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Fusion-Fission System Burns Hot Radioactive Waste
An anonymous reader writes "A hybrid fission-fusion process has been developed that can be used in some traditional fission reactors to process radioactive waste and reduce the amount of waste produced by 99%. This process uses magnetic bottle techniques developed from fusion research. This seems like the first viable solution to the radioactive waste problem of traditional nuclear reactors. This could be a big breakthrough in the search for environmentally friendly energy sources. Lots of work remains to take the concept to an engineering prototype and then to a production reactor."
If at any point in this process (say you stop it at 50%) the 'waste' is now weapons grade this will never be allowed in the US.
If it's still 'radioactive' you can still get energy from it. You can refine it, clean it up and shove it back through again.
Generations ago we were masters of waste not want not. If you burned candles for light, you collected your drippings, remelted them into new candles. Imagine if the 13 Colonies outlawed this because you could also remelt them into canon wicks... absolute stupidity.
First, they have to get sustainable fusion working, then they can installed the Super-X Divertor to bleed off neutrons to burn fission waste.
Why not use safe, proven technology available TODAY to burn 99% of current fuel AND WASTE?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Scientific American just had an article on fast neutron reactors that get around the waste issue and don't create any weapons grade material: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste&page=1
This is neat technology, and may some day be practical. But, i don't think that day is coming for 50-100 years.
Here's why : solar is getting cheap very rapidly. Today, you can pick up panels at $2.85 a watt off the shelf. Below $1 a watt, and it will be cheaper to put panels up than it will be to burn coal.
A fusion-fission hybrid system will cost a LOT. According to the wall street journal, nuclear fission plants are already deal-breaker expensive. It would be cheaper per watt to build more wind farms than new fission reactors. http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/05/12/its-the-economics-stupid-nuclear-powers-bogeyman/
Another way to look at it :
To operate a fusion-fission hybrid system, as well as dozens of large gigawatt fission reactors takes a lot of well trained and educated people working round the clock to make all of the technology work. There are very real dangers, and very expensive regulations that have to be followed.
To build more solar panels? You print some more off the reel and slap them on to glass. You park the panels in the desert and leave them alone for 25 years. Maybe a simple robot wipes them off occasionally.
There's no liability, or need for exhaustive quality control. If a panel fails prematurely, you pay a warranty claim.
Inherently, solar is going to always be cheaper for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for sharing, Nostradumas. While you're pulling prophecies out of your ass, can you tell me when my 401k is going to rebound?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
For those of you who probably are not familiar with the nuclear industry, let me make a very simple description of how "Nuclear Waste" is classified.
Waste falls into three categories:<BR>
Low Level Waste (LLW)<BR>
High Level Waste (HLW)<BR>
Transuranic Waste (TRU)<BR><BR>
LLW is anything that has been exposed to a reasonably low level of radiation. This is typically things like gloves, towels, suits, etc. and their activity level is usually low enough to store in a temporary facility until the activity level in them dies off enough to be disposed of safely.<BR><BR>
HLW is primarily spent nuclear fuel that, in places like France, is usually reprocessed, but here it is typically either sent to be disposed of or onto research facilities, disposal, or weapons.<BR><BR>
TRU waste is what the article has been discussing, which is a big problem. TRU waste comes about as nuclear fuel is fissioned out into various fission products. Obviously these fission products are radioactive and all depend on the type of fuel, but for old LWR/BWRs, there is a significant amount of TRU waste coming out. If what they claim is actually true, then it will be a very big step in the right direction.
This idea was (in some sense) around in the 1960's, believe it or not.
The high neutron flux produced means that the CFNS would itself become radioactive, and the steel of its construction weakened by neutron irradiation. I would like to see a life-cycle analysis to make sure that the total waste consumed was more than that produced by the CFNS itself.
This general issue is why I would like to see a lot more emphasis places on He3 fusion, and also on linear fusion devices. (He3 fusion, either He3 - Dt or He3-He3, produces much less neutron flux. To me, the end goal would be to have nuclear fusion power that did not produce radioactive waste, which ITER definitely will do. Linear fusion is for spacecraft propulsion, of course - it is thought to be much easier technically than making a tokomak work.)
I'm sure with your amazing powers, you know where to put the bill.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm also guess here. A decade ago, Los Alamos pioneered Accelerator Transmutation of Waste. There the idea was you bombard high level waste with a particle beam to, ironically, make it even higher level waste. The clever thing was this. The higher the radioactivity the shorter the half life.
The plan was to convert things with halflifes of 50,000 years to half lifes of hours. An insanely clever idea. But it never got much funding.
I'm guessing that this Fission/fussion system is probably playing the same game. Fusion makes for heavier nuclii, which if they are not stable, tend to be even short lived as a general trend.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Fast breeder reactors turn out not to be as easy to make safe and reliable as their proponents think. Google for more recent literature. It's a pity, I personally like the idea, but both fast reactors and fuel reprocessing have turned out to be very difficult.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The liquid fluoride thorium reactor can burn existing nuclear waste just fine, and it's been available since the 50's.
