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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."
I'm only going to worry about this if the Weekly World News is right and death has been cured.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
First of all, why is that stuff sitting in a nuclear waste container? It's good, fissile material that could supply much-needed energy to our power grid. Stop being a bunch of pansies and BURN IT IN A REACTOR! That will not only massively reduce the amount of waste, but it will turn much of the remaining material into extremely hot isotopes that will go inert (or nearly so) in a much shorter period of time.
Secondly, Pu-239 emits a very small amount of radiation. With a half-life of 24,000 years, it barely even raises the background levels. At a whopping 10 fissions per kilo per second, I doubt that much of the radiation is even escaping the material. I presume that the real safety problem is Pu-240 contaimination. A problem that wouldn't exist if they burned the materials instead of storing them.
Lastly, can someone please inform the press that the 1980's called? They want their "one of the most deadly by-products" scare-mongering back. There are far more deadly materials in this world than a bit of plutonium. Caffeine being a prime example. We dillute caffeine so much that we don't realize that too a few grams is actually quite deadly. (Find out how much of your favorite caffinated product would be needed to kill you here.) So maybe we can start reporting these things for what they are (engineering and safety issues) rather than what they're not (mini-Chernobyl levels of contamination). Maybe? *sigh* I suppose not.
Someone should setup a lobby group who's job would be to convince the government to let us use our nuclear fuels instead of declaring everything as waste in a mostly useless gesture to stop the mythical nuclear terrorist of the month.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...should store the waste at the dark side of the moon.
I suggest to build a moon base near the dump yard to for
observing. Since there is a lot of radiactive waste, there should be
more than one yard, so the first one should be named Alpha-1.
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)
A couple questions for anyone who knows more than me:
1) If this stuff is still hot, doesn't it mean there's still energy there we could use?
2) This stuff came from the ground, why can't we put it back there?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yes, yes, we know the problems with this. But what about the benefits? While there may be some negative health benefits, the super hero population is only bound to grow with this recent discovery.
You can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and you can't make super mutants with laser vision without cracking some radioactive material storage facilities. Let's take a balanced look at this.
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.
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Unless the rocket taking it there happens to blow up on launch and spreads radiaoactive waste over a few thousands square miles.
That would be a good idea. However, every so often (1 in 100? 1 in 50?) a rocket launch doesn't go right...a self desctruct option on a rocket carrying payload of nuclear waste isn't a very good idea, neither is letting a rocket that won't make escape velocity burn out...that leaves engineering black-box type of containers to contain the waste (which is already pretty damned heavy), causing your launch weight to go up, necessitating bigger more complex rockets...(and back to the beginning agan)
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.
Again, how is water going to get to it unless the whole thing cracks? If that happens, your container has failed, regardless.
Hyper-sensitive man! Able to look through an obvious joke with his penetrating sarcasm ignoring vision! No internet joke is safe!
I kid, I kid...
Because, contrary to your Grade 6 "Earth Sciences Unit" animated filmstrip, subduction zones aren't neat little escalator-like places where material goes into some sort of geological garbage disposal system like you might have attached to your sink.
Instead they're messy places where continental blocks are crashing into each other in tremendously slow motion, riding up over, breaking off, dissolving, melting, all that good stuff. Material dropped on one of these places is could just lay there for the longer then we've been a species. However there is a strong possibility this material won't always just lie there but instead break up, on it's own or under subduction-related volcanic or seismic activity, and spread into the larger ecosystem (garbage in is indeed garbage out!)
While this breakdown & distribution could be a slow process it would be a chaotic environment and 'bad things' could just as well happen 'fast', with disastrous consequences. Keep in mind that while out of sight and generally low energy places the deep ocean beds are not disconnected from the rest of the planet and are also subject to disturbances; subduction zones hugely so.
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.
Yeah. No. Not a good idea.
Better to minimize the amount of material. Convert it into the least reactive forms economically & technically practical. Then using reliable systems (and that pretty much rules out 'under several thousand meters of water' with our current skills) isolate it as much as practicable in long-term stable places, and hope that future generations don't fuck with it in a bad way.
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.)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The problems with storage of 'spent' fuel from nuclear reactors go beyond inadequate technology for 'containment' and the likelihood of highly radioactive material (and heavy metals) getting into the environment. Radioactivity is both carcinogenic and mutagenic - not usually creating 'super heroes' but rather mental retardation, crippling deformities, and nasty genetic diseases. Exposure to radiation is like playing 'russian roulette' with your genes, and almost all genetic damage is harmful.
It also includes HEAT, and as the thermal balance of this planet changes with buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gasses, the problems of excess heat generated by nuclear waste are amplified.
Plutonium does not tidily decay into radioactively inert (but still chemically toxic)lead, but instead into a 'decay chain' of other - also radioactive - elements. It's a crumbling, poisonous mess that keeps generating more heat. Among the many possible decay chains:
Plutonium-239 - half-life: 24,110 years
alpha decay into Uranium-235 - half-life: 704,000,000 years
alpha decay into Thorium-231 - half-life: 25.2 hours
beta decay into Protactinium-231 - half-life: 32,700 years
alpha decay into Actinium - half-life: 21.8 years
beta decay into Thorium-227 - half-life: 18.72 days
alpha decay into Radium-233 - half-life: 11.43 days
alpha decay into Radon-219 - half-life: 3.96 seconds
alpha decay into Polonium-215 - half-life: 1.78 milliseconds
alpha decay into Lead-211 - half-life: 36.1 minutes
beta decay into Bismuth-211 - half-life: 2.15 minutes
alpha decay into Thallium-207 - half-life: 4.77 minutes
beta decay into Lead-207 -: stable
Every one of these 'decays' creates more heat, as well as more radiation... I don't know if anyone's ever calculated the impact of all that heat on the finely-tuned balances that make this planet inhabitable by human beings?
In my understanding, anyway, the most important questions of the present include 'how can we - while we still have time and resources - redesign and restructure our society so that we don't NEED nuclear power (or excess fossil fuel consumption) for high quality-of-life. It's a lot more than buying organic coffee and sometimes riding a bicycle.
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.
Strange. I found the tone of his post to be far more temperate than yours.
Indeed, perhaps an attitude check is in order by a "self-aware" person.
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.
This problem was expected if not proven 30 years ago - which led to the very slow and poorly funded development of alternatives like synrock for waste incorporation (mixed in and chemically bonded) instead of just encapsulation (enclosed). Unfortunately idiots mainly in the US nuclear power lobby have been pushing nuclear waste as a solved problem ever since it was just being shoved in stainless steel drums and thrown into the sea. It would be useful if that industry spend as much on R&D as they currently spend on advertising - then things may get closer to the wild claims thay make.
The chances of an atom of waste buried in moving groundwater ending up in the human food supply are less than 1 in a trillion.
Studies have shown water does travel away from Yucca hundreds of miles.
We intend to bury it in Yucca mountain (not moving groundwater) which is an extremely stable geological formation which hasn't moved for millions of years and almost certainly won't move for a long time.
The area around Yucca is seismically active, and has experienced earthquakes. It is NOT geologically stable. In the 1970s a government building was damaged during an earthquake there, and in 2002 another earthquake happened not far from there.
FalconShould there be a Law?