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.

Comments

Nothing new?

[pedestrian crossing]

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...

Re: Nice?

[Alwin Henseler]

Turning it into a glass isn't so much to reduce radiation in any way, but to immobilise the radioactive material. It can remain highly radioactive.

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.

Re:The acceptable cost of disposal?

[richie2000]

cars kill about the same number of people every year as a jumbo jet going down with all hands

I can't seem to figure out which planet you're from, but if your homepage URL is any clue, the British cars kill just under 3,000 people every year. In case you're a yank, that figure goes up to a bit over 40,000. I'd like to see this super-duper-hyper jumbo jet of yours.

Re:nice location

[Anonymous Coward]

The server is being very very slow, so here's the article text:

A British company claims to have found the "holy grail" of the nuclear energy industry - a solution to the problem of radioactive waste disposal.

Amec, the London company that cleaned up Ground Zero in New York and rebuilt the Pentagon after the September 11 attacks, says that its latest process will enable nuclear waste to be stored safely for 200,000 years - longer than the radioactivity will last.

The company says that the method could transform the nuclear energy industry and offer a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

The technique, called geomelting, has been tested successfully by the American government, which is building a $53 million (£30 million) pilot plant in Washington state. It intends to use the method on 300,000 gallons of liquid waste from atom bomb tests in the 1940s.

Amec has already held talks with British Nuclear Fuels, the state-owned nuclear energy company that owns the reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria and employs 23,000 people in 16 countries. It plans to send a team to America to look at Amec's site in the next few months.

The Department of Trade and Industry will also study the process. Earlier this month an official said that a huge expansion of the nuclear power industry - including the construction of 45 new reactors - was essential if the Government were to meet its Kyoto target of cutting "greenhouse gases". Many environmentalists, including James Lovelock, have embraced nuclear power because it does not generate greenhouse gases.

The Amec process involves mixing nuclear waste with soil or other "glass-formers" in large, lined metal tanks. The mix - 20 per cent waste and 80 per cent soil - is heated through two graphite electrodes at temperatures of up to 3,000C. Gases, mostly carbon dioxide and traces of hydrocarbons, are drawn off and treated separately. The molten substance is then allowed to cool and forms a large glass block that is harder than concrete.

The process, known as vitrification, was devised by the Battelle research institute in Ohio, which also invented the photocopier and the compact disc.

Amec, which has worldwide interests in gas, oil, mining and forestry - and a turnover of £4.7 billion last year - bought the technology from Battelle. It has an international licence for the process.

British Nuclear Fuels stores much of its waste in concrete, which lasts up to 200 years. This has prompted widespread concern that radioactive material will leak into the water supply and pose a serious threat to public health and the environment. Some nuclear waste at Sellafield is already vitrified by British Nuclear Fuels, using a "continuous melting" method that stores the waste in 6ft containers resembling milk churns. The churns are sealed remotely and stored above ground. Last year 341 containers were filled with vitrified waste.

The vitrification does not, however, last as long as the radioactivity and "a certain amount of repackaging" is necessary, a spokesman said.

Amec said that its method produced a higher quality and longer-lasting glass than British Nuclear Fuel's at three-quarters of the cost.

The new form of vitrified waste is more durable than British Nuclear Fuel's because it contains fewer chemicals. Don Fraser, the global director of Amec's GeoMelt projects, said: "The nuclear industry has an image problem and most of the public concern is over the problem of dealing with radioactive waste. We believe that GeoMelt solves that problem and could transform the energy industry. It is more effective than any other process that has been developed so far."

Mr Fraser said that the glass would last for "geological times" and almost all the radiocative particles in it "would decay to non-radioactive elements or compounds long before the glass corrodes away to nothing". It would, he said

Lead vapor

[Anonymous Coward]

Heating the soil up that high to melt it into glass will also vaporize the lead and send it into the air.

Lesson learned?

[RKloti]

I think it is you that knows nothing about radioactivity:

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.

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.