Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Vitreous State Lab at The Catholic University of America has been doing this for 30 years. Read a recent article here.
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.
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.
Of the top of my head... There was some discussion and research done a while back to establish what sort of symbolic warning to future generations we could use on the surface above extremely hazardous waste such as long half-life radiactive material. 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. It seems pretty sensible to at least try and warn future generations about an area such as a geologic waste depository but what if the warning signs get misconstrued? If we ever wipe our selves out, which is more than likely in my opinion, then would the next round of intelligent life understand what we ment? Might not such a legacy raise the same kind of curiosity that we have and lead to some archealogical dig only to get themselves zapped...
my other sig is written in brainfuck
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.
One of the waste products produced by nuclear reactors is Iodine-129. The half-life of I129 is 15.7 million years.
You'll have a greater risk of radiation exposure from going outside on a sunny day than from all the iodine-129 in the world. The point about keeping an eye on iodine-129 is because it's found together with the 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:
From http://www.jaeri.go.jp/english/press/2001/011017/ (Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute):
Among the radionuclides emitted during a nuclear accident, the Iodine (131I, 133I) isotopes exhibit strong radioactivity that affects the human body but they are difficult to quantify because they have short half-lives and turn quickly into stable, non-radioactive substances. On the other hand, the iodine-129 that is hardly hazardous at all due to its long half-life period is emitted at a certain ratio with respect to iodine-131 and iodine-133. The measurement of iodine-129 makes it possible to estimate the emission of radioactive substances such as iodine-131
Iodine-129 by itself is hazardous for roughly 0 seconds, 0 minutes and 0 years. So which physics course did you take again?
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.
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.
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.
Heating the soil up that high to melt it into glass will also vaporize the lead and send it into the air.
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.
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.
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.