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Amec Working on Long-Term Nuclear Waste Solution
Ckwop writes "The Daily Telegraph is reporting that Amec, the company that cleaned up Ground Zero, have developed a new process for storing nuclear waste that lasts two hundred thousand years - far longer than any radioactivity will last. The process works by mixing eighty percent soil with twenty percent waste and then heating the mixture to three thousand degrees centigrade. When the mixture cools it forms into a glass harder than concrete. While this is not the first waste process of this type it is the first to be cost effective and produces a glass much harder than previous methods. " We'll see if we still need a ten mile field of spikes I guess. A pilot facility is being built in Washington State.
well.... maybe they will build the permanent location inside yucca mountain if this pans out.
Bring forth your ignorant, your undereducated and uneducated, your readers of dubious websites, and maybe, just maybe, one or two people who actually know what they're talking about.
Time for another nuclear waste disposal imbroglio!
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Cool - imagine an entire line of quasi-radioactive collectibles to decorate your Xmas tree and decorate that shelf above the fireplace that needs that something special.
I'll take cleaner storage of nuclear waste any day, but this might also have other uses - AKA, building materials, hulls, etc. Depening on how much it weighs per cubic foot versus concrete, this might bring about safer and lighter structures, allowing for taller buildings without compromising safety.
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
After R'ing TFA, it looks like this is nothing new, just a slightly better method of vitrification. I don't know, the tone of the FA was a little, um, enthusiastic for an incremental improvement to an established method...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
While it's good to see another neat/good idea, the problem is having a place to put it. Until such a site exists AND IS ALLOWED TO OPERATE, we're left twiddling our thumbs. Since nothing is 100% safe and secure, I'm not optimistic such a site will be operational.
To head off some flames, I'm sure people are fully secure living near dams, powerplants, coal mines and transmission wires. Oh, and I assume they're suitably slathered with SPF 30+ outside in the sun...
Was I the only one that read "ACME" instead of Amec?
lasts two hundred thousand years - far longer than any radioactivity will last
There will be some residual radioactivity in any nuclear waste forever - I presume that they meant far longer than the half-life...
Ground Zero, have developed a new process for storing nuclear waste that lasts two hundred thousand years
:P
I won't believe them until they have done it just once. Until then it theoretically lasts two hundred thousand years
Couple this story with the recent pronouncement by James Lovelock and others that nuclear power may in fact be the only way to save the world after all, how does this square?
Nuclear energy seems to boil down to two things: cost and danger. If we sort out the first one, will we learn to live with the second? After all, in terms of simple loss of life, cars kill about the same number of people every year as a jumbo jet going down with all hands, and we accept that as necessary.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Glowing glass spikes would be even cooler than lava lamps. (Yes, you'd have to mix stuff in to get the glow.) And they'd last for generations of stunted mutant troglodytes with no use of fossil fuels--talk about your green power!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I'm all for alternative fuel sources, but nuclear power and its ever-lingering waste products are truly a bad solution.
Even though the total amount of waste produced by fossil-fuel power plants is many tons greater in amount and much more toxic than the nuclear waste of a similar nuclear power plant, the released waste from a fossil fuel plant is quickly reabsorbed and recycled into the ecosystem. No such mechanism exists for spent nuclear waste.
The solution, of course, is fusion power with its essentially waste-free power production. However the stopgap to fusion should not be fission. We will be faced with tons of this "safe" glass for hundreds of thousands of years.
Dancin Santa
The article stated that the current processes uses concrete and lasts 200 years. I would say that the "incremental change" to 200,000 years IS significant. Now, I would have doubts that it actually lasted that long. And I would be interested in seeing how they determined that deterioration rate. Is 200K years a conservative estimate or a best case scenario one?
How are you going to heat an entire building to 3,000 degrees?
Well, "far longer than any radioactivity will last" is obviously wrong, because it depends on which kind of radioactive isotopes we're talking about. It's far longer than *most* radioactivity will last, because the most abundant isotopes in this kind of waste have half times of a few hundred years, but some radioactivity will last for millions of years.
that i dont understand what they ment by the "10 mile field of spikes" comment, would anyone mind to explain?
Why don't they just form it into a nice little arrow/bullet shape and use that instead of depleted uranium in the military.... That way it will be in one of 3 places, a firing range, a foreign country, or an enemy of the US. :) Ready.... aim.... glow.........
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
No offense intended to the people of the article, but some of that waste (if we are talking used fuel elements) still contains Uranium and Plutonium which has a half life of 10^8 years. While I am pretty sure I won't live to see that, It still is a pretty messy thing to deal with.
One thing that this sort of storage technology is good for is for the short lived stuff with half lives in the hundreds of years.
My humble opinion is that this technology is used after the really long lived nasty stuff is separated and destroyed (neutron bombardment looks promising). There was an Argone National Labs Experimental Sodium reactor that in "proof of concept" separated all the uranium from spent fuel (electro refining)but the program was cancelled due to budget cuts.
Believe it or not, there is technology being researched to destroy radioactive waste products with accelerators that actually looks like it may work.
The real question is, how can we apply this technology to finally seal up the leakage from around Chernobyl permanently? The last time I read anything about it, the sarcophagus that was built around the plant was leaking terribly and radiation is permiating the area. This sounds like a great application of the new process, but I wonder what sort of hurdles will have to be overcome to actually implement the design in that part of the world.
60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
200,000 years is NOT far longer than any radioactivity will last.
One of the waste products produced by nuclear reactors is Iodine-129. The half-life of I129 is 15.7 million years.
Nuclear waste is considered hazardous for at least 10x the half life. So I129 is hazardous for, um, about 157 million years.
So, er, which press release did you read again?
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
This sort of thing is done already, and often glass is packed inside a metal layer/container. Take transport: if you got fluid components, dust, or pressurised gasses, and there's an accident, the stuff spills all over the place, and into air, ground water. If it's glass, it may go in pieces, but the pieces stay were they are, with the radioactive material trapped inside.
From a distance, hopefully :)
"As the intrepid kobold companion continues his journey, he begins to wonder... if priests raises dead, why anybody die?
This could give the Diaper Genie a run for it's money!
The problem is factoring in the cost of running a nuclear waste compound for 200,000 years, into the price of the electricity generated today by nuclear power.
Lot's of hot-plates and a giant beer coozie.
They need to shape it as something interesting and pass it on as prices or bonuses.
Like you get a small glow-in-the-dark Wolverine figure, when you see X-Men n, and you even get a chance at having X-Men like kids of your own!
It's just at questing of selling it right.
TC - My Photos..
How are you going to heat an entire building to 3,000 degrees?
Rumor has it that nuclear waste is warm.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
If we are able to develop means to 'safely' store radioactive waste (and we are just taking them on their word at the moment) then surely nuclear power will become a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Now we just have to develop decent security to keep terrorists out...
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
Unlike that council in england (I can't find a link) which used low-level waste in brick form for roads, buildings, etc. I hope you mean the process would be useful for glass bricks *without* the added nuclear waste :-)
OK, launching rockets filled with nuclear waste from the earth is expensive and way too dangerous. But I am just thinking of this at this moment, if it would make make sense when you'd have a selfsufficient nuclear plant on the moon and need to get rid of the waste in an effective way.
