacramento.blogspot.com
While my geology is limited, on the storage of long term waste, I have always wondered why we don't stabilize in glass or ceramic and drill to a continental sublimation point i.e. send it to the center of the earth. I'm sure there must be a good reason
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile my geology is limited, on the storage of long term waste, I have always wondered why we don't stabilize in glass or ceramic and drill to a continental sublimation point i.e. send it to the center of the earth. I'm sure there must be a good reason
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"... including a fire caused by a leak of its molten salt coolant, ..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Japanese Monju Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) has liquid sodium (Na) metal as a coolant, not Molten Salt. The Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) has molten salt as its coolant and fuel. The MSR's Molten Salt, such as ORNL's Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE), was a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and Beryllium fluoride (BeF2) in which was dissolved the fissile uranium as uranium hexafluoride (UF4) and the plutonium trifluoride (PuF3). Since the metallic elements (lithium, beryllium, uranium, & plutonium) are already fully oxidized by the fluorine (a very powerful oxidizer) and thus tightly bound, molten salts can not burn. In fact, they are quite inert and unreactive, and this is a major safety advantage MSRs have over other reactors, especially the Liquid Metal Fast Reactors with their volatile and reactive sodium coolants.
Had they implemented my suggestions at a Hanford meeting in the portland bpi. building in the early 90s we would have a solution for the waste. Lets try it again OK put a billion dollar prize on the reuse of the waste and from the workable results the problem will be solved. Ryan Goosmann again 2009
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHad they taken my advice in the early 90s They would have solved the problem of waste.This Idea was discussed at a hanford watch meeting so here I go again. Put a billion dollar price tag on on the reuse of spent fuel and from those results you will have your solution. May someone different listen this time and get results. Ryan Goosmann 2009
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMay I be pedantic and point out that it is a millenniUM. More than one; millennia.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis whole article is based on the false premise that ANY level of radioactivity is toxic. Living systems are self-repairing. You get more ionizing damage from the free radicals created by the biological processes of being alive than some of the radioactive levels people like the author are trying to tell you will give you cancer in 10 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRyan & born1138,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHave the two of you been reading Jerry Pournelle on this subject? A large prize would produce a reprocessing solution pretty quickly. And when the fuel can no longer be reprocessed, there's not much need to drill; just drop the glass-stabilized waste into some natural subduction zone. But according to <http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf04ap2.html#subduction_zones>, this “is a form of sea disposal [and] is therefore not permitted by international agreements”.
Maybe these agreements need renegotiating.
Sure, those agreements can be renegotiated but we've got plenty of decades to do so. For now we want to convert all our spent fuel to metal fuel assemblies for fast reactors and use it up making electricity, for with our present reactor systems we use less than 1% of the energy in the uranium we mine. That way we could use 100%, and the waste we'd get out of it would only be radioactive for a few hundred years. At that point we'd have it embedded in glass that couldn't leach anything into the environment for thousands of years, and it would only be radioactive for a few hundred. Drop that into the deep sea mud and forget about it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBuilding the Integral Fast Reactor systems to utilize all this spent fuel and then produce the short-lived waste will take a while, then the waste can be retained on-site for their 40-60 year service lives. Thus we've got at least half a century to sort it out. It wouldn't HAVE to be disposed of at sea, of course. But it would be the easiest and cheapest way to do it, with no impact on the environment. Hopefully after another half-century or so the logic of this will be evident and public policy will be based more on reason than hysteria and misinformation (call me an optimist).
As for Lyman's contention that fast reactors have never worked, that is patently untrue. BN-350, BN-600, FFTF, EBR-II, all of these operated for years, even decades, quite successfully. We don't need a Manhattan Project to figure this out. We already figured it out at Argonne National Laboratory in the 80s and 90s. The issue now is political. We know how to convert and use the spent fuel. For a clear explanation that will answer a lot of the questions posed by this article and its commenters, take a look at the book Prescription for the Planet - The Painless Remedy for Our Energy and Environmental Crises, available at Amazon.com.
The article states, "And even if reprocessing or fast breeders could be made to work cheaply and efficientlyeliminating spent reactor rods as radioactive refusethere would still be thousands of tons of nuclear waste in need of a permanent home." Yes, but if that waste was in the form of short-lived and inert waste as described above that would put a whole different slant on things, wouldn't it? Breeders of the IFR type CAN be made to work cheaply and efficiently. The commercial version of what was developed by the IFR research is designed and ready to be built to prove the point. Now it's just politics that stands in the way. Hopefully, Obama will break that logjam and let it happen.
