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Planned Nuclear Reactors Will Destroy Atomic Waste
separsons writes "A group of French scientists are developing a nuclear reactor that burns up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes. They estimate that 'the volume of high-level nuclear waste produced by all of France’s 58 reactors over the past 40 years could fit in one Olympic-size swimming pool.' And they're not the only ones trying to eliminate atomic waste: Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin are working on a fusion-fission reactor. The reactor destroys waste by firing streams of neutrons at it, reducing atomic waste by up to 99 percent!"
The anti-nuclear group will always come up with something to deter nuclear plants from taking off.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Nuclear, like it or not, is the intermediate solution to first world energy needs. As long as we can mitigate past mistakes (sloppy arms races) with technology such as this, nuclear will also have a promising future.
--I like turtles...
Educating, not sensationalizing, is what the nuclear industry needs. Or at least not exclamation marks.
Alas, I can can guarantee you that 1: it will take another decade minimum of legal wrangling to get large-scale stuff like this in the works
2: This type of research in general is old news. It's still viable, but from reading the summary (I'm lazy) it doesn't seem to be anything new that I haven't heard of before.
P.S. I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough to be one who does the educating. (Oh wait, I don't need credentials to educate on the internet, do I? :P )
Clean nuclear is far more realistic than the fantasy that is clean coal.
I don't care if coal outputs an order of magnitude of radiation than all of the nuclear reactors combined. I don't care if the number of terrorists in the world will be stopped by reducing access to this deadly radioactive material. I don't even care if we are entrusting the French (yea the FRENCH!) with coming up with a solution to the world's power generation problems and global warming at the same time. No sir! I'm thinking of the Children. The C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N! And they are not too happy about this development. Even the children have a right to die of lung cancer in 50 years from the filthy air like the rest of us. Remember 3 mile island! The end is near! The march of socialism is upon us! They're coming for you! ... Ah gosh darn it, who am I foolooin? Ok I give up, Obama just passed health care I guess this isn't the end times after all. There's always 2012!
I don't see a problem with diversifying. I assume we'll run out of fissionable material at some date, and if solar can help slow that down, then bring it on.
Sent from my PDP-11
Some of us have been saying for decades that another way to say "nuclear waste" is "nuclear fuel." The current view of "spent" fuel is akin to refining crude oil to make gasoline and then having to store all the waste diesel, fuel oil and other petroleum byproducts until the end of time.
Despite the intentions of the summary to say otherwise, the volume of an olympic swimming pool is actually a lot. For example, all gold ever mined would also fit in an a pool of that size. The comparision is therefore meaningless. A better comparision would be the *area* required to safely store all that nuclear waste. That area is orders of magnitudes larger than the area of an olympic swimming pool.
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"Succeed on its own merits..." Boy, that's a laugh.
The US nuclear industry has lagged behind because for the past 50 years, the regulatory and political environment allowed anti-nuclear activists to delay the completion of plants indefinitely. You can't make a profit from a power plant without actually producing power; the anti-nuclear groups simply stalled the completion of plants until the companies gave up on the existing projects and walked away. Nobody tried to start new projects because they weren't willing to risk $10 billion on what might amount to a really ugly paperweight.
The nuclear industry never had a chance to succeed on its own merits. If they halted after they lost the taxpayer handout, it was because that was the only thing left letting them make a profit.
What? And take away their last best hope to control the world through manufactured crisis?
Population bomb?...bust
Famine?...nothing
Nuclear Winter?...phhssssaaaa
Ozone hole?...They still don't know what's going on with that.
Swine/Bird flu?...flew the coop.
AIDS?...Only people getting that now are the ones who go putting things where they don't belong.
If you take away AGW, I suspect there will be millions of depressed and unemployed activists.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The US nuclear industry has lagged behind because for the past 50 years, the regulatory and political environment allowed anti-nuclear activists to delay the completion of plants indefinitely.
Oh the hyperbole. 50 years ago (53 for you nitpickers) Shippingport came online. You know, "the first fully civilian nuclear reactor." Nuclear power industry was just starting to appear, and the "regulatory and political environment" was anything but inimical to it. Rather gung-ho, in fact.
The past 30 years instead of 50? Probably. But not without good reason. An industry mired in secrecy and obfuscation stemming from its military origins, where screw-ups can happen and are serious -- potentially disastrous -- if they do, does not inspire confidence. Neither does pooh-poohing genuine concerns. "Waste? Oh, that's easy, we'll just reprocess it!" Sure. Hanford did that for years. Recovered tons of weapons fuel, ended up with additional megatons of extremely nasty waste. (Ditto Sellafield in the UK and La Hague in France.) There are better ways to do it for civilian use, and actinide burners may be one of them, which is why they should be built and studied; but they -- and all other things nuclear -- should not be presented as a silver bullet, in an arrogant and condescending tone.
Some may get an impression that I am too opposed to nuclear power. Not in the least. IMO, nuclear is the only sufficiently plentiful energy supply which we can comfortably use for the next thousand years, and is not geographically or otherwise limited like solar or wind. But it is not without risks, and while those risks should not be overstated (like the shrillest environmentalists do), they should not be swept under the carpet, either.