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Better Nuclear Waste Storage Plans than Yucca Mountain
NuclearRampage writes "Technology Review has an in-depth article about A New Vision for Nuclear Waste based on the premise that 'storing nuclear waste underground at Yucca Mountain for 100,000 years is a terrible idea.' The article looks at the current DOE plans for Yucca, its shortcomings and what temporary solutions we have to use while a better permanent plan is formulated."
A Slashdot / The Onion Tagteam Special
>"But here's the twist: with nuclear waste, procrastination may actually pay ... ... technological advances over the next century might yield better long-term storage methods.
Sorry, but this kind of stupidity really irks me. If the Yucca plan is flawed, then we should be working constructively to fix it, not criticizing it and offering no solutions. Certainly not assuming that in a hundred years we'll have genetically engineered winged monkeys who will fly all our nuclear waste into outer space. The problem is here now, so we've got to face it now, with today's technology. It's the height of irresponsibility to assume that our children will be smart enough to solve a problem a hundred years from now whose solution has completely eluded us.
As long as we keep it away from a remote, unwatched island. The Japanese already learned this lesson the hard way.
And for the software industry to celebrate this disaster with a name like "MoZILLA" is insulting.
I don't see this as such a big problem as say having thousands of coal power plants churning out millions of tons of poison into the atmosphere.
Isn't it possible that within a few hundred years there will be a method found to actually use these stored materials for further energy extraction? Not impossible. So let it lay there for a while.
You can't handle the truth.
If the waster is radioactive, it is inherently releasing energy. I have never understood why no one has tried to take advantage of this with some kind of "dirty" reactor. Alteast, I have never heard of this. It would obviously not be as efficient as the fision process, but there must be some way to capture that energy and redirect it somehow. Even if you put it in a big bunker and have a thermocouple set up, atleast that is something. Beats tossing it into space.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
France must be on the leading edge of dealing with nuclear waste - what are they doing about it? France gets a very high percentage of electric power from nukes. I for one admire their dedication to being free from dependance on foreign turmoil.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
the whole combining radioactive material and dirt and heating it into glass thing? http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n ews/2004/09/26/nnuke26.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/26 /ixhome.html
Really, if this waste is so awful, why don't we try to create as little waste as possible by using everything we reasonably can? You'd think people would be clammoring to cut down the number of times waste (and live fuel) needs to be shipped, and cut down the quantities that need to be stored away for extended periods of time. Though it isn't like there's that much volume of waste. If I remember correctly, one of WI's biggest, Point Beach, produces something like a quarter of a phone booth's worth of waste in volume per year and provides a heck of a lot of power.
If not now, when?
How about we just ship the nuclear waste to the moon, ala Space:1999?
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The problem with shooting it into space (other than the ethical issues with space littering) is that
1) It's really expensive to lift chunks of metal into space, and
2) The pollution associated with burning untold seas of rocket fuel is perhaps worse than the dangers of leaving the stuff where it is.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
If the idea is that we can come up with more permanent solutions if we just wait, then why not use Yucca as the temporary solution?
The article predicts it will take 100 years for us to come up with a permanent storage solution, which is about how long these casks are good for. What if it takes 200 years? Or 300? Will the casks still be good?
Would Yucca? So what if it isn't a 100,000 year solution. If it's still a longer solution than anything else, that makes it the best solution.
You only have to store it for the duration of your office (4-8-whatever years). After that, it becomes Someone Else's Problem.
The Raven
American Scientist magazine has an article on "heavy metal" reactors that transform some of the nastiest components of spent fuel into a more acceptable range of isotopes.
Is what are they going to do with all the Nucular waste. That's a much bigger problem than this...
From orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Do you like German cars?
Why not just press for reprocessing of spent fuel? All the 250,000 year stuff is from material that can be recovered back into the fuel cycle. If you remove the junk lower down on the periodic table (the real nuclear waste) it only will be dangerous for a few hundred years.
On a side note, has anyone heard of the natural reactor in Oklo? A naturally occurring nuclear reaction there produced all the same waste of a modern reactor and it all stayed in place in de-facto geologic storage.
yucca is ready to accept waste, vitrification is mature. I really don't see why Yucca is still a controversy other than NIMBY and ignorance.
Blaze a trail to the New World
The climate is changing NOW. We need to use an alternative to fossil fuels NOW. Wind power, solar power etc arn't up to the job , only nuclear is. Theres no point worrying about what will happen in milennia if we screw up the climate in this century since if that happens there might not be anyone around in 102,004 AD to have to worry about nuclear waste!