And yet, 5 times the amount of uranium is released into the environment from burning coal as is mined each year. And nobody even notices.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe need nuclear power. If we had gone nearly 100% nuclear in the 1960's and 1970's we would not have global warming today.
ERROR IN FACT:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, the U.S. nuclear industry has produced roughly 64,000 metric tons (one metric ton equals 1.1 U.S. tons) of radioactive used fuel rods in total or, in the words of NEI, enough "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (Of course, actually concentrating rods this way would set off a nuclear chain reaction.)
Mr. Biello should have checked with a nuclear engineer, or even someone who knew anything about reactors and their fuel. Without a moderator, usually water, reactor fuel, spent or otherwise, can not “set off a nuclear chain reaction”. I suspect Mr. Biello thought the aside makes him appear witty, but it does not. That it got past the editors reflects poorly on them.
ERROR IN FACT AND BAD GRAMMAR:
“…a deep shaft bored into the side of the mountain sheathed in stainless steel…”
Neither the shaft nor the mountain is sheathed in stainless steel. Mr. Biello is correct, however, that Yucca Mountain is unlikely to ever receive any spent fuel.
“The encased rods still manage to emit roughly one millirem of radiation per hour and heat the outside of the 100-plus ton concrete casing to as much as 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius).”
1 millirem per hour is indeed above background, but you do realize that “…as much as 90 degrees Fahrenheit” isn’t even body temperature, right? And do you realize that the older the spent fuel, the less radiation and heat it puts out?
There are a lot of other weaknesses in this article. It is alarmist, unbalanced, and poorly researched. I would expect better of this publication.
This is great, because I am still a believer in nuclear technology
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is a fundamental in the concept of disposal of hazardous wastes: it implies some suitable dump where it can be out of sight and mind permanently. We should rather think of "perpetual care storage" which will last as long as the hazard exists or as long as the civilization survives whichever is shorter. Any producer of hazardous waste should be required to put up enough money to endow a perpetual care fund to safely store it. A good safe hazardous materials perpetual care facility is the ideal industrial addition to any community. It produces no pollution, has many stable high paying jobs, is immune to the economic cycle, and cannot be easily moved elsewhere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy comment should have read "There is a fundamental FLAW in the concept of disposal...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCurrent nuclear fuel cycles are committed to generating "waste" even though it's been known for years that more energy can be extracted from uranium via fast reactors. But money is generated for Governments by continuing to mine uranium ore - thus we're in this idiotic situation of barely using the fuel we mine. The whole stupid game sickens me as a pro-nuclear supporter. It's time an informed government broke the back of the whole economy of waste and supported better technologies.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe more I have read on nuclear power (and the origins growing out of the early nuclear bomb testing era), the worse and more dangerous it looks. Ernest Sternglass (Secret Fallout, 1982) spent decades studying radiation issues and determined beyond a shadow of a doubt (to him and a number of scientists) that even low-level radiation is harmful and in fact deadly (particulary for fetuses, newborns and pregnant women). Given the repression of good information from the Three Mile Island incident, NRC negligence to ineptitude (see www.ucsusa.org) and the many problems with nuclear, I think it is very unwise to attempt to use it any more. These articles at least touch on some of the concerns, though are still short of fully disclosing many of the dangers. For the intellectually courageous, concider the dire warnings of a contemporary of Nicoli Tesla, Walter Russell ("Atomic Suicide?" - www.;philosophy.org ). Nuclear power could indeed have more dangers than currently understood. Scientific knowledge is never 'complete' - it is always partial (based on limited information) and subject to periodic revision as more understanding comes to light. We should be VERY cautious with nuclear materials. In fact Russell predicted the ozone hole, and it being largely due to fission materials being used on the planet's surface. Our very oxygen may be in danger. Some (apparently unacknowledged) research has begun to confirm this. We should be concentrating on energy efficiency, renewables and new emerging sources (cold fusion?) - that is our future; not crater to an irradiated, dying planet to reduce carbon footprints with a 'silver bullet.' This is the same logic as the current over-use of allopathic medicine (a crisis intervention method; strong drugs with side effects that shock the system to health when vitally threatened).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAside from the multitude of dangers with nuclear power, just the cost factor is daunting:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCraig A. Severance, 2008, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power. See p. 32, list of “significant Nuclear Business Risks.” This is one of the most detailed cost analyses publically available on the current generation of nuclear power plants being considered in this country; by a leading expert in power plant costs, co-author of The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger 1976), and former assistant to the chairman and to commerce counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission;
Synapse Energy Economics, Inc, July 2008, http://www.synapse-energy.com/Downloads/SynapsePaper.2008-07.0.Nuclear-Plant-Construction-Costs.A0022.pdf ;
Union of Concerned Scientists: "The risks posed by climate change may turn out to be so grave that the United States and the world cannot afford to rule out nuclear power as a major contributor to addressing global warming. However, it may also turn out that nuclear power cannot be deployed worldwide on the scale needed to make a significant dent in emissions without resulting in unacceptably high safety and security risks."