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
I had an idea once for taking low-level waste -- the sort of stuff that won't do you a great amount of damage unless you actually ingest it -- mixing some of that in with stuff such as contraband {drugs, illegally-imported fags and booze, porn &c.) or HDDs full of sensitive personal data, and dumping it in the middle of nowhere.
No need to worry then about assured destruction, because nobody's going to go near radioactive stuff -- and if they do, you can get an idea where it came from and where it's been, just by looking at who has been admitted to hospital suffering from radiation poisoning.
Actually, with some careful calculations you could tailor it precisely. Say someone made something that violated someone else's time-limited IP rights. No problem; just place their infringing property in storage -- along with a precise quantity of some radioactive stuff, which will be quite harmless by the time the IP rights in question have expired.
The Vitreous State Lab at The Catholic University of America has been doing this for 30 years. Read a recent article here.
and yet we still cannot speed up the actiosn to test whether or not after 2,000 years the radiated glass is in fact harmless...
You know they did the atomic wii projects basd onthe same we hope it works long term philisophy and you know where that got us???
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years (our soloar system is not yet 5 billion years old). Uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 Billion (10^9) years, Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 25.000 years. Half-life means that after some billion years, you still have half of your nuclear waste happily emitting radioactivity, while the other half has decayed to other, possibly also radioactive elements. After 7 times the half-life (7*47*10^9 years = 329*10^9 years), you still have round about 1 % of the original radioactive waste (2^-7 = 1/128 ~ 1%) and a lot of other radioactive products.
There is no final solution of nuclear waste, and there probably will never be one. It is practically impossible to guarantee a safe place for at least 7 half-lifes of Rubidium 87 or Uranium 238. Even if you can dig a deep hole and fill it with nulear waste, there still is a possibility much larger than zero that someone digs it out again in some thousand years and does not know what that shiny stuff is. There have already been accidents in third world countries, where poor and uneducated people digged out radioactive materials from medical devices on waste dumps. And a mountain used to store nuclear waste may erode before the waste becomes harmless.
Lessons learned: PR people don't know anything about mathematics and radioactivity.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
Since they mix the material with soil to form the glass, maybe they should use soil from a place where it's been contaminated by lead? (Safe storage and toxic cleanup, bonus!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Slighty offtopic question, but how much plutonium/uranium etc is there on earth? Is it sustainable to become dependent on this type of fuel? And of course, where is it all? Do we have to demolish pristine wilderness to get it?
Although "harder than concrete" sounds "strong" it does not address the chief danger in long-term storage. Chemical erosion and leaching are a bigger issue than brute strength. Anyone who has ever thought about geology and objects like geodes will realize that quartz is both much harder than concrete, but also (over the long term) water soluble. The real trick is to encapsulate the waste in something that won't dissolve or allow the migration of waste isotopes in the heat, potential liquids, and long timescales of waste storage. (I'm sure hardness is somewhat of an issue when trapped alpha particles and decay products create expansion stresses in the glass)
I do think that vitrification is the way to go, but statements like these do the public no good when they mislead them on what characteristics actually make for a good containment system.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Interesting that Amec have experience handling heated objects.
The base of the WTC burnt for DAYS, the metal heated to over 2500 degrees all because the structure "collapsed". If you belive that, you'll believe anything.
The problem is not how hard glass is, but how brittle it is. Normal glass is harder than most metals (steel, for example) but it is very brittle, and chips/breaks easily. Concrete isn't exactly immune to this either, while we are on the subject. So hurray! It's hard enough to survive a journey though the ass of an RIAA lawyer, but will it shatter into a trillion radioactive pieces if some bozo drop's it?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Acme Working on Long-Term.... oh wait.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Sounds like a great way to get rid of nuclear waste. We just have to get over that pesky little 0.5% chance of explosion on lift-off.
I know let's store it on the moon. Then we can make a place called Moon Base Alpha. Then we can also use it to our advantage by letting it explode, turning the entire moon into one use spaceship. :)
After all, my Uncle says that is what they do with the radio active mining equipment, and he has been down the largest uranium mine in Australia - Olympic Dam.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
And since the mantle's already highly radioactive --- radioactive heating is one of the things that drives Earth's geology --- the fact that the waste is radioactive is hardly going to be a problem.
Provided you make sure that the initial hole is deep enough to be well under the water table, this form of disposal should be both cheap and entirely safe.
Better just to zap it with a laser
We will have to do something with nuclear waste, whatever the price is!
They've increased the performance of this technology by a factor of 80 - 100. That's impressive.
You are comparing apples and oranges, and I believe that the fact that you've been "tricked" into making this comparison makes my point that the article isn't exactly without bias.
The 200-500 year figure is for CONCRETE ENTOMBMENT, which is NOT vitrification.
Vitrification is not new. And I would doubt anyone who claimed even 20,000 years of containment. There are a lot of factors that can come into play on those kind of timescales, and these numbers have nothing to back them up. Of course I haven't backed up my doubts of these numbers, but hey, I'm not the one saying "problem solved"...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Have I been the only one reading "ACME working on.."?? Holy grail!
We have the technology now to chew all that stuff up for power, leaving only mild leftovers with 100-200 yr. half-lives.
(Put that in your smoky glass and
Oh, and it will also run on thorium. And can't go critical.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Comment removed based on user account deletion
>AKA, building materials, hulls, etc.
It might be cost-effective as a nuclear-waste-storing material, but there ain't no way it will be as a building material.
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
Vitrification is nice (better be multi-layer), but there'll have to be one hell of a vapor recovery system.
...and the lead would shield against alpha and beta (and some gamma) emitted by the waste!!!
In the past, reinforced concrete pressure vessels holding the reactor core and boilers used lead shot as an aggregate to enhance the shielding capability of the RC.
Although then again, given much of the world, including ocean floors, has a degree of low-level radiation, maybe it's not really such a problem.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
the answer, without going into a lot of phyics is that between proven sources and the regenerative capacity of so-called breeder reactors, we could could go [at present power consumption levels] for centuries. This was the original "power too cheap to meter" argument made for nukes back in the [naive, optimistic] '50s. It would outlast oil by several generations. Politics always trumps science and acute accidents like Chernobl always change peoples minds more effectively than diffuse accidents like our overheated bioshpere slipping by with little alarm despite wiping out entire species. If one percent of what our nation spends to secure an oil supply [you may even leave out the cost of the Iraq misadventure] were spent on building nuke plants that were idiot proof and safe disposal methods, we would not be worried about another three mile island, and we would be able to afford to turn on our air conditioners.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
That's about the same amount of output as 17 modern LWRs. THe PBMR is well suited to areas without an existing electrical infrastructure. Using PBMRs to power the U.S. isn't practical and that's not what they're designed to do.
Now if you built 100 additional LWRs and double the nuclear power production in the U.S. (up to 40% from today's 20%) you'd have a massive impact on greenhouse gas emissions (We'd be able to join the Kyoto protocol) and reduce our reliance on foreign sources of natural gas. Very little oil is used for electricity generation in the U.S.