But it is better than a bunch of casks all over creation. These are only good for 100yrs. Send them to Yucca. If a good idea for using the waste material comes up, we can pull it out of Yucca. This stuff came out of the ground. Rain water is percolating through uranium deposits all of the time. I would rather be down wind of TMI than a coal plant. Put wind mills on top of any building over 10 stories high. That would be a middle finger to the middle east.
One, is storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain really a "terrible" idea? Storing nuclear waste in the middle of a major city would be a terrible idea. Storing nuclear waste in a volcano would be a terrible idea. Dumping nuclear waste in the ocean would be a terrible idea. Storing nuclear waste at Yucca mountain may not be the best idea, or a great idea, it may even be a bad idea, but is it really a "terrible" idea? Or is saying it's a "terrible" idea one of those little pieces of hyperbole designed to subconsiously sway an argument.
Second, after about a thousand years even high-level radioactive waste is only going to be about as radioactive as the ore it was mined from. Not that 1000 years is a trivial length of time, but is saying we can't protect this material for "100,000 years" really a valid argument, or is it another one of those bits of hyperbole?
But I forgot, this is Slashdot, where we're pro nuclear power, but anti nuclear waste.
I know, -1 troll, but I had to say it.
If Yucca Mountain won't be safe for a million billion years, how about you just use *it* as the "temporary solution" before you come up with a permanent one? Say what you will about the long-term stability of Yucca Mountain, consider the pathetic short-term storage facilites and warehouses where the stuff is being stored now.
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Nuclear Energy Belongs in the Technology Museum
by Hermann Scheer
(This article originally appeared in DIE ZEIT, 32/2004 http://zeus.zeit.de/text/2004/32/Kernenergie and has been translated from German.)
Nuclear energy is still too expensive and too dangerous. Huge amounts of water are needed in a time of increasing water shortage. Uranium supplies are limited. In Europe $1 trillion was spent on nuclear research while renewable energy fell by the wayside.
The end of the fossil energy age approaches. Its ecological limits draw near as material resources are exhausted. The advocates of nuclear energy see a new day dawning. Even some of its critics have joined the appeal for new nuclear power plants. 442 nuclear reactors are now operating worldwide with a total capacity of 300,000 Megawatts. Two and a half times this number will be added by 2030 and four times as many by 2050, says the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the bastion of the global nuclear community.
This pro-nuclear argument relies on twofold inhibition. Amid contrary facts, the economic advantages are praised. The risks are minimized or declared technically surmountable. At the same time, renewable energies are denounced as uneconomical, with their potential marginalized in order to underscore the indispensability of nuclear energy.
Trivializing the reactor catastrophe at Chernobyl is part of this strategy. In DIE ZEIT 31/2004, Gerd von Randow wrote that there have been only 40 deaths and 2000 registered cases of thyroid cancer. These figures have been provided by advocacy organizations. Independent studies, such as the report of the Munich Radiation Institute, have identified 70,000 casualties that include desperate suicides and the tens of thousands of long-term victims additionally projected.
Comparing these victims with the victims of coal mining and fossil energy emissions is an element of minimization. However, both the massive nuclear and fossil tragedies necessitate mobilizing renewable energy as the only prospect for lasting, emission-free, benign, and inexpensive supplies.
The deployment of nuclear energy is the result of gigantic mechanisms of subsidization and privilege. Before 1973, OECD governments spent over $150 billion (adjusted to current costs) in researching and developing nuclear energy, and practically nothing for renewable energy. Between 1974 and 1992, $168 billion was spent on nuclear energy and only $22 billion on renewables. The European Union's extravagant nuclear promotion efforts are not even included in this calculation. French statistics are still being kept secret. The total state support amounts to at least a trillion dollars, with mammoth assistance provided to market creation and to incentives for non-OECD countries, above all the former Soviet block.
Only $50 billion has been spent on renewable energy. Since 1957, the IAEA and Euratom have assisted governments in designing nuclear programs. By contrast, no international organizations exist today for renewable energy.
After the middle of the seventies, nuclear energy was largely burnt out, due more to enormously increased costs than to growing public resistance. The limitations on construction have become more severe. Uranium reserves estimated at a maximum 60 years refer to the number of plants currently in operation. With twice the number, the available time periods would inevitably be cut in half. The expansion calculated by the IAEA could not be realized without an immediate transition to the fast breeders for extending the uranium reserves!
