Disposing Of Nuclear Waste As Nuclear Fuel

Saige writes "Nuclear waste has been a contentious issue, recently culminating with fights in the government over Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a proposed storage site. Well, perhaps there's a better way to deal with nuclear waste -by using it in nuclear reactors. A nuclear scientist at the University of Maryland, has come up with CAESAR, a reactor that runs not on the standard U-235, but on U-238. U-238 makes up most of the fuel rods in current reactors, but doesn't contribute to the reaction, and ends up currently as waste." The Yahoo! story linked from this article doesn't seem to open, but here's a story at The Economist.

Comments

Cool, but isn't the real problem...

[bscott]

(caveat - I haven't had time to read the article yet, so I'm spouting off without much backing to my opinions, except that I live near Rocky Flats...)

Isn't the real "nuclear waste problem" not just the fuel rods, but the kilotons of contaminated building materials, protective clothing, screwdrivers, air ducts, semi-trailer trucks, topsoil, reactor coolant, baseball caps, human remains...

I'm sure this is a great advance for many reasons, but it's barely gonna scratch the surface of how to deal with contaminated material - or am I wrong?

Enough with the misconceptions already!

[Spamalamadingdong]

Breeders produce a lot.

Well... no, not really. I'm told that near the end of a fuel cycle, a conventional pressurized water reactor (light water, not a CANDU) is producing the majority of its power output from plutonium fission. The breeder's claim to fame is that it can breed more fissionable fuel than it burns.

The "waste" which is U-235 depleted but plutonium enriched must be further processed to produce weapons-grade material.

Well... no, not a bit. Spent PWR fuel contains quite a bit of plutonium, but it is essentially useless for making bombs. A PWR cycle lasts a couple of years, more or less, and bombards the fuel like mad. U-238 absorbs neutrons and becomes U-239, which beta-decays to Np-239, which beta-decays to Pu-239. While some of the Pu-239 gets fissioned further down the line, some more of it captures a passing neutron and doesn't fission. It becomes Pu-240, or even Pu-241. These are isotopes with very different half-lives (much shorter) and much higher spontaneous fission rates.

This is all-important for making a bomb. U-235 has a half-life of around 700 million years, and making a bomb with it is easy: squeeze together a prompt-supercritical mass, and wait a few milliseconds. Pu-239 is tricky, because its half-life is only about 25000 years and you have very little time to get it into a prompt-supercritical configuration before a spontaneous fission starts the reaction going. If the reaction starts too soon, the bomb blows itself apart into a sub-critical configuration before releasing much energy and all you have is a fizzle. Now imagine dealing with a substantial fraction of Pu-240 (half-life 6564 years or Pu-241 (half-life 14 years).

Bomb-grade material is made in special reactors which allow the fuel to be irradiated relatively briefly at a low level, and then removed and processed to remove the plutonium. This is specifically to avoid the production of enough higher isotopes of plutonium to be a problem. The stuff coming out of a power reactor after a full fuel cycle is dirty as hell, but amateur proliferators are not going to be able to make a serious bomb (as opposed to dirty weapon) out of it. This is why we had few objections to building pressurized-water reactors for North Korea; they are essentially proliferation-proof.

For 25 years we have banned reprocessing even to the level needed for use as fuel because of the concern is could be stolen and further enriched.

I doubt that it's quite that simple. The real problem is that the plant required to refine fuel-grade Pu from spent power reactor fuel uses the exact same chemical processes as the plant which refines bomb-grade Pu from depleted uranium rods held briefly in a neutron flux for transmutation purposes. If you have a world full of people reprocessing it would be very hard to put a finger on the ones who are making weapons, so the US decided we had enough uranium to put the kibosh on all reprocessing just to set a good example.

I think we should have gone with the Integral Fast Reactor, but it seems to have succumbed to the fundamentalist anti-nukes (who probably couldn't figure out that there are medical and explosive grades of nitroglycerine either...).