We are not creating more radioactive material than was already on this planet. All we are doing is moving it around. So If we can safely store it there is no harm. The problem in the past has been storage. This method seems like a safe way to store the waste material until a better solution such as recycling it into a usable product is found.
American
Community of
Nuclear
Engineers
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
The most intense sources of radiation in spent nuclear fuel have very short half-lives. The longer lived isotopes, like Uranium-238 (half life of ~4 billion years) are much less radiotoxic than the short lived isotopes like Xenon and Iodine.
Heating the soil up that high to melt it into glass will also vaporize the lead and send it into the air.
It's been around here since 1969, and still used today in La Hague nuclear repocessing plant. You will find many details (in english) on the web site of the CEA (Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique), a governmental agency. They say that glass packages are guaranteed for millions of years.
We could just dump our radioactive waste onto another country, ala depleted uranium munitions.
n itions/du.htm
..
a q/2003/09/iraq-030904-04092003185213.htm
From http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/mu
DU munitions were first used in the Gulf War of 1991. A total of 320 tons (290,300 kilograms) of DU projectiles were fired by the US during the Gulf War.
US Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft fired approximately 10,000 30mm DU rounds (3.3 tons of DU) at 12 sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1994-1995. In 1999, they fired nearly 31,000 DU rounds (10.2 tons of DU) at 85 sites in Kosovo.
Coincidently, there has been an increase of cases of leukemia in both the Balkans and Iraq. Though, all reports from government organizations, international and domestic, discount any link between use of DU and increase of leukemia
Or
From http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/ir
Now, the [U.S.] Department of Defense says, 'Gee, we've spent $300 million and [conducted] 300 studies on this, and we just can't figure this out.' Well, then, we either have the most inept medical community in the [world's] military, or it is by design that they don't find the cause of this."
...about as much as I trust the statements that CD-R's will last for a century.
After all, it's such a confident, unqualified statement. The process, they say, "will enable nuclear waste to be stored safely for 200,000 years." Now, me, I'm no expert and I'm constantly getting taken by surprise by little adjustments in our understanding of the physical universe... you know, like plate tectonics and black holes and asteroid collisions causing the extinction of the dinosaurs.
So, I'm really glad there are people that know what will happen over the next 200,000 years. People who can also assure me "We know that nuclear plants work and are safe." I'd been getting a little nervous after things like Browns Ferry and EBR-1 and Detroit Fermi and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
But those Brits are real experts. After all, they've hardly had any nuclear accidents except Windscale.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The process works by mixing eighty percent soil with twenty percent waste and then heating the mixture to three thousand degrees centigrade. When the mixture cools it forms into a glass harder than concrete.
You bastards, that's my extra chunky granola bar recipe!!!
OR...
In other words, it's like the nuclear plants are shitting bricks
and so on.
If they would dump the vitrified glass in a subduction zone, where one geologic plate is sliding under another, the glass would be buried as much as several hundred centimeters deeper each year, until it eventually melts and is presumably diluted in the magma of the earth's core. Anybody know why this isn't done?
Realistically the issue here is waste management. BUT its not really. Why cant we start to invest in more renewable resource based energy like solar, wind, hydro, the list goes on. That way we dont have to come up with solutions to dispose of deadly nuclear / atomic waste. I know that sounds tree huggish but at the same time its the reality of it. We are causing so many other environmental issues because we rely too heavily on fossil/nuclear power.
Also there there tend to be volcanoes associated with subduction zones
This bring sup an interesting idea.
Why can't they use some of their fancy GPS-guided ICBMs to deliver the nuclear waste into the heart of volcanos in remote sites for disposal?
A few million metric tons of lava will disperse the waste readily, intermixing it with the earth's magma. and like the parent poster said, the stuff is already radioactive.
Why would this not work?
The faster a substance decays, the more energy it emits. Conversely, substances which only decay very slowly emit very little radiation. Thus U-238, with it half-life of 4.5 billion years is far less radioactive than, say, Carbon-14 with its half-life of approximately 5,730 years. There are, of course, different types of decay, and heavier atoms tend to decay producing alpha particles and gamma rays rather than the beta particles that are common in lighter elements. Even so, elements with half-lives measured in millions of years do not typically emit enough radiation to be a threat to humans or to nature. The intensively radioactive products tend to get rid of themselves, so it is the medium intensity materials, such as the infamous Sr-90, with half-lives measured in months to millenia, that are particularly dangerous. It is also worth noting that alpha, beta and gamma rays can not make materials radioactive - it is neutrons that do that - and that alpha particles, which are the least penetrative of the three primary radiative products of nuclear decay, are also the most strongly ionising, while gamma rays, the most penetrating, are the least ionising, given the fact that they consist of mere EM radiation rather than charged particles like alpha and beta rays.
Humans are exposed to ionising radiation every day, and have been during the entirety of history. For this reason we have a variety of genetic repair mechanisms. The mere presence of ionising radiation is not a matter of concern; under normal circumstances the most significant sources of such radiation are natural. It is only when the level of radioactivity overwhelms the body's natural defenses that radioactivity becomes a threat to human health.
(Couldnt RTFA - page /.ed)
Wouldn't it be better to use metallic glass (amorphous steel) to store radioactive waste?
Mister Scalesinger, you are young and naive, in which case I ask you to forgive me for being so harsh, or you are apparently an idiot and deserve a public thrashing. The lame ass article repeating a dumb idea that has been brought forth a thousand times in a manner not unlike the infamous water torture technique simply stated that this vitrified material was "harder than concrete" which is so vague it is fucking meaningless. The strength of concrete varies vastly according to its ingredients and handling.
Secondly, the assumption that this would be cheaper than conventional concrete or even metals is absurd simply based on the temperatures required. High quality cement can be made at 1500C and solid steel, even stainless steel in an oxygen furnace is made at a mere 1700C. These materials are also made from ores that come from, as the article puts it "the soil". How in the hell is a process that requires 3000C going to compete? This is not even to mention the issue of tensile strength in vitreous materials.
This is a stupid idea that has been brought up a million times and simply shows you that part of the Slashdot editorial staff has a hard-on for nukes. I wonder if that editor is somehow closely associated with the editor who recently posted an article on the bright side of immigrant bashing.
How about diapers?
Didn't the OP already mention nuclear waste?
Sometimes you don't get immobilization. We had a prototype of this years ago here in Oak Ridge, TN, developed by Martin Marietta Molten Metals (M4) where they tried in situ vitrification by sticking these huge carbon electrodes into a prepared testbed in an open field. What little water was trapped inside caused a massive steam explosion that blew hot dirt for a radius of hundreds of feet.
I'm now the technical support for the financial servers for the federal bankruptcy court for M4.
... this stuff has been proved to last millions of years.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Bad guys can always dig up the lumps, grind them, and leach out the radioactives, so it still needs guarding for millennia. I'd rather we all overcome the reprocessing paranoia and burn up this stuff to some purpose, than to just throw it away.
Still, good show! I'd wondered whatever happened to vitrification, which was "just around the corner" decades ago. It's loads better than leaving that stuff sitting in drums on a pavement in the open.