The history of the breeder reactors is a history of fiascos. Like the Russian reactor, the British reactor achieved an operating capacity of 15 percent before its shutdown in 1992. The French Super Phoenix (1200 Megawatts) attained 7 percent and cost 10 billion euros. The much smaller Japanese breeder (300 Megawatts) cost 5 billion euros and experiences regular operating problems. Making these reactors fit for operation, if that were to prove possible
It's not that these materials are radioactive, but that these materials are composed of isotopes and elements that are *very* rarely found in nature.
Strontium-90, cesium-137, and plutonium are not materials that one can regularly dig up in anything greater than trace amounts, but we have manufactured at least several hundred thousand kilograms of each. To suggest putting these low-half-life materials into populated regions or atomizing them for atmospheric delivery is humorous folly at best.
If we can actually revert the materials in question to their originals (without costing us *more* energy than we originally received from fission; a task that, just to be clear, is impossible) before burial, then I'm all for it. In actuality, your naive suggestions merely show a lack of understanding of the fundamental problem, but this lack of understanding is not unique. That very thinking likely led to the hatching of the Yucca mountain plan in the first place.
As we depart the steel age and forge into the composite-ceramic age, we stand a very good chance of improving existing technologies that show promise in solving this problem completely.
Before we decide to package these materials as a dangerous slurry in a mountain about which we intend to forget, we should seriously consider investing in technological advances that have been before us for over a decade.
(disclaimer: I didnt make this up, but I cant find where I originally saw it)
Spread the nuclear waste over the rainforest and other protected wildlife areas.
1. Solves the nuclear waste problem.
2. Keeps people out of the protected wildlife areas.
Perfect example of "thinking outside the box".
My life is an open book ... up to a point.
The Acoustic Stirling, a new engine that has been recently been developed, Acoustic Stirling Press Brief, could take the heat energy that is generated by nuclear waste and convert it into electrical energy. When the waste is doing work for you, it's no longer waste.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
The entire problem in the US stems from the fact that the government wanted cheap reliable fuel and saw nuclear power as the solution to it. Among the consessions they made to get companies to build these hugely expensive power generators (beyond the obvious subsidy's) is that the government would take the waste that was produced and dispose of it. The nuclear reactor's are now calling the governments bluffs (which it was), causing them to scramble for a solution. Yucca mountain was the ideal location. It is remote, [sarcasm]who lives near a giant mountain in the nevada desert anyways? [\sarcasm]. Everyone knows people live in either Vegas, Reno or Carson City. (yes i do live in nevada as a warning). The problem with this solution is a couple of things. Transport of the nuclear waste. You have large sites of waste from the east coast that would have to travel to the west coast. The idea was to use the rail system to transport this. However, you will go through many many residential and commercial area's along the way. If you were to have a train derail or a vehicle hit and turn over the boxcar holding the waste, you could have a huge spill in a highly populated area. Secondary, there is no way to guarentee that you won't have some of the radiated water from yucca seep into the ground water. This ground water is pumped up by farmers and used to spread on crops. Thus you will have radiated food being fed to your people potentially. Don't you want to eat food that glows at night? Finally, you have earthquake falts in the area. San Adreas being the big one. Its the transition of the pacific plate to the North American plate. From research data, its long overdue for a big earthquake. Something bigger then the 7.0's we get periodically in california. Yes, the fault is some hundreds of miles from the site. But then you get a 7.1 earthquake 60 miles north of Big Bear and you feel a 6.7 in San Diego. So you would have the possibility of a huge quake (not sure how big. I believe it was stated somewhere at least a 8.0 if San Andreas was to go off), traveling this significant distance and shaking up a mountain filled with radioactive waste and fluids, above a aquafer that is believed to stretch well beyond the limited area of nevada (something like to the midwest). Now, those people who say that it doesn't matter store it there...i don't want to see it. Do you want the consequences when something happens along the way, or at the site. That will effect you in some way?
Perhaps /. readers could explain the problems with this plan.
Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.
The main reason we're having such problems with nuclear waste repositories such as Yucca mountain is because of the rather long timescales of decay of a small class of fission byproducts. This class of elements (the 'transuranics' ; Z > 92) comprises a very small fraction of the total waste volume and has (in general) the majority of ill-effects, such as long half-lives, toxicity, excessive heat generation, etc. (Different isotopes contribute to each of these effects in some small fashion.)
