NMR Shows That Nuclear Storage Degrades

eldavojohn writes to point out recent research using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imagery that shows that certain nuclear waste storage containers may not be as safe as previously thought. From the article: "[R]adiation emitted from [plutonium] waste could transform one candidate storage material into less durable glass after just 1,400 years — much more quickly than thought... The problem is that the radioactive waste damages the matrix that contains it. Many of the waste substances, including plutonium-239, emit alpha radiation, which travels for only very short distances (barely a few hundredths of a millimeter) in the ceramic, but creates havoc along the way."

Comments

So why not sink it?

[Dr Reducto]

I have heard that sinking the waste to the bottom of the atlantic right at the fault lines (where it will be sucked into the earth) was a good idea. Why don't we do that?

But then again, I forgot that while environmentalists scream at us to pay attention to science when it comes to global warming, when it comes to anything nuclear, most of the same environmentalists have been known to completely ignore science and act completely irrational (although slashdot readers tend to think rationally about nuclear)

Re:So why not sink it?

[the phantom]

1. International treaties forbid it.
2. The faults at the bottom of the Atlantic are in rift zones where new oceanic crust is being produced. The material would not be subsumed into the mantle, but would be forced away from the fault. If you want it to be "sucked" into the mantle, you would need to drop it into a subduction zone, say, off the coast of Japan.

It's an economic problem in the US.

[ciscoguy01]

The trouble with spent nuclear reactor waste is the quantity of the stuff.
In France they reprocess the used fuel, which results in about an 80% conversion to new useable nuclear fuel. So rather than having 100 tons of nuclear waste, they have 20 tons that have to be stored indefinitely.
Here in the US we don't reprocess our spent fuel, because it costs more to reprocess that to just make new.
This is an economic problem that results in us having to stockpile the whole amount of spent fuel, forever.
If it cost less to reprocess, or if reprocessing were required to reduce the amount of spent fuel for storage, we would have and 80% smaller problem.
But we don't.
Personally, I think that would be worthwhile just to reduce the storage requirement.

Re:It's an economic problem in the US.

[b0s0z0ku]

Here in the US we don't reprocess our spent fuel, because it costs more to reprocess that to just make new.

Only because the government is subsidizing the eventual building of a storage facility. Also, have we considered the risks of the current state of things - which is that the highly-radioactive spent fuel elements are lying around (under guard, but still...) in dry casks or reactor water pools.

Besides, environmental costs also have to be considered. It's not just the storage of a large mass of fuel. The environmental toll also includes damage due to uranium mining and extraction, enrichment of the uranium - both of which involve some pretty evil chemicals (UF6, yummmmmmm).

-b.

Re:It's an economic problem in the US.

[cperciva]

In France they reprocess the used fuel, which results in about an 80% conversion to new useable nuclear fuel. So rather than having 100 tons of nuclear waste, they have 20 tons that have to be stored indefinitely.

In fact, it's even better than that: Those 20 tons which remain as waste are considerably "hotter" than the useful fuel, and thus degrade faster. Instead of keeping 100 tons of waste for 240,000 years, they need to keep 20 tons of waste for 100 years.

Re:It's an economic problem in the US.

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to coal mining, uranium mining is nothing.

Also, take a hint from the name: uranium hexafluoride. It's an intermediate product. When you have enriched uranium, you no longer have UF6. The chemicals used in processing aren't particularly relevant if they can be controlled (which they can), otherwise solar-electric would be out, too (the silicon industry has long be a target of the environmental groups wraith).

Re:It's an economic problem in the US.

[turing_m]

Most of this opposition to nuclear power seems to come from the US. Why?

On an international scale, between governments, deals are conducted by intelligent people. They want to exchange scarce, valuable goods for something of equal value. They don't want paper (or bits) that can be produced (and are, google M3 graph) at negligible cost UNLESS it is backed by something that is scarce and of equal value. That used to be gold, until the US became addicted to running trade surpluses and other countries began demanding gold instead of their inflated dollar (because there wasn't enough gold to cover the paper they were printing).

As a result of that, the US effectively became an empire. It has done that by switching a gold backing for the dollar with an oil backing. Before: don't trust paper dollars? Fine, we'll exchange them for gold. Now: don't trust paper dollars? Fine, go exchange them for oil. And the US (or rather, the Federal Reserve Bank) keeps printing more dollars at a cost of next to nothing, effectively taxing the rest of the world.