I have found the perfect site to store this stuff HERE
I would think that rather than creating super-duper magic concrete that we should be developing reprocessing / breeding techniques. I was under the impression that the primary reason the Americans quit reprocessing was the idea that someone would wind up with weapons grade fissile material. That all sort of seems past tense now...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Here we come...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Honestly, if the US werent' so effing superstitious about all things nuclear, we would be doing the sensible thing and reprocessing the was and disposing of the plutonium in and Integral Fast Reactor.
Saying its harder than concrete is like saying an OS is more secure than Windows.
How to fix cracks in concrete
There's glass, and then there's glass. "Normal" doesn't tell us much. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, IL, US has (had, anyway) a room full of glass springs, etc. and a glass block which has had a large iron ball dropped on it many times daily over *years* so people can see the effect on polarized light passing through it as it is stressed.
Well-made glass is not just hard, it is *tough*. Proper formulation and annealing yields a very durable material. Not much at all like that cheap stuff they use to make jars for spaghetti sauce.
The structure heated to 2500 degrees because enviro-nuts wouldn't allow Asbestos to line the metal superstructure of the WTC during construction (Vacuum sealed even.) Steel+Jetfuel+fire=molten steel.
That way it will be in one of 3 places, a firing range, a foreign country, or an enemy of the US.
You forgot about number four: Inside friendly soldiers, killing them softly with your love.
In the Gulf War in 1991, the war in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999, Depleted Uranium ammo was used....
And ended up making many many friendly Nato soldiers sick and numerous soldiers died of cancer. Thhis has been the cause of huge outrage in Italy, for example where it has been documented that about 12 soldiers died after having been exposed to the remains of DU ammo.
Problem is that DU ammo vaporises on high velocity collision contact, and the resulting fine Uranium powder is a bit worse than a carton of Marlboros a day would be.
And I wish little (grown) boys like you would fucking grow up and get a fucking clue. You might think you're a big strong man talking about nuking everything, but the effects of what you want never entered your fucking little skull, dickwad.
I toured Australia's only reactor facility, in Sydney, recently and was told in detail about a similar product ANSTO invented years ago called 'Synroc'
It sounds very similar to this innovation to my untrained eye.
Of course it's heavily patented...
synrocANSTOAn error in the story:
Plutonium has a half time of 44.000 years.
If you put 1 kg plutonium in a glass block, after 44.000 years 500 grams are still there. After 88.000 its down to 250 grams, after 200000 years still 30 grams are left. So if you put 10 kg into such a block, after 200000 years still 300 grams are left.
The press release of the research team is missleading as well. In germany the deposition of waste, radioactive or not, in different kinds of glass is a long researched topic.
At my town where I live is the research center, and I know people involved in such researches.
Most glasses are somewhat vulnerable to acids. So the question, still to answer is: where to deposite the glass blocks? In germany it was for a long time an idea to place them in salt mines (we have a lot under surface piles of old stone salt).
Salt mines are considered "dry", very dry. However: a lot of salt compositions contain so called "crystal water". That means a crystal, a kind of big mollecule, contains captured water.
The ionisating rays of decaying material can break up such molecules and the water is set free. As such water can dissolve salt it can become to an aggressive acid which even harms very robust glass kinds.
Now you would think about a protecting surface over the glass blocks, that wont help much. Most places where you would store the glass blocks, will eventually be covered by the montain. The pressure if the mountain moves likely cracks a block once a while, and that block then is vulnerable to aggressive acids.
That said, glass blocks surely are a "quite save" way to handel our current problems. But they are no holly grail like the industrie likes to tell us.
Interesting is: in germany the research results are not public disclosed. In politics its still talked as if salt mines would be a perfect storage, but a granit mountain would be likely much better. I guess if you ask (or search for PDFs) you might get the information easyly, its an EU sponsored research project. However in media its not covered: htp://www.fzk.de (or probably the institute site: www.ine.fzk.de -- I did not check if they have their own site)
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is an interesting application of the basic premise of the plasma torch. A company called Startech Environmental has been working on the technology for quite some time. The basic gist is that if you heat just about anything hot enough, molecular bonds will break down, and you'll be left with a uniform mixture of all of the elements found in whatever you were trying to destroy. When cooled, you get a black glass and a flammable gas that can be used to power turbines that provide the power necessary to run the torch itself.
This is the first I've heard of it being used for radioactive disposal, but Startech uses it for disposing of toxic waste, biohazardous materials... all kinds of dangerous stuff.
With enough research and development, it may be possible to "skim" individual elements from the melted slag based on their density. Perfect recycling!
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
One application has already been found.
Valve have announced that Half Life 2 will be delayed by approximately 2 hundred thousand years due to these advances in vitrification.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
Seen how much radioactive goop there is in a ton of decent coal? Burn it in an older plant and it gets spewed into the air; a newer plant will catch it in the stack scrubber but you still have to do something with it.
And the torrent of energetic particles streaming out of a fusion reaction makes the reactor vessel radioactive over time, so "waste-free" is a bit optimistic. Let's say we may be able to liberate significantly more energy per ton of radioactive what-do-we-do-with-it by using fusion rather than fission.
The stuff is still radioactive genius. This is just a way to contain the material. Store radio active waste in a barrel and it might break and the material leak out in to the enviroment. This will stop that but the blocks themselves still are as dangerous as if you just had the waste on its own. Glass is not known for its shielding properties.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think that ocean dilution is safest..
I.e. make the glass in barrels and drop them in the middle
of the Pacific ocean. The barrels penetrate the
sediment about 25-50meters.
It will fail eventually but
in an essentially non-detectable way.
The primary risk is during transport.
Transport is also a risk for many other methods, but is no longer primary for those methods.
I also heard a scientist discussing the politics
of this state that given the eruption of automatic
opposition by Greenpeace et al., the politicians
above the scientists told the scientists not to consider it any more. Instead, lets keep it NEAR
people! Brilliant, no?
...But all the renewed debate about nuclear energy has come about because of the raging of the "global Warming" debate, so it all goes so very unscientific in a second.
there already are technologies that allow for residual exposure similar to background radiation: the politics of the debate do not allow for a solution, because each side has an axe to grind.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Hmm I seem to recall reading something about a gas called Brown's gas that was effective in nuclear waste treatment. Also that it did very little damage to organic compounds and materials, but sliced through metals and such when heated. Anyone ever hear of this?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
AMEC's pilot plant is only for a low-level fraction of nuclear waste... the really hot
material will be vitrified with a non-AMEC process.
So, this new way of processing nuclear waste will benefit all other Western nations besides the USA.
The USA is a great nation, and it is built by kind-hearted people with good values even though they have only an average intellect in areas of science. This average intellect is being manipulated by science frauds who claim that nuclear enery is a disaster waiting to happen. Most of Japan's electricity is generate by nuclear power plants.
>>So the question, still to answer is: where to deposite the glass blocks?
>>
Why, ship it up to Sweden! Thats where the they make a living of receiving waste like that. ??
Right?
