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The Nuclear Power Renaissance
Actual Reality writes "It is ironic to me that much of the same sentiment that thwarted the nuclear power industry back in the 80's is partially responsible for reviving it. Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel. The US has missed several advancements in nuclear technology. We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again stifle our progress."
Another concern is the current ban on re-processing in the U.S.
This leads to an increased amount of medium-half-life waste (not to mention waste of energy), which would be converted to much more radioactive short half-life waste by the re-processing. Such waste is more hazardous, but its disposal is less challenging because the necessary term of safe storage is greatly reduced.
I really don't see the big deal. We're ALREADY a nuclear power, and I sincerely doubt that our energy companies are going to be selling plutonium to the highest bidder.
And here's where I fit your caraciture: I do oppose raising energy rates and reducing consuption because it's anti-progressive, or as I prefer to say, regressive. Any extra burdens imposed on the cost of energy are going to disproportionately hurt the poor, and they've had it bad enough. Besides, it's totally unrealistic. Of course we should be doing more to insulate houses, and I strongly support government subsidies for doing that. But in a choice between reducing energy use and not reducing it while taking the risk of global climate catastrophe, Americans (maybe people in general) will choose the latter ten out of ten times. We can get mad about it or we can get realistic about it and provide them with the one clean source of power that we know how to develop on a large scale. Sucks that we'll probably have to bring in French engineers to do it right; we've really lost our technological lead in this industry!
Regarding the spent fuel, there is an obvious answer: Reprocessing. The most radioactive stuff that we bury now are the heavy metals which are actually fissile and could be used to produce more energy. The rest of the waste, if processed correctly, would be less radioactive in 30 years than the ore that was originally mined. So in the long run we'd be reducing the amount of radioactive stuff in the ground.
As Nikky Telsa said in 1915, "No matter what we attempt to do, no matter to what fields we turn our efforts, we are dependent on power. We have to evolve means of obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever. If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations."
If it uses up a limited resource, it's "burning fuel", at least metaphorically, and therefore lame. Screw that. Let's figure out how to tap into the vast power represented by the titanic spinning mass we live on, or the even more titanic mass that shines in our skies, instead of perpetuating the cycle of digging stuff up stuff until it we use it all up. Those experiments with dangling wires from the shuttle are a step in the right direction.
Reprocessing is expensive mainly due to the labor involved in reprocessing it. Spent fuel must be cut apart and chemically treated in a clean room environment. Removing the tans-uranic elements from spent fuel is not complicated from a chemistry standpoint, but handling spent nuclear fuel is always expensive.
One potential solution is molten salt reactors, which do not use fuel elements but rather use molten uranium salts. Since there are no fuel elements, fuel from the reactor can be chemically treated without a lot of handling. It may even be possible to continuously process the fuel while it's still in the reactor (though this has never been done). Doing this could completely solve the problem of long-term nuclear waste. The only waste produced by such a reactor would be depleted uranium and fission products. Of course, the fission products would need to be safely stored for 300 years before they were safe, but that's a lot better than the trans-uranics that we have to deal with now.
Molten salt reactors also have advantages when it comes to fail safe design. Since they don't have fuel elements or control rods, there is nothing in the reactor core which can break or wear out and cause a melt down to occur. In the case of emergencies, the reactor can be drained into sub-critical containment vessels.