It has successively put more and more bases in oil producing countries, either through diplomacy (i.e. We'll secure your monarchy as long as you continue to take payment for oil in dollars, otherwise we'll either invade or do a similar deal with your enemy tribe) or outright invasion. See the world map of US bases. Compare to proven oil/uranium reserves. How did those bases get there? Starting to look like an empire by now?

http://respectsacredland.org/no-us-bases/draft3.jp g

So long as the US maintains control of the currency that most of the world's oil and uranium is sold for, it maintains an ability to tax the world, effectively making it an empire. And so long as it downplays this through propaganda, most the world doesn't really notice. They need oil, they toil to make something that holders of US dollars will want to buy. It's actually quite analogous to the Carthaginian empire and its monopoly on tin, except more efficient. And much like Carthage, Naval dominance is essential.

So why is nuclear played down? Well, the more addicted to oil the world is, the more the US can tax. Oil can still undercut nuclear costs. And when the switch to nuclear is made, look who has spy bases in Australia and borders Canada?

Re:It's an economic problem in the US.

[Chris Burke]

I also would love to see your reaction when the nuke plant 2 miles from your house melts down and the authorities are rousting you out of your house to clear the area.

It wasn't necessary for TMI, so why do you think it would in a newer, safer design? Things like pebble bed reactors whose very physical design dictates that the chain reaction will slow down if the reactor ever becomes too hot, making meltdown physically impossible.

You're vastly more likely to have to flee your home due to a truck carrying industrial chemicals getting in a wreck -- as in, this has actually happened -- but I don't hear you calling for the end of industrialization.

I live in Illinois, the most nuclearized state in the US, so it's not just an armchair discussion to me.

And how many meltdowns have there been? Right, zero. Gary, Indiana is a bigger source of health risk to Illinois residents than your nuclear plants are. Your coal plants are a bigger health risk. Just like people living around the TMI plant were exposed to more radiation from underground radon gas than by the TMI incident.

Illinois, "the most nuclearized state in the US", gets about 50% of its energy from nuclear. France gets almost 80% of their power from nuclear. How many meltdowns have there been? Right, zero. I guess it isn't hypothetical to them, either, but they come out on the other side of the debate.

By the way, it wasn't theoretical to me, either, as while I was attending the University of Michigan they had an active nuclear reactor on campus. Strangely it too failed to meltdown and explode.

So the "special interests" you are talking about are people like me.

No, you're one of the people who have an irrational fear of the nuclear boogeyman that I'm talking about.

The problem with nuclear power is that the worst case is very bad. If the containment fails in a major accident, you'll get a whole lot of coal plants worth of radiation in a hurry. A coal plant, regardless of the failure mode, is unable to permanently radioactively contaminate an area. Something like Chernobyl in a US metro area would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Then don't build reactors like Chernobyl, duh. TMI wasn't built like that, so when it failed it didn't blow up like Chernobyl did. It is possible to design a reactor so badly that it has the potential to pull a Chernobyl. It is also possible to design a reactor so it doesn't. TMI didn't, and it is still considered an archaic design and no new reactor would be built in the same way. So where does this fear of "something like Chernobyl" come from? Hollywood?

Why? Human factors, primarily, because of the complexity of the technology and the risks posed by major failure. People blame "regulation" on the one hand for making the plants expensive, then with the other extoll the failsafe design demanded by these regulations for preventing the Chernobyl-type disaster. You can't have it both ways.

Well the key to preventing a Chernobyl-type disaster is to use a modern design that cannot fail in that manner. The key to avoiding the problem of human factors is to design your reactor such that no matter what the human does the worst case is that the reaction stops and the nuclear fuel is wasted. I'm still all for regulation that ensures safety, but proper reactor design means that safetly regulations needn't by themselves prove prohibitive.

If we had allowed nuclear technology development to continue apace with the rest of the world, our reactors would be better and cheaper and we would have cleaner air and more reliable energy. Instead, the major economic argument against nuclear is that we're so far behind that it would be prohibitively expensive to catch back up. Well that's only going to get worse over time, so I say turn it around now.