So we don't have to worry about the shuttle or a rocket spilling liquid waste into the atmosphere anymore. Let's point that rocket at the sun and say BA-BYE!
:-)
Don't have to worry about terrorists getting them anymore
Don't have to worry about storing them
Don't have to worry about them harming the environment either
Just a question; how much nuclear fuel is out there and how long would it last?
What about our water supply. Since WWII our water has been flooded with toxic chemicals coming out of detergents and flouride. It's been 60 years, and our world is suffering from a boost of cancer rate every year. Stop nuclear use, we are ok. Stop water use, we are fucked.
Damn kneejerk greenies all think that nuclear == teh evil. It's just a matter of proper risk analysis.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Vitrification has been around for quite a while. One trick was to drill a bunch of holes and lower in microwave emitters to heat/melt the ground in-situ. Hardness is only one small part of the question. Chemical reactivity is the bigger question. What happens when the mass comes in contact with ground water? Working in the assay business, you get a lot of hard glass from melting dirt/soil, but when it comes in contact with water, it often just disolves away, releasing whatever was mixed with it. When storing stuff for +100 kyr, this is probably the biggest issue. Water is wonderfully chemically reactive. Since they are using "soil" as the primary matrix, as opposed to some engineered material, my bet is that even if it doesn't dissolve fully, it will leach out an appreacable amount of waste. At least enough to be an issue.... Of course it's better than storing 55 gal drums of the stuff in your backyard. ;-)
Not only that but it would make the resulting lead crystal (especially if cut) so much more classy than standard vitreous blocks...
Plutonium has a half time of 44.000 years.
If you put 1 kg plutonium in a glass block, after 44.000 years 500 grams are still there. After 88.000 its down to 250 grams, after 200000 years still 30 grams are left. So if you put 10 kg into such a block, after 200000 years still 300 grams are left.
Uhh.. maybe it is just me, but your math isn't adding up. after just 88 years it's down to 250. My assumption would be that 250 could get halved another 3 times: 250 / 2 = 125, 125 / 2 = 62.5, 63 / 2 = 31.5
So that puts us from 88 through another 3 half lifes, 3 * 44 = 132 years. Plus the original 88, 220 years or so to get to the 30 grams you were talking about. And this stuff lasts 200,000 years.
The actual amount, given a 44 year half-life, of waste left over after using this method on 10 kg is going to be:
(10,000grams) / (200,000 years/44 year half-life) = 10,000 / 4545 = 2.2 grams.
2.2 grams from 10kg is negligible. Also, in 200,000 years I would hope Earth has been abandoned. We'll probably kill ourselves well before nuclear waste, global warming, or any other countless "invisible threats" occur.
I'm curious why one would think that. Is there any evidence we're actually evolving in that direction? Do we even actually have any idea as to how humans are evolving? Heck, modern civilization is probably evolving us away from being more durable.
I should think before natural selection could make us more radiation-proof we'd have mutated into other things or been obliterated outright. That would be like saying people will eventually evolve to not be burned alive in house fires, so we can save on firemen in the long run. It sounds completely made up.
I'm all in favour of getting nuclear/toxic wastes contained, but hoping that evolution will eventually make the problem go away seems to be wishful thinking at best, and evading the problem at worst.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The company that "cleaned up" the WTC site after the 2001 planebombings was a mafia company that screwed up the operation, while Giuliani and his worshippers in the press covered it up. Pieces of the rubble were sold as "souvenirs", interfering with the investigation using the material as evidence. The operation was all handled by reopening closed landfills in Staten Island, a pet project of the demented Giuliani. The EPA, run by Christine Whitman (ex-Governor of polluted next-door New Jersey) meanwhile announced that airborne toxins didn't exceed EPA limits, though tests the same day showed at least 150% excess. People died from the poisons, and are still dying. While Giuliani and these companies ride the hype to fame and fortune. Now we'll get them to handle the most poisonous waste ever made. We're totally screwed.
--
make install -not war
There is no drilling involved. You drop the waste into a subduction zone (aka "trench"). Sediment will slowly cover the material. Over longer periods of time, shifting geological plates will send the material under the crust. Again, no drilling is involved.
As for volcanos, if a volcano at the bottom of the ocean erupts and its material threatens a large number of people, the radioactivity is the least of your worries. Vaporizing because of the heat from the lava seems to me a more immediate problem.
Then again, it is *highly* unlikely that a volcano would be an issue here.
Lessons learned: PR people don't know anything about mathematics and radioactivity.
I'm sure PR people all took basic high school algebra and physics too. (Yes Slashdot, usually you do need an undergrad degree to be able to write PR fluff. and you need basic math to get into college.) I'd say the lesson learned is that PR people don't know how to ask scientists about mathematics and radioactivity, and that they have a bias for presenting best-possible scenarios.
Likewise, scientists don't necessarily know how to indicate to PR people that the lowest/shortest possible time frame isn't necessarily the one you should include in the media announcement if you want an accurate representation... which is PR poision anyway. These are commercials you're reading, not accurate estimations.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
I think everyone is forgetting about the issue of technological advancement of the human race here.
Everyone seems to think that in 200,000 years we might be still dealing with the same technology we do now.
If the human race hasn't advanced past the information age in 200,000AD then it means that we have suffered a major earth destroying catastrophe inbetween now and then (see Meteror Impact, Nuclear War, etc etc) and at that point we have other things to worry about like global fallout or death of all plants due to sun being blocked out by dust from impact than burried waste.
I would dare say that a technological solution could be found in the next 50-100 years. Look how far we've come in just 10.
You'd think we have ability to manipulate matter or transport it out of the solar system in at least 1,000 years with little or not effort.
I know it's kind of a cop out but we should have faith in our descendants ability to deal with problems we can't at the moment. Of course they might call us bad names and be slightly irritated when they realize we didn't document all the waste locations for their nanobots to disassemble.
Just for everyone's info, AMEC is one of the companies facing a massive lawsuit for improperly protecting workers who were involved in the WTC cleanup. For more background read the reports from Cate Jenkins, PhD. of the EPA at New York Environmental Law & Justice Project.
Do you really trust them to do anything right?
Erm, yes, sorry, wanted to say 30 grams and typo-ed. Also half time seems to be 24.000 years according to other posters.
:D
LOL to the rest of your post
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
OP was using European convention of the dot (.) instead of comma (,) for marking thousands. However, the figure of a half life of 44,000 years is still wrong. The isotopes of Pu vary in half life from about 4 nanoseconds (Pu 240a) to 80 million years (Pu 244). Pu 244 is obviously not very dangerous in small quantities :) None of them seem close to
44,000 years.
I remember they had something like this in my text book in 4th grade. They heated up a pool of graphite put barrels of waste in it, removed heat and you had graphite glass like stuff. That was 10 years ago, I can't believe this isn't wide spread now or deamed expensive and unusable.
I didn't poofread
Obviously, people don't like radioactivity. So don't do nuclear energy. I don't see how that is a problem. After all isn't energy generation supposed to be FOR people?