Comprehensive study of many concerns:
of Concerned Scientists, December, 2007, Nuclear Power in a Warming World, http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear-power-in-a-warming-world.pdf
As to the savings of greenhouse gases:
Physicist Dr. Tom Cochran extrapolated from the nuclear industry calculations for its future and found that by adding 700 gigawatts of nuclear electricity to the world – double today’s capacity – for the fifty years from 2050 to 2100 would entail:
• Adding about 1,200 new nuclear plants (provided they last forty years and have no meltdowns);
•Adding fifteen new uranium enrichment plants;
•Generating 0.97 million tons of high-level nuclear waste containing enough plutonium for hundreds of thousands of nuclear weapons;
•Outfitting fourteen Yucca mountains to store the waste;
•Adding fifty new reprocessing plants to extract plutonium if the Generation IV reactors were to proceed;
•Investing $1 to $2 trillion.
The effect would then be to cut the global average temperature rise by just 0.2%; far from helping to actually reduce global warming.
Without reprocessing, accumulation of toxic and hazardous spent nuclear renders nuclear power not sustainable. The specter of vast accumulations of such waste littering the land is truly unacceptable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, with appropriate reprocessing, the resulting waste stream from power plants can be reduced by orders of magnitude and acceptably benign. Moreover, the cost of reprocessing facilities will be mostly offset by the new nuclear produced. It makes no sense to enthusiastically recycle every industrial product on the planet- but not nuclear fuel!
Aside from what I posted already, this is a good summary of the problems with nuclar power - just the facts (and some good case studies with abundant qualified references):
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_power_plants/articles.cfm?ID=13447
"It is the folly of man to assert beliefs in the face of facts that prove them wrong." ~ Horatio (maybe someone famous said it also)
Most nuclear reactors in the United States are getting extended to 60 year operation and could get extended to 70 or even 80 years. So the the 40 year life estimate quoted by Hotario is wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChina is developing factory mass produced High Temperature nuclear reactors. A 200 MWe module is starting construction this year. They already performed a complete removal of control rods and coolant for the 10MWe pilot plant and it cooled down by itself. The plan is for mainly eight pack plants with a common control room. Factory mass production should drive construction times down to two years.
In the 1980s there were years with about 30 nuclear reactor completions worldwide. In the 1970s the US had 12 reactor completions in one year. China is currently building coal plants which are as big as nuclear plants and completing one per week. Westinghouse AP1000s are having modules mass produced in factories.
So 1200 nuclear plants over fifty years is very doable and a likely low estimate. The alternative is about 5 million five megawatt wind turbines. Those wind turbines are 60 stories high with blades like the wings of a 747. The equivalent power would take ten times as much cement.
The world energy needs are large. It costs a lot of money and requires a lot of things to be built to meet that need.
The world will be spending $2 trillion per year on energy and growing. So 1-2 trillion is just a tiny part of that spend.
Horatio quote : "However, it may also turn out that nuclear power cannot be deployed worldwide on the scale needed to make a significant dent in emissions without resulting in unacceptably high safety and security risks."
As opposed to the safety we have now ? 3 million dead each year from air pollution (World Health Org) Dieing 14 years early from diseases. Plus 30% of all sickness is air pollution related. More heart attacks, cancer, lung disease, asthma, allergies etc...