"[1st and 2nd generation Thermal] Nuclear power [are] a dead end. No new [1st or 2nd Generation Thermal] nuclear plants have been built in 25 years". . .
There, fixed it for you. Yes, old reactor designs are a dead end. They are prone to a risk of melt-down (though that risk has been, mostly, successfully managed for the past 30 years; yes, Three Mile Island was a problem, but, keep in mind that even with the TMI incident, the safety features of that reactor design prevented an escape of radiation when the melt-down did occur), they only extract a miniscule amount of the potential energy available in the fuel, and they create waste that "would have to be kept under armed guard forever".
Nuclear physicists and engineers have continued to do R&D for the past 30 years, and they are proposing *new* ideas. When new ideas are presented, you can't just assume that the same arguments that were valid criticisms of the previous designs continue to be valid for the new designs.
We have, right now, a Nuclear Waste problem, because of those previous generations of dead-end reactor designs, that must be dealt with. Putting the stuff into storage for 100000 years is not really a solution. The only real solution to the nuclear waste problem is to further process it to make the waste 'safe' and short lived.
Now, I do not really know if the design proposed in this article is "the solution" or not. Maybe it is. There was also a solution proposed in the 1990s, called the Integral Fast Reactor, which was essentially melt-down proof - not because of systems put in place to prevent a possible melt-down, but because it used a different Nuclear Reaction called a Fast Nuclear reaction, instead of the older Thermal Nuclear reaction, and was such that if the reactor increased in temperature beyond the normal operating temperature, the reaction actually choked itself, sort of like a candle sealed in a glass container. They even successfully tested the design, by purposefully cutting off the cooling to a prototype reactor that the DoE built out in the desert somewhere, and it did, in fact, shut itself down as it is designed to do.
The IFR design was also based around the concept of using our existing waste stockpiles as *fuel* for the reactor, producing hundreds of times more energy from that fuel, than older 'conventional' reactors do, which should have made it much more economically feasible.
The reason I mention the Integral Fast Reactor, is that is an example of a new design which I've studied more about than this new fission-fusion hybrid in the article, which demonstrates that the old arguments don't *necessarily* apply to new designs. Every proposal must be studied and evaluated on it's own merits - you can't just make a sweeping statement that Nuclear power is a dead end.
Unfortunately, the IFR project (which was being conducted by the Department of Energy) was canceled by the Clinton administration because of the same knee-jerk reaction to all Nuclear technology, exhibited by the parent, instead of really considering the IFR design on it's own merits or problems.
Also, in regards to this new technology, it sounds like they are not necessarily proposing to build new plants, but to 'upgrade' existing plants. If we can upgrade the already built plants in such a way as to reduce our existing waste stockpiles, where is the downside? True, this new design, as with any new design, needs to be thoroughly evaluated and proven, and also compared to other proposals (for example, we should consider if this proposed design is actually superior to the IFR design - if not, we should be restarting the IFR project instead, perhaps) before we role it out to any large scale.
*Maybe* we should have never gotten into the business of Nuclear Fission, but the fact remains that we have all this waste that we need to do something with. Why not 'burn' it in a new reactor type in such a way that we produce significantly less toxic, shorter lived waste? Environmentalists should be proponents of finding ways to deal with our nuclear waste problem, not object to every single proposal with a blanket statement that nuclear power is a dead end and re-hashing the same old tired arguments regardless of whether or not they apply to the new proposals.
President Gerald Ford issued a Presidential directive (October 1976) to indefinitely suspend the commercial reprocessing and recycling of plutonium in the U.S. This was confirmed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Link.
-kgj
That's great that they may have a way to solve the issue of nuclear waste, but that doesn't solve the main problem which is that you average person is afraid the power plant will blow up and destroy everything around it for hundreds of miles.
While you're pulling prophecies out of your ass...
Wouldn't that make him "Nostra-dumbass"?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
What we need is a mainstream movie and miniseries about the hazards of coal; perhaps going through the life of a Chinese coal miner?
Oh, and point out the cost/hazards of solar and wind while you're at it.
I don't read AC A human right
Unfortunately much (most?) of the US public thinks that:
Everything that's "natural" is good. (Umm... what about ricin? Perfectly respectable "natural" product...)
Everything "nuclear" is bad. (The parent is potentially a good counterexample).
Everything "renewable" is good. (Using corn-based ethanol as a fuel source is a really bad idea ... there are better sources that have less environmental and economic impact).
Etc. Unfortunately the state of science education in the US is in such a sorry state that too many people are unable to think rationally about many of the choices facing us - they'll pay more attention to what Oprah or Paris think about some scientific question than they would to the scientists and engineers who actually do know something about those choices.
For all those people, I've got a bridge for sale in Manhattan! Cheap!! Buy it now while you have the chance, because it'll sell fast!!!
:-( :-( :-( Our country is so screwed... hopefully some of the rest of the world can keep civilization going until the nitwits here die out ... :-( :-( :-(