I actually spent a few months as an intern helping with the design of the Vitrification plant on the Hanford Reservation. There will be a run up where they glass tons of hazardous but non-radioactive waste to get all of the bugs out. It will be when constructed the largest plant of this type by far, and judging by the shape of things at Hanford it will be sorely needed. http://www.waste2glass.com/
Bad news, kiddies. First of all, two hundred thousand years is nothing when we're talking half-lives. Second, a glass "harder than concrete" means nothing when its got high level radiaoctivity embedded. Radiation induced crapout is inevitible.
The idea of using a lot of large monolith type needles came up, these were supposed to be truly massive and the idea was to convey 'dont dig here', or something.
For the past couple of centuries, archaeologists have waged a vigorous effort to find massive buried structures (Troy, Peruvian pyramids, etc.) -- and dig them up. Human nature, I guess.
Give an engineer a mysterious black box with a big red button labelled "Don't Push". Will the engineer push the button, or not? Oh, the temptation! How else can you find out exactly why you're not supposed to push?
-kgj
-kgj
and let it get subducted into the mantle.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Somebody skipped breakfast this morning. Don't you know breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Start your day off right with a well balanced breakfast.
Wrong... See this advertisement from the asbestos industry saying that the WTC was filled with asbestos
What will be used to heat it? Nuclear Power? :)
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
Hey, if Mama nature can do it, we should be able to pull it off.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The head of the ultrasonics research group at Battelle Institute told me about the plans for "glassification" in 1975.
Is it really true this time?
--
Bush: Borrowing money to give to the rich.
Could place it in roads in your colder regions--the level of heat that the readioactive material releases would help prevent moisture freezing on the roads, thereby reducing the effort of road crews and salt trucks. As well as fewer accidents due to the lack of snow / ice / black ice.
Just have to try and restrict the radioactive material to the alpha and the gamma emitters. Not that it's particularly possible, in most nuclear decay series that we'd be dealing with.
But imagine a spring when you didn't have to rinse all that salt off your car?
Radioactive compounds and their isotopes are dangerous for two reasons.
1. They are radioactive and emit energy in dangerous quantities/frequencies. This energy destroys DNA and tissue causing burns and genetic mutations.
2. The elements are inherently toxic in the same way that lead and mercury vapor is toxic. Uranium is a toxic heavy metal separate from its potential radioactivity. This is why depleted uranium bullets and shells are such a bad idea.
Radioactive waste that is dangerous for reason #1 is low volume, high level and short-lived.
Radioactive waste that is dangerous for reason #2 is high volume, low level (radioactive intensity) and is long lived. In fact is is always toxic just like lead is always toxic.
#1 Radioactive waste turns into #2 radioactive waste pretty quickly. The half lives are between years and decades (maybe centuries).
Long-term storage requires a combination of "burning out" the high level stuff with breeders or keeping it safe for a few decades and then burning the resulting low level waste with all the other low level waste somewhere relatively safe. This low level waste is not going to kill anyone anytime soon. In fact diluting it is probably better than keeping it in the same place. These elements of low level waste are found in nature as a matter of course but at lower concentrations. A few thousand year round trip under the earth's crust would elminate the risk.
The bigger risks come from transporting the waste to the waste disposal site. Glass beads/bricks that can take the impact of a train wreck may be more important than beads that can take 5000 years of pressure sitting under a mountain.
Let's also not discount the fact that we will have amazing technologies in the next few centuries. If we blow ourselves up instead then the disaster of that outcome will probably sterilize the earth for eons. But if we do last a few more centuries than we will be burning this "waste" as fuel anyhow. It's not that big of a problem.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Using lead to shield against beta particles is actually worse than using a sheet of plastic. The beta particles usually cause the lead to kick out a whole slew of other varied emissions, as opposed to just being absorbed.
High-grade uranium deposits are another matter, but don't go around with the misconception that our current prices and extraction technology define the limit of reserves... of anything.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Plutonium has a half-life of 24,100 years. Ten half-lives reduce radiation by a factor of 2 to the 10th, which is 1024. Reducing the radiation of Plutonium by a factor of 1,000 is not enough to make it safe. In 241,000 years, the Plutonium will still be one of the most poisonous substances on earth.
--
U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. Feel safe?
I don't have any of the figures or statistics, but every energy solution has it's downsides:
Solar - inefficient at current technology levels. You would need entire fields of solar cells in order to do anything, which causes issues with paving over pristine wilderness; as well as the amount of chemicals and power it takes to make a solar cell in the first place.
Wind - same inefficiency as solar, requiring massive land use. Very non-friendly to birds, so as to get the moniker of 'Condor Cuisinarts'. Also extremely ugly to look at on a nice high-desert plain.
Hydro - causes massive changes in river ecosystems because of damming, and running thousands of fish through turbines. Causes salmon endangerment, etc. etc.
Fossil fuel use needs to go, but these other sources (hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, etc.) are good for supplemental, but you've got to either use something that hasn't been invented yet, or dig something out of the ground (coal, oil, U235, U238). Bummer situation, but that's the deal.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I like to start my day out with a nice, warm, cock in the mouth. Err, your mouth. Err, bowl of oatmeal.
Say you have one ton of radioactive waste. You need to heat this up, along with four tons of dirt, to 3000 degrees and let things melt into a big happy ball of goo. So how much energy is spent on mining, pre-processing, and finally disposing of that one ton of material, compared to the electrical (and maybe heat) energy extracted from it?
Less is more.
Why not dump the immobilized radioactive waste into a subduction zone out in the ocean?
That way, it can be drawn into the planet, and the radioactive decay energy released used to help keep the core molten. After a lengthy period of time, it resurfaces to form precious island real estate, probably not any more radioactive than the lava expanding the Hawaiian islands (or Iceland) is today.
No need to create agencies to watch over the disposal sites for hundreds of thousands of years -- especially difficult since no government in recorded history has lasted even a fraction of that time -- recorded history isn't that long!
And I think we can safely assume that it will be safe from terrorists, sitting in the bottom of a deep water ocean valley.
OTOH, there's the Godzilla factor to consider...
To use nuclear (and solar, and wind) power to displace oil, you need some way to use electricity in vehicles. Batteries and their cousins, regenerative fuel cells, are the best prospects for this; hydrogen is a waste of effort. For my musings on this, see my blog:
Starving the Beast
Our vehicles use less than 200 GW average at the wheels; if we can generate the energy where we do now, we can easily move the required power using the existing electrical grid. See You find you get what you need
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Now there's a way to get rid of radioactive junk: Turn it into glass crystal collectables. Somebody like the Franklin Mint could shift tonnes of it .. hmm .. I wondered how they made the warp nacelles look good on that Enterprise model.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
This would be a good solution since the radioactive materials derive from the interior of the earth anyways. We would just be putting it back to where it came from.
Another solution is to dump it into the sun using an annual series of launches using simple rockets. The gravitaional well of the sun would ensure that the material gets to the sun with no storage needs whatsoever. And no Venusian NIMBYs to wrroy about!
Just a thought...
The spikes are for humans x thousand years from now to discover. Personally, I prefer human heads on poles, but that's just me.
-- "You can lead a yak to water, but you can't teach an old dog to make a silk purse out of a pig in a poke" - Opus
Lesson 2: Pundits on
But at least with pundits who have direct relationships to the product, you know exactly why they're lying...