A key insight to the problem is that we do not have to store the waste as it comes out of the reactor (or otherwise packaged for long-term storage). It is possible to process the spent fuel in a way to transmute the problem isotopes into others that decay away quickly (days to tens/hundreds of years vs 1x10^6 + years). Neutron bombardment is one method of 'bumping' these decay chains onto different tracks. Doing this effectively, efficiently, and economically is the challenge; many people (including some of my professors) have been working on it at Los Alamos. A good introduction to the process and its rationale are located here.
Of couse, these transmutation schemes require their own energy to run them, and we can't beat the second law of thermodynamics -- it has to come from somewhere. These days it's mostly coal, the same source we're trying to replace with nuclear power! (Don't get me wrong -- nuclear power plants are by far the best we've currently got in terms of environmental impact, reliability, and production capacity. It's not the best, but it's the least of the other evils at the moment.) A better solution would be to provide this energy from an environmentally clean source, such as fusion energy. (It's nice to see two nuclear physics articles in a day!)
Of course, providing funding for disposal solutions such as Yucca and transmutation technologies is expensive and a political hot potato. (It also requires members of Congress to be a bit more forward-sighted, instead of just looking ahead to the next election cycle. Just think: ITER is on the order of $10B [a drop in the bucket to Congress], and has been scrounging for funds from all across the world for more than 20 years -- when it has the potential to unlock safe, envirionmentally clean energy that's powered from constituents of seawater.)
This sounds like talking about solutions to me. One of his main points is that the Department of Energy is ignoring alternatives at all costs, that's why it seems like there are no other solutions.
His main point is that Yucca is taking so long that by default such a low density staging area is coming soon to a big field near you! Wouldn't it be better to do that all in one place far away from population centers?
a quarter of a phone booth's worth of waste in volume
...or on the order of 4 petajoules.
How much energy in burning Libraries of Congress could a phone booth of nuclear waste produce?
If we assume that only the books are burning, and that they weigh a couple of pounds each (say 1 kg), and that they give off the same energy from combustion that an equivalent weight of carbon would (very rough approximation), we can estimate the BLoC energy unit as about:
115M books * 1 kg/book * 390 kJ/mol CO2 / 0.012 mol C/kg
Let's assume the phone booth contains about 2 cubic metres of nuclear waste. Let's assume that it has a density of about 10 g/cm^3, as it's oxides, and that virtually all of this represents the weight of the heavy nuclei. We'll take a value of 10 MeV as the total decay energy of each heavy metal nucleus as it traverses the decay chain down to lead (or some other stable isotope, if it starts off lighter than lead, though most of the fuel rod will still be U238). We'll assume an atomic weight of 250 AMU for each nucleus, to make the math easier. As 1 AMU is approximately equivalent to 1 GeV (i.e. mass of a proton or neutron), we have a rest energy of each nucleus of 250 GeV, meaning 1/25000 of its rest mass is converted to released energy.
The phone booth contains 2 m^3 * 10000 kg/m^3 = 20000 kg of material. This has a rest energy of about 1.8e+21 J, meaning we get about 70 petajoules out if we wait long enough for all of its constituent elements to decay.
So, a phone booth full of nuclear waste could produce about 18 BLoCs worth of energy.
In practice, you'll only get around 1% of this out in any reasonable timeframe (short-lived isotopes, vs. the U238 that you'll have to wait a few billion years for unless you stick it back in a reactor).
While the time waiting for it to cool off is a legitimate argument, the cost relative to mining uranium ore is not. Why? Because the costs for short-term and long-term storage have not been applied.
If you reduce the volume of waste by half, you have already saved a huge amount of money in the long run. Cooling pools are expensive. Spent fuel caskets are expensive. Homeland security measures for all the spent fuel is expensive. Yucca Mountain is ridiculously expensive. Reprocessing so that the fuel can be used again is cheap by comparison.
Fast neutron burner reactors. We've already got the waste, and burner reactors reduce the volume of waste while simultaneously producing large amounts of power thus reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Why is this even an issue anymore?
Because we're waiting for close to 100,000 square miles of solar cells or millions of new windmills to be built? Please!
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Drop it into a subduction zone. It will then be returned to the magma. By the time it comes up again it should have decayed away
I forgot the link! Sorry:
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As pointed out in the article and by another poster, the problem is that Yucca Mountain was selected because proponents thought that it's a dry place.
