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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.
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...
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...
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?
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.
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.
341 years of safe storage to 200,000 years of safe storage, done at 75% of the cost... that's a pretty big increment! Not to mention that this appears to be the first truly viable long-LONG-term solution to preventing the waste from leaking out of where it's stored. Still have to agree on a spot to put it, but once it's there you don't have to worry about it. That's half the battle won, and that's what makes it news.
=Smidge=
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.
You do realize that the longer the half life, the slower it's breaking down, so the less radioactive the object is, right?
Right?
Ah.
--Dan
The point is that it passes a significant milestone, i.e. the length of time it takes for the radiation to fade. If it just increased the storage time to, say 500 years, then I would agree with your assessement. TFA, however, claims that this basically keeps the stuff safe until its no longer a radioactive threat. That's important. Lowering the cost of processing is a nice bonus, but less important (IMO) than that 200,000 year figure.
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.
.... really, it boils down to a matter of "perceived" vs. "average" risk.
.
The technologies available to dispose nuclear waste, imperfect as they are, render the risk comparable, in terms of damages, to alternatives ways to obtain the same amount of usable energy in comparable quantities.
the point is that the human being is incapable to assess low probability events
As you said, you see the same psychology at work in air transport: people that habitually use a car (and drive recklessly, BTW) regard air travel as "dangerous", while statistically just the opposite is true.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
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I think that he's trying to say that if a radioactive isotope has an exceptionally long half-life, that means it will be emitting dangerous radiation at a small percentage of the rate that other isotopes will. Generally speaking, this makes the isotope less of a threat. The same amount of an isotope with a shorter half-life (15k years versus 1.5M years) will expose you to 100 times the radiation over the same period of time. A radioactive isotope with a long enough half-life might even be considered safe.
Unfortunately, 129I has another problem: the body likes to stockpile it in your thyroid (it can't tell the difference between it and regular iodine). A sufficient exposure will cause fatal thyroid cancer.
So it may not be as radioactive, but its chemical properties make it just as dangerous. This would certainly suggest it would need to be kept out of the environment for the typical 10* half-life (160M years).
The uranium in coal is reabsorbed?
The sulfur in coal is reabsorbed?
As far as that goes, is anything at all reabsorbed with oil/coal/gas burning? Even the carbon dioxide may take many, many thousands of years to reach a level that it was at before we started burning things.
Rubidium 87 has a half-life of 47 billion (10^9) years
Do you know how much of that stuff you'd need before you would even notice the difference from background levels? Remember that the longer the half life, the more atoms you need to produce the same amount of radioactivity. Doubling the half life halves the amount of danger posed by the radiation emitted. Its as simple as that.
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.
Correct. OTOH, the longer the half-life the less intense will the radiation be, as there are of course fewer nuclei decaying per unit time per unit mass.
See, the danger in nuclear waste is not the extremely long aged compounds like Ru87 or U238, whose radiactivity is not very much higher than the background radiation. Also, short-lived compounds (i.e. the ones which in the short term constitude the vast majority of the radiation) aren't the most problematic either, since mankind can certainly contain them for the few decades required.
The real problem is the compounds of medium half-life, like Pu. These materials radiate strongly, and can present a serious danger to anyone coming into contact with them. Also, containing them requires containing them for longer than the time civilization has been around.
Lessons learned: PR people don't know anything about mathematics and radioactivity.
Lesson 2: Pundits on
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.
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.
A Phosphur coating like the inside of a CRT or Flourescent Light would do it. Only a small fraction of the radiation would be converted to light though so it would not be safe.
If the phosphur could be combined with the soil so it was evenly distributed, it would make the whole thing a bit safer in so far as it would make it easier to to find all the shards if the glass breaks. "Hey Bob, there is some glowing dust on your butt, you better go through decon."
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
...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!
depends on how we choose to use it. the current method is basically to refine uranium ore, put it through a reactor, then bury what comes out as dangerous waste; this isn't very efficient, on the whole. if we went to an all-nuclear energy economy using this strategy, we'd be running out fairly soonish.
(how soon? depends on who you ask, since it's so tricky to estimate. i've heard figures from several decades to a few centuries for this.)
if we switched to breeder reactors and a plutonium economy (google the term), we could make much more efficient use of the fuel. in that scenario, we'd effectively be recycling and reusing the stuff many times over before burying any waste; the time to run out, then, becomes so large that it's entirely impossible to estimate, since nobody can know how our energy demand will change over such time spans.
the problem with breeder reactors is that they'd create a lot of Pu, and the whole scheme would rest on us reprocessing, shipping, and reusing the stuff all the time, all over the place. there's a risk of nuclear weapons proliferation in that, and environmentalists tend to go bananas at the mention of it all. (except for me - i'm a technophile environmentalist, i think it's a much better idea than burning coal. i think pretty much any damn thing is better than that, actually.)
especially british environmentalists tend to go apeshit at the mention of reprocessing anything nuclear. i'm not sure why; i suspect it's because the brits have already proven themselves rather dramatically incompetent at doing it, so now they don't want anybody else showing it can be done safely, or something. whatever the reason, whenever you say "reprocessing nuclear waste", next thing you know some brit will start screaming, "Sellafield! Sellafield! Sellafield!" at you, like it's some sort of cussword they expect you to be scared of. just watch, at least one's pretty much bound to reply to me that way...
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,
Which is why you find these isotopes naturally...Very long lived isotopes are not really a problem, life has been dealing with them since it first appeared.
Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 25.000 years.
This is why you don't find Pu239 naturally, though you do find it's daughter (U235) naturally.
It is practically impossible to guarantee a safe place for at least 7 half-lifes of Rubidium 87 or Uranium 238.
Naturally occuring Rubidium is around 28% Rb87 and 72% Rb85 AFAIK none of the uses of the element require removal of the radioactive isotope. Nor is U238 a "waste product".
"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."
I am from Italy, and I follow closely military technology as well. In the case of the presumed cases of deaths from DU exposure, nothing conclusive was ascertained (transl: " we don't know").
Remember that we're talking about weapons here, and horrible as it may seem, there's an efficacy case to be made: if using depleted uranium ammo saves X lives at the cost of Y lives, where X>Y......
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Three words "Missile Tracking Systems" -- can you imagine the consternation of the various nuclear powers as an ICBM is launched? Would *you* trust the reassurance of a foreign power that "you have nothing to worry about, that scary looking missile is going to impact in a volcano in the middle of nowhere. No, really. And besides, it has no payload, well it has a whole bunch of highly radioactive material that would be act as an appallingly destructive 'dirty bomb' if it were to impact in the wrong place, like one of your major cities, but really that won't happen. Trust us."
...more dangerous isotopes, iodine-131 and iodine-133, which have half-lifes of 8.02 days and 21 hours respectively, making them very active and dangerous substances.
I'm not disagreeing with the statement, but just wanted to point out that iodine-131 saved my wife's life:
http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/dept/thyroid/RAI.html
...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)
Can't help but wonder if that's "200,000 years under ideal, laboratory conditions" and this is projected (unless they've been working on it for a really long time.
Nothing that a human hand has made has lasted much past 10,000 years, much less 10,000 years with no maintenance. It's safe to say that 200,000 years is a guess at best.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
Find me a volcano that sucks in molten rock and it might work. As I understand it, though, volcanos only spew out. Trying to shoot radioactive waste down a volcano to the earth's core is like trying to dispose of waste water by pouring it into a garden hose while the hose is turned on. Just doesn't work.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
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.