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
But this idea is not entirely new, in fact it would have first been mentioned in the 1960s if not before. Still, it is a good idea, whose time maybe has come at last.
What if those big radioactive blocks of glass could be used to decontaminate polluted water supplies in poor nations. If they're as stable as it sounds then there wouldn't be the risk of waste getting into the water and it'd kill a lot of the germs that lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths. I've seen UV light used to decontaminate water, why not use something that doesn't need to be plugged in?
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
FWIW... from one who believes we probably DO need more nuclear-fueled power-generating plants... at least until we find something better.
In TFA, "Amec says that its latest process will enable nuclear waste to be stored safely for 200,000 years - longer than the radioactivity will last."
The courtroom dictum, "false in one thing; false in all," may not be entirely applicable here, but you may wish to take a grain of salt with Amec's claim that its vitirification process can outlast the decay processes.
The half-life for a radioisotope is the time for half the radioactive nuclei in a sample to decay. In other words, after two half-lives, there will be one quarter the original sample left (and emitting alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation) and after three half-lives one eight the original sample will remain.
Half-lives range from tiny fractions of a second to many, many times the age of the universe.
Plutonium239, for example, has a half-life of 24,300 years; Uranium238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years.
The U238 decay chain inclues other radioactive materials (U234, thorium, radium, radon, bismuth, among others). The end product of the decay chain is lead206 which is stable; ie, not radioactive. The preceding elements in the chain each have their own half-lives, ranging from 247,000 years to 1e-5 seconds.
[this sig has been trunca
The process itself is not the issue here in the US and this will not solve ANY of our current problems. Having worked on bothe the Low Level and High level waste respoitories here in the states, I know the issue is getting the waste to the facilities, not the storage itself. The criteria for stability for the sites chosen today were 100 million years, not 200,000. So the storage length is not an issue. No body want to allow the waste to be transported over their roads, through their neighborhoods to get to the facilities. Dispite the Low level facility being operational for nearly a decade now, they have yet to recieve any waste due to this issue. I guess peoplewould rather have this stuff in their backyards rather than safely buried.
I know of a few places in Scotland where it could be worked if necessary.
But there is no shortage right now, breeder reactors convert the otherwise unwanted U-238 to Pu-239, which can then be used in more reactors.... The supply is of course finite, but one of the reasons Pu reactors are not too common is that AFAIK less than 3kg, in the pure state, will make a bomb, so they don't want it in circulation. But recycling all the old nuclear weapons could help out power generation for a long time.
I think you would be talking about many thousands of years before the known economic reserves of uranium have been fully exploited.
Anyone know how to go about making amber or just a hypothesis?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
After all, if the radioactive materials have much shorter half-lives, there will be less risk of such contained material falling into the wrong hands, and less space needed to store them. Any work on that field?
Also, if I recall materials engineering correctly, isn't there a direct correlation between "hardness" and susceptability to cracking? Wouldn't you be better off with a material that would deform, rather than shatter when placed under stress?
One more thing: what a great business model! "Yes folks, if this doesn't last 200,000 years, we'll give you double your money back! (Good luck finding us in 1000 years when it fails!)" How does one prove something will last 200,000 years without testing it for 200,000 years?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Yeah, uranium is scarce, and current mines might run out. That might be a problem, but I don't really know.
But take a look at this page. Speaking as a citizen of the United States, I'd much rather kiss some Canadian ass to get our energy source, than to deal with a bunch of enthusiastic Wahhabi nuts.
Even if the Canadians and the Australians run out, I submit that we are better off owing them and having cleaner air, than stumbling on like we are now. Who knows what kind of fun technology will come along in the next 50 years? That said, I'm not really wired into the nuclear materials world, but I don't hear a whole lot of panic over short supplies of the appropriate ores.
We might still need crude for specialty applications, and we'll probably still be worrying about what happens in the middle east, but I can't think of a huge downside to cutting down on our oil consumption.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Well along with abortion and incarceration the US will not have to worry about the poor revolting anytime soon. Approximately 40 million people do not exist today due to abortion that would of mostly been at or below the poverty line ( children of students, urban minorities, and the like) and approaching 800 per 100,000 in prison helps keep the country from attempting to overthrow the government as well. IF they could make soldiers die in the same amounts as vietnam we would have a massive boost in the economy.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
... it will be at about the same level as uranium ore, which occurs naturally and randomly around the planet. With any reasonable form of disposal, this stuff will be safer than uranium ore, because it at least will look man-made.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
You're right - beta is sheilded using aluminium or perspex, because when beta particles are stopped too quickly they produce bremsstrahlung (X-rays; literal translation braking radiation).
After checking the PCPV designs a bit more carefully, there is a thin metal liner before the concrete.
(I'm a civil engineer (and therefore more familiar with the concrete than the mechanical aspects), so I thought that the liner was just to keep the CO2 inside the pressure vessel and didn't realise it had a shielding function too)
why not simple use the spent fuel as fuel for another type of radioactivity generated power? this way your own emissions become your source of power!
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Within 20-30 years you have the technology to separate out the radioactive isotopes. (You can weigh *individual* atoms with nanotech -- hell you can even separate them today using a mass spec. or a centrifuge, etc.).
Then you decide which are useful and save them and which are not and should be transmuted into non-radioactive isotopes. The entire radioactive waste disposal conversation is of zero significance if one understands molecular nanotechnology and the context of the progress of civilization. We are only having the discussion today because of (a) near term risks [from radiation exposure], (b) costs of short term storage (years) vs. intermediate term storage (decades) considerations and (c) the relatively large number of people, particularly those with any political "throw weight", who lack an understanding of basic physics and whom one would hope have some training in the fundamentals of economic development.
Which is why I asked. Unfortunatly the article only referenced its hardness. That's not a very good measure for glass, especially glass doped with a highly radioactive material.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
The issue in this conversation is waste products. When it comes to the production and use of solar power it maybe inefficient but if every house in every city had thier roof (which is wasted space in many places) covered with solar power the issue of space wouldnt be as difficult. Couple that with a large stash of batteries (yes polution from them too) and it would be ok with excess energy going back to the grid for others to use.
Hydro power doesnt always mean river ecosystems there are successful hydro generators using tidal currents although not as efficient at this stage.
Wind generators are not pretty.. but they work. and bird issues are not as bad as people like to claim. Reports from the wind fields in germany have said the problem was only an initial issue while the birds learnt about them.
At this stage in our evolution it comes down to us reducing our energy usage. Recycling, increasing the trees in the world rather than chopping them down. Recycle Reduce Reuse.
I vaugely remember hearing about that... :: don't cook the dome), and capture volitiles...
Couldn't they have just done something simple, like slowly ramping up the current [go from warm to hot to bp(volitiles) to obscenely hot(tm)]? Add a dome/exhaust filteration unit (much larger than area,
Spent nuclear fuel contains the intensely radioactive fission products, as well as less radioactive (but enormous half lives) heavy actinide elements (uranium, plutonium, americium, etc.)
The vast majority of the fission products have short or medium duration half-lives.