5000-10000 dead per year from coal mining alone.
How many dead from the oil related wars ?
Just because people have irrational fears. Boo. Nuclear. "Horatio just crapped his pants".
Yet. every other week. Another 200 people died in a coal mine accident in China. Or Air pollution reduces life span by several years for everyone. Or one square mile of Tennessee ruined by coal sludge spill. Coal waste: generation of hundred of millions of tons of waste products every year, including fly ash, bottom ash, flue gas desulfurization sludge, that contain mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, etc. Not stacked. Out into the air.
50% electricity is from coal
Good logic! Because nuclear radiation causes deaths has not been studied by 'main stream' agencies (wonder why?) then those deaths (no matter how many) are 'acceptable' given there are other causes of death? Duh. I cited several qualified sources. As I say, "folly to assert beliefs in the face of facts to the contrary." My pants are quite dry btw.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy position is that we should, in the face of all the environmental and health risks from nuclear and coal power, be 110% supporting 'Renewable/clean Energy Manhattan Projects.' True - coal has a lot of problems, and we have to get off of it also. To plan to plow trillions into nuclear, however, in my opinion, is foolish and obviously (if one is honest) not cost effective or reasonably safe. No doubt there will be break-throughs in energy development, and it is foolish to continue to put the world on a death track before they come, or do we care about coming generations? We can conserve, become more efficient and move to renewables with efforts at better storage technology (battery technology, etc.) without anymore nuclear or coal plants if we really are motivated. And, if we take a clear look at the facts, I do not see how one could not be motivated, other than just plan BS (belief system) business-as-usual mentality.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce again I sit here shaking my head in dismay. Our species is too confident for our own good. There exists in neither a single one of us nor groups of us who have the capabilities necessary to attempt what has been begun in the atomic sciences. Instead of using the benign energies bathing half of this planet each and every day faithfully for millions upon millions of years, we choose to think ourselves up to the task of harnessing nuclear reactions like we are gods and not the hairless, upright walking primates that we are. Oh well. I sit here consuming killowatt after killowatt from the nuclear power plant nearby as well as another that is coal-fired. Bad and bad again. I, like every one else without exception, have no answers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis, (Toni Medford) is certainly an honest response. NOBODY has the answers as yet. So, it would be wise to be less wasteful with energy and cautious with dangerous energy sources as we discover our way out of this delimma. We must reign in the corporate greed factor, however if we do not want to be victimized further.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe reasons (yes, there are more than one) that we do not use solar to replace nuclear are actually easy to find, if you look. One place to look right now is the middle of the USA, where snow and ice have hammered thousands of square miles. Solar doesn't work well there in the winter in the best of times, and it won't work at all under the current conditions. Most solar arrays are pretty fragile, and so any that are in that area are likely to need repair.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother place to look is at the environmental costs per unit of energy produced, from the mining of materials to the placement of the generating equipment to the disposal costs at the end of the equipment's useful life. This is where the anti-s go after nuclear power, but seldom do they apply the same standards to their favorites. Until recently, for photovoltaic system it was unlikely that they would produce over their lifetimes as much energy as it took to make them in the first place. The tech has improved, but it still doesn't compare well in most parts of the US.
Still another place to look is at the low power density of solar, even in the places it does well in. If you have industrial applications that require a lot of electricity, solar isn't a good choice.
That being said, I am a fan of solar applications where it works. Every flat roof in the southern tier of the US ought to have some type of solar energy system (or roof gardens, which can be viewed as a different solar collection system). Every house in that area that gets even a couple of hours of sun per day should pre-heat their water with solar. We should be sending solar cookers to the tropical third-world nations to save the forests and their women's time. Solar can and should be used more. But it doesn't solve all the energy problems, and it doesn't replace nuclear or coal (and wind doesn't replace them, either.)