It's not. The ground is quite moist, and about a year ago (or two?), they found water leaking through the tunnels. The problem is that water will cause corrosion in the caskets that store the waste (again, as pointed out in the article).
Imagine that thousands of caskets are stored in a chamber, and water leaks through the chamber's ceiling. It intermixes with the caskets and carries away pieces of radioactive material. The water then escapes the facility through leaks in the floor of the chambers. That contaminated water then enters the ground water and eventually spreads through the ecosystem.
It's a disaster waiting to happen. 10,000 people every month are moving into the Las Vegas metropolitan area to live.
Let's do the math together.
First, we take the solar constant, 1.367kW/m^2.
The average output per panel over an entire day is approximately 0.2kW per m^2. In other words, the sun provides direct light an average of six hours per day averaging 0.8kW per m^2 each of those six hours. I think that's a fair estimate.
Solar cells that are currently mass produced and have a reasonable lifetime (30 years or more) max out at about 15% efficiency. But I'll allow for incremental improvements if this was to roll out. Let's say 18% to be generous. 0.2kW/m^2 * 0.18 = 0.036kW/m^2.
Multiplying by 24 hours (since we already made an average based on the whole day) gives you 0.864kWh/m^2/day.
Multiply by 250 days (no place on the planet has 365 days of perfect sunshine, and yet I'm being generous) and you get 216kWh/year per sq. meter. Divide 3.848 trillion kWh by 216kWh per sq meter and you get 17,814,814,815 sq. meters. Divide by a million to get sq. kilometers. That comes to 17,815 square kilometers. Quick unit conversion leaves 6,878 square miles.
Now let's reflect. In this best case scenario where you have plenty of sunshine, better than the best mass produced cells available today, the cells are kept clean, no major earthquakes, no tornados, etc., you still need 6,878 square miles of the stuff. Last I looked, I see that a square meter panel costs about $500 -- and solar is federally subsidized! Even if you factor in economies of scale whereby subsidies are not necessary and street costs are slashed in half, you are talking about $4,453,703,703,704. Just so we're clear, that's $4.453 trillion dollars. Even if you reduced the price of panels by a factor of ten from what they are today, you are still talking about $800 billion. Also don't forget that this was a forgiving estimation.
More realistic estimates place the land necessary at 10,000 square kilometers and do no expect such huge drops in price. Remember, this would be a government contract. Nobody will be bidding particularly low.
And I haven't gotten to the best part yet. You have to replace a substantial amount of cells every thirty years or so as the cells wear out and are damaged (how do you protect thousands of square miles from acts of sabotage?). Oh yes, let's not forget that overall demand is increasing, not decreasing.
If this sounds reasonable to you, I think you have a problem with your brain not being screwed on tight.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Actually, I think I read about that previously. Interesting design, really :) Unfortunately on slashdot, if you say anything bad about any particular type of nuclear reactor, they assume you're some nuclear-hating nut.
:)
Nuclear power has huge potential and huge risks. Some people (usually not on slashdot) like to pretend that the potential isn't there. Many on slashdot like to pretend that the risks (note: not mainly of death, but of ruining large amounts of valuable land for several hundred years) don't exist. One has to be objective and look at all the data. Data on current breeders isn't that great, unfortunately. That's why I really like to hear news about new breeder designs. Breeders could literally supply the world with power for several thousand years on known uranium reserves alone.
PBMRs are also really interesting, promising reactors, although the plans in many places to build them without containment structures are more than a little scary. For one, nuclear grade graphite *does* burn, as we saw in Chernobyl, in some circumstances - in fact, it was the burning nuclear grade graphite that was largely the problem when it came to radiological waste dispersion. Also, at the test reactor in Germany, they had some problems about pellets getting caught in the machinery (which were a big pain to get out), although I'm sure things like that can be resolved, and you're not going to be at a risk for radiological dispersal from such accidents (just economic loss from downtime and repair).
Here's a page with a quick summary on an LFR (Lead-cooled Fast Reactor):
http://energy.inel.gov/gen-iv/lfr.shtml
The Russian one is called BREST; it's also an anti-proliferation design:
http://www.asno.dfat.gov.au/nnr_technical.html
Also, there's also some interesting anti-proliferation thorium breeders out there (which convert thorium to U233, which is fissile), such as the Radkowsky design. In short, there's a lot of neat stuff on the horizon.
The *special* hell.