The actinide elements are fissile (given a fast neutron source), and can therefore be burned for energy in a suitable reactor (potential designs include the liquid sodium cooled, liquid lead cooled, gas cooled reactors and molten salt reactors).
The very few long-lived fission products (e.g. Tc99) could be added to the actinide mixture, where they could be transmuted into shorter lived isotopes by the neutron flux in the reactor.
An advanced reprocessing scheme could take spent fuel, extract only the fission products, and prepare these for disposal. The remaining highly radioactive mixture of plutonium, uranium and other elements, could be returned to the reactor for further burning.
The mixture of fission products would have short-lived radioactiviy, decaying to less than natural uranium ore within 300 years.
The impure uranium/plutonium mix would be self protecting against theft due to the intense radioactivity of the contaminants.
What little water was trapped inside caused a massive steam explosion that blew hot dirt for a radius of hundreds of feet.
I'm now the technical support for the financial servers for the federal bankruptcy court for M4.
Bankruptcy? What happened, did they neglect to sell the TV rights in advance? This historic event comes to mind, as does this more obscure one.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Plutonium239, for example, has a half-life of 24,300 years; Uranium238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years.
True, but if we use a pebble bed reactor, which can have the fuel pellets rotated for better use of all the fissible fuel, we can eliminate a large portion of the U238 in the fuel. If we can get down to mostly the "lesser" materials with shorter half-lives, that would be better.
Taking the half-life of Plutonium-239 as an example, 200k years is approx 4 half-lives, if I did my math right. So there will only be 6.25% of the original mass left. Still, I guess when you're talking tons of this material, 6.25% is still a substantial quantity.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Why not simply give iodine capsules to the population and dispurse the waste in the air, much like the Green Run at Hanford in the 40's? Atleast with the iodine capsules we would not develop thyroid cancer.
Its really early in the morning here, so I could be wrong. But my math isnt adding up. Plutonium239 half-life = 24,300 years...lets make it really simple and round that off to 25k...How many lots of 25,000 go into 200,000? 8, unless I'm really whacked in the head...
Which is substantially less, no?
Chemically, Plutonium is a heavy metal and perhaps toxic like other heavy metals.
The problem with Plutonium is its radioactivity. A tiny, tiny amount can still kill slowly because Plutonium emits very energetic particles, for which the human immune system is not full prepared, and which can cause cancer.
I know the Wikipedia says that the toxicity of Plutonium has been exaggerated in the past. However, there are hundreds of millions of compounds, and if there are 1,000 or 10,000 equally as poisonous as Plutonium, it is still "one of the most poisonous substances on earth".
All of the organic compounds which the Wikipedia article on Plutonium says are very toxic break down chemically. Plutonium, however, loses 1/2 of its strength in 24,300 years. It can be difficult or impossible to remove from the environment. The toxicity of Plutonium includes the toxicity it has today, plus the toxicity it will have for a thousand generations to come.
I saw this article referenced by Wikipedia: The Myth of Plutonium Toxicity. Remember, the toxicity of Plutonium is not a "myth". What is a "myth" is that Plutonium is uniquely toxic when dispersed by other means than exploding as a bomb.
The author, Bernard L. Cohen, offers to eat Plutonium, although he must be aware that he will never be asked to do so because giving it to him to eat would be illegal.
Probably the biggest area of confusion between what the news media say about Plutonium and what Bernard L. Cohen says is that they are talking about different expected means of dispersal. The news media often discusses the possibility of someone exploding a bomb made of Plutonium in a populated area, or an explosion in a Plutonium manufacturing plant or storage facility. The toxicity of the explosion would include all the products of the explosion, of course, many of which are quicker killers than Plutonium itself. The news media are using the shorthand of saying that the people killed in a Plutonium explosion are killed by Plutonium. That is true in the sense that people understand it. People would not say the cause of death was building collapse when an explosion of a Plutonium bomb destroyed a building. They would correctly say that the risk came from the availability of Plutonium.
It is legitimate to say that the burning of coal kills more people than the use of Plutonium, but that's because billions of tons of coal pollutants enter the atmosphere. A small amount of Plutonium is safer than a huge amount of coal, except when Plutonium is used in a bomb.
It's really difficult to cover all the issues about most subjects in a Slashdot comment or even a news article. It's easy to find fault with something in most articles.
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24 wars since WW2: Creating fear so rich people can profit.
Check out this excellent article about Gas Core Nuclear Reactor (GCNR) rocket technology. A GCNR rocket would be fully reusable and would emit no nuclear waste -- only superheated, non-radioactive hydrogen. The multi-engined rocket could be designed to vent its own spent nuclear fuel during its orbit circularization burn, a routine maneuver that changes the flight path from parabolic to circular. The exhaust, travelling at 30km/sec, would escape the Earth's gravity and could easily be aimed to hit the sun. The two million pound payload capacity of such a rocket (not gross weight or fuel, payload weight) would make it highly feasible to haul up a few hundred pounds of earthbound nuclear waste per trip as incidental cargo and inject it into the exhaust.
Even if you don't believe in this particular approach (or don't want to bother to learn about it, so you have no meaningful opinion), does it really seem likely that the human race will continue to have a problem getting things off the planet for the next two hundred thousand years??? I find it ludicrous that people have spent so much time and energy dreaming up ground-based facilities to last that long.
At best any ultra-long-term ground storage plans are incredibly pessimistic, presuming that some natural or man-made global tragedy will prevent the evolution of practical, large-scale space flight. We're so close.
It sounds like your problem is more with placement than solar. Why cover wilderness when there are so many strip mall parking lots that could be roofed by solar panels. You move the production nearer the consumption and provide the customer with a nice shady walk into the store. While at it, you can reduce the need for automotive A/C use as well.
Wind - same inefficiency as solar, requiring massive land use. Very non-friendly to birds, so as to get the moniker of 'Condor Cuisinarts'. Also extremely ugly to look at on a nice high-desert plain.The 1970's called and wants its Condor Cuisinart's back. Seriously Fossil fuels and atomics are generallly hazardous to those who live around them, more so than the dissappearing issue of chopped up birds. My opinion regarding this issue is biased towards human health.
According to a recent study, 36% of Japan's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. 13% of America's electricity comes from nuclear power plants.
If you look closely at the study, you note that North Americans derive only a small percentage of their electricity from nuclear power plants. The Canadians and the Mexicans have an even lower percentage than we do.
The brits in combination with the Aust government have already cleaned up one site that used some vitrification.
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http://www.ippnw.org/MGS/V7N2Parkinson.pdf
http://www.google.com/search?q=in+situ+vitrificat
Are we supposed to wait 200,000 years while the performance of the pilot facility is being evaluated, before the method can be safely employed for production use?
Or, maybe the company has included a money-back clause in the contract, to be used if the storage material turns out to deteriorate already after 10,000 years. I'm sure the mere interest will make that plant a very attractive investment.
The current waste vitrification plant will mix the contents of the tanks with non-radioactive material to make a long-lived glass at a considerable energy savings.
... that is so five years ago.
the US imports 20% of it's oil from the perisan gulf.
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