Ernest Sternglass has an agenda, and is more than willing to mislead people in order to advance that agenda. I don't have a problem with someone becoming informed and deciding that they do not favor nuclear power. I do have a problem with people thinking that reading Sternglass and his ilk makes them informed. If you read his works with as critical an eye as you would an NRC report, you will not be comfortable citing him to support your position.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre there venues for discourse about solar constructions locked in low earth orbits? Is there only one billionaire investing his time and resources out of all those in similar positions of wealth and resource? Frankly, I can't give any credence to corporate efforts. Too much time and money is wasted in just shaping the idea of such enterprise much less seeing to fulfillment. I admit to a more than fair amount of cynicism but would relish some insight and even a tiny light at the end of this tunnel with no harkening to any heavy metal music, if you don't mind. Meaning: share 'em, if you got 'em! Links to more information. Peace!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, the spent fuel could very well have uses. I find the hysteria about the 250,000 year half life to be amusing. After all, if we dump arsenic, mercury, and other toxic elements into a landfill, what's the half life on them? The nuke waste will have all decayed but the elements still be there when the Sun explodes and melts the Earth. Should we take similar precautions to warn people about the elements in our landfills? My guess is that 1,000 years from now landfills and waste storage areas will be prized as natural resources.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are a number of good reasons:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this- Drilling to the necessary depth isn't feasible using today's technology
- Even if it were, there's no evidence that the intersections of tectonic plates create neatly defined or stable "sublimation points"
- Even if there were, pumping 60,000 tons of highly radioactive waste down such a bore hole would be technologically challenging and environmentally risky
- Sublimation zones are the source of most of the Earth's volcanic activity. What's to guarantee that a subsequent eruption wouldn't blow a large chunk of that radioactive material into the atmosphere? Such an event could make large sections of the Earth's surface uninhabitable.
Your idea is similar to suggestions that we "simply" launch nuclear waste into space, sending it into the sun. Besides prohibitive problems of scale, there's the daunting possibility of accident or sabotage. The explosion in ou atmosphere of a rocket carrying a tons of radioactive waste would be an environmental catastrophe.
No one's proposing building major solar energy facilities in the midwest, but in the southwestern desert, which is not subject to major winter storms. Arguing against solar power, wind power, etc. separately is disingenuous. As Al Gore points out (correctly) a concerted effort to build large scale wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and other environmentally benign generating facilities, along with a "smart" power grid and distributed energy storage system could supplant fossil fuels within a decade. We just need the will to do it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm afraid that you don't qualify as someone who knows something about nuclear reactions. Moderators are incorporated into reactors so that chain reactions will occur within the relatively small volume required for effective control and heat exchange. However, a sufficient volume of radioactive material can sustain low level chain reactions even without a moderator. There's growing evidence that this has occurred spontaneously in at least one geological concentration of uranium ore.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Boo. Nuclear. 'Horatio just crapped his pants'. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat on Earth is the matter with you to post such a stupid, vulgar statement. Are you still in elementary school? Have you no sense of propriety, no intellectual pride, no self respect?
Evidently not.
D Fox.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy understanding of radiation is that it consists of high energy particles made up of electron proton neutron and neutrino.
All of these particles carry charge.
So If these particles could be captured and their velocity decreased then thy could be converted into usable electric current.
Changing a usless waste product into an energy source that wil last for a thousand years
cdrkln, unfortunately you have not brought anything new to this conversation, other than generalities and wild accusations. You have not stated what your credentials are, nor what exactly you are contesting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNext time do your research and bring some corroborating evidence to support your claims, otherwise you will be held liable for the same accusations you are making of the author.
The tragic decision of choosing what is useful mineral and what is waste, in the very first years of the nuclear era, has to get the question again: is it still supportable to discard as waste materials offering temperatures at levels more than 300�C and radioactivities and photonic emissions potentially useful through adapted technologies? Temperatures produce vapour at custom pressures for energy production; photonic emissions are potentially recoverable with adapted photovoltaic panels (through hardened techniques). The challenge is affordable, but it was never said it is cheap& but the benefits would be double: first, to survey real threats for the far future, several 10000 years and secondly, to recover a very long time energy production at equivalent time lengths prospects, thus to get profit making sites otherwise presenting long time high cost constraints.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMake this waste profitable
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt the risk of being abused insulted or denigrated again I have decided to share my thoughts on a way that I believe may solve the problem of what to do with these dangerous spent nuclear rods.
I note that some of those readers, who claim to be intellectual genius, their contribution to this problem, are to bury it, in the hope that some future generation will find a solution and solve their problem.
In the mean time they insult and denigrate any person who dare suggest a possible solution that doesnt fit their theory.
My suggestion is to place some spent fuel rods at the centre of a specially prepared tube shaped into a circle. A spherical shield reflector within that tube ensures that the escaping radiation is aligned parallel with the circular tube.
