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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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- People don't want to live near nuclear waste disposal sites.
- We want to preserve large tracts of land in an undeveloped state for a variety of reasons including biodiversity and aesthetics.
So put the storage facilities in the middle of national parks you want to protect. No one wants to build house there, and the stream of tourists is reduced to those who can overcome irrational fears enough to be within a few hundred miles of some rocks that are slightly more radioactive than the rocks they are hiking on.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.
"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 is true, however: as you noted in the title: POLITICS is the problem. And it's not the kind of politics of Republicrats vs Demoblicans - it's the politics of CRAZY insane and desperately poor nations getting their mitts on fissile material for ugly bomb making. Breeder reactors make plutonium, and the last thing I want to do is let people like North Korea, Sudan, Chechnya, Congo, Burma, etc. get any of it.
Proliferation of breeder reactors will permit theft and sale of Pu - even if the reactor isn't in the troubled country. All it has to do is be in a Ally's land and that ally may not be on the up and up. Example: Pakistan.
I agree - in the Best OF Worlds, we should be able to do breeders, but due to political realities, we can't and shouldn't bother "going down that road".
I think a much more fruitful direction would be to
1. make present fission plants safer and more efficient,
2. increase research and development of other sources of power (geothermal used to crack water for hydrogen - I trust Iceland a lot more than Saudi Arabia...) such as geothermal, hydrogen, tidal, wind and solar.
3. improve efficiency of consumption, so as to reduce load
4. Reduce the population. A lot.
point 4 is probably the most important and oddly, the most obvious, but will be the most difficult policy to implement, and would tend to obviate a lot of the power problems.
cheers,
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"So put the storage facilities in the middle of national parks you want to protect. No one wants to build house there, and the stream of tourists is reduced to those who can overcome irrational fears enough to be within a few hundred miles of some rocks that are slightly more radioactive than the rocks they are hiking on.
This is slighly OT, but that's what happens in military training areas. No one wants to risk being run over by a tank, and Voilà! wildlife has a place to call home.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)