Why is a fraction of a mm of weakening bad?

[Gertlex]

What is so horrid about these plutonium particles if they only penetrate the container "a few hundredths of a millimeter"?

Ok, so you've got an almost microscopic layer of weak stuff... Surrounded by otherwise resilent ceramics. The article says nothing about if these particle continue to penetrate past the weak glass.

All this disrupts the crystalline structure of the ceramic matrix, jumbling it up and turning it into a glass. That can make the material swell and become a less secure trap. Farnan says that some zircons that have been heavily damaged in this way by radiation have been found to dissolve hundreds of times faster than undamaged ones. So if the ceramic gets wet, there could be trouble.

Again, how is water going to get to it unless the whole thing cracks? If that happens, your container has failed, regardless.

Re:Waste?

[archen]

I could be wrong, but my answer to your questions:

It is still "hot" but we don't get energy here on earth through the radiation (we could probably get more from the sun), instead we get it from fission. As someone else mentioned we could reprocess the "waste" to get the stuff that is still useful back out. Getting energy from radioactive materials isn't practical in terms of power generation unless you're under unusual circumstances like space probes.

Stuff came from the ground true, but what we're looking at is basically concentration. If you say dug up a mountain then put it back with the radioactive waste distributed evenly then it probably would qualify as basically harmless. However that again isn't too practical. Stuffing it underground I don't think is a real issue if it's deep enough, and you're absolutely sure it's clear of the water table and will no longer interact with the surface. Displacement from earthquakes could be an issue there however.

Re:1,400 years

[Dog-Cow]

It is not logical to live any other way, unless you believe you are coming back some way or another.

Re:Waste?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plutonium is ONLY a bi-product in reactors that are not to be used for energy production. These reactors main goal is to create plutonium for bombs. A real energy reactor burns plutonium. See CANDU design for example. Plutonium is created and burnt at the same time.

Re:'Sinking it' doesn't make it magically 'go away

[cartman]

So you're talking about essentially land-mining a significant chunk of the planet, some of the most unstable parts of the planet, with the possibility that still-lethal material could suddenly, randomly, re-enter our parts of the environment, with catastrophic results.

It seems extremely unlikely that waste from a subduction zone could re-enter "our parts of the environment." Uranium and transuranic actinides are extremely heavy elements and they would be stored as enormous 1-ton+ spent fuel assemblies in synrock or passivated glass at the bottom of the ocean. They are heavier than water. Even if earthquakes fractured the fuel assemblies, they still would not rise to the top of the ocean somehow, then somehow heat up to 5000+ degrees celcius, then vaporize and spread through the air. In fact, recovering one of the sunk fuel assemblies would be very difficult.

However I have read one plausible scenario that small amounts of radioactive waste stored at the bottom of the ocean could re-enter our environment. Over long periods of time, it may break up, then small amounts of it could be consumed by ocean animals, then it could travel its way up the food chain and eventually be consumed by a human eating seafood. However, the chances of that are very small and the quantities consumed are very small, and it would be far off in the future when most of the radioactivity had already been lost. In other words it would not constitute "catastrophic results".

There was also some concern about the health of ocean animals in the immediate vicinity of waste.

Still, stable terrestrial storage would be more effective for various reasons, according to what I've read.

Finally, regarding the majority of your posting: While there are indeed alarmist/ignorant/self-serving 'environmentalists', as there are boobs and headline-graspers in every part of human endeavor, there are also arrogant self-righteous techno-weenies with equally poor understanding of the topics on which they opine. As much as you look down on those you deem ignorant, those who are informed can look down on your ignorance, which to a self-aware person would suggest an attitude-check would be in order. (Frankly you come off not much different then the stereotyped asshats you rail against.)

Strange. I found the tone of his post to be far more temperate than yours.

As much as you look down on those you deem ignorant, those who are informed can look down on your ignorance, which to a self-aware person would suggest an attitude-check would be in order.

Indeed, perhaps an attitude check is in order by a "self-aware" person.

Re:Kill two birds with one stone

[san]

There are countries (the Netherlands, for example) that send their nuclear waste to France, too. The deal, however, is usually that the countries take back the reprocessed waste, and the waste processor gets to keep the fuel.