This tube will be lined with a highly reflective mirror finish material.
The tube will gradually decrease in diameter toward both ends leading to a small aperture through which a narrow beam of radiation will emerge.
This beam is then fed into a second tube that has wound copper coils at regular intervals and is formed into a larger circle.
A redundant circular particle accelerator reverse engineered would be ideal for this part.
Radiated particles are mainly charged particles, and moving charged particles display a moving magnetic field.
This moving magnetic field passes through the windings of the wound copper coils around the tube creating electric current.
This hypothesis therefore converts the velocity energy of these moving charged particles directly into electrical energy.
Finally when the velocity of these moving charged particles has slowed sufficiently the particles can then be fed into specially prepared fuel cells.
The fuel cells sort these particles into Helium, Hydrogen, Water, and Electron, all of which are saleable commodities.
The gamma rays could be used to heat water.
Des Fox
Make the waste profitable
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt the risk of being abused insulted or denigrated again I have decided to share my thoughts on a way that I believe may solve the problem of what to do with these dangerous spent nuclear rods.
I note that some of those readers, who claim to be intellectual genius, their contribution to this problem, are to bury it, in the hope that some future generation will find a solution and solve their problem.
In the mean time they insult and denigrate any person who dare suggest a possible solution that doesn’t fit their theory.
My suggestion is to place some spent fuel rods at the centre of a specially prepared tube shaped into a circle. A spherical shield reflector within that tube ensures that the escaping radiation is aligned parallel with the circular tube.
This tube will be lined with a highly reflective mirror finish material.
The tube will gradually decrease in diameter toward both ends leading to a small aperture through which a narrow beam of radiation will emerge.
This beam is then fed into a second tube that has wound copper coils at regular intervals and is formed into a larger circle.
A redundant circular particle accelerator reverse engineered would be ideal for this part.
Radiated particles are mainly charged particles, and moving charged particles display a moving magnetic field.
This moving magnetic field passes through the windings of the wound copper coils around the tube creating electric current.
This hypothesis therefore converts the velocity energy of these moving charged particles directly into electrical energy.
Finally when the velocity of these moving charged particles has slowed sufficiently the particles can then be fed into specially prepared fuel cells.
The fuel cells sort these particles into Helium, Hydrogen, Water, and Electron, all of which are saleable commodities.
The gamma rays could be used to heat water.
Des Fox
Well, yes unranium as a fuel has a major setback which is long term radioactive waste. reprocessing (like we do in the UK) turns the low radioactive waste back into usable fuel but creates a small amount of highly toxic waste which causes it's own problems.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn essense unarium isn't the right fuel for nuclear fission anyway, its just good for bombs. Thorium is much nicer wastewise (and it doesn't work for bombs either).
The below explains why throium is a great improvement for civil use.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
In France their is the Worlds biggest nuclear 'Retreatment' center. In fact it does nothing to drastically reduce the overall toxicity of the nuclear waste, as many people think.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf Thorium plants were built, the overall quantities of radioactive waste would be colossal, bearing in mind that nuclear power actually only represents 6% of the world's electricity generation!
Coal ash and cinders were once considered as the source for uranium. See: http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/coalmain.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCoal fired power plants put 100 to 400 times as much radiation into your environment as nuclear power plants are allowed to. Why does coal get away with NOT putting coal ash and cinders into Yucca Mountain?
The nuclear reactors do work, for sure, and give us (at some cost) plenty of clean energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBUT: the disposal of the nuclear waste has not been worked out at all!! To bury radioactive material that is likely to be toxic for thousands and thousands of years (maybe 250,000 years!) is not a 'solution' at all (by any standards that are acceptable to society)!
How come this simple fact is not understood by the nuclear industry and its apologists? UNTIL the problem of nuclear waste is properly resolved, no nuclear power plants should be allowed at all.
GSC
SO, Let me get this straight: We dig up a bunch of dirt, extract and refine out this radioactive stuff, run it for a few years in a reactor, making it less radioactive and then can't figgure out what do do with it? How about mix it with a bunch of dirt and bury it back where it came from? There is a tar-sands project in canada that has megatons of earth, just start mixing. It is less radioactive than when it started so you would have to mix it with less dirt to get the same concentration per cubic meter.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this