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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!
This is one more reason that we should move ahead with the green (no greenhouse gases) technology of nuclear fission based electricity generation. One of the classic arguments against fission reactors is waste containment. Now that problem is behind us. Race ahead, my brothers, to a greener future.
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 )
Destroy as in convert matter to energy?
Wait, so it's a chemical reaction (rapid oxidation)?
Or is this fission, where they convert the actinides into other less-dangerous elements via fission?
How can it be that they don't know how many waste they created? I would (maybe falsely) assume that practically everything that happens in a reactor is measured? Keeping track of your waste looks to me like single most important job in a reactor besides preventing it to go kaboom on us. But definitely more important than producing power (for me, feel free to disagree). So I find it a bit scary that they 'think' they 'might'...
French Scientists?
A university in Texas?
I think you tried a little too hard on that one. Less is more.
The article doesn't make it clear which technology they are referring to... however this google tech talk on LFTR is absolutely fascinating.
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
Watch this
You might not like Gates because of Windows, but if you're a fan of nuclear power this might stop your assassination attempt.
After 99% of the waste is eliminated, the 1% left is the pure blood of Cthulhu ready to make mankind wilt in horror??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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
Anyone remember this article?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/01/02/1330245/Thorium-the-Next-Nuclear-Fuel
http://www.northernsun.com/n/s/0016.html
Mutants for Nuclear Power!
*)
in soviet russia, nuclear waste will destroy you
(sad but true i guess)
Time to go upstairs and find the nearest Greenpeace doom-sayer (I work on a Uni campus, there's usually 2-3 around trying to snag them some suckers) and hand them a print out of this. Lately they've been deriding Obama's nuclear power policy.
Of course they'd probably call me a tree killer, you can't ever win with them.
No sig for you!!
I searched for thorium in the comments and found only your post. So that's two people.
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.
How would this new reactor they're developing compare with a breeder reactor. From what I remember a breeder reactor will take the waste from traditional Uranium fission and convert it into Plutonium. So it's more efficient but the waste has an increased perceived scariness factor. Either way you have hazardous material to contain, perhaps this way we can reduce the amount of it that we must store.
Reminds me of the PRISM reactors that have been in development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PRISM
Why do the nuclear industry always trot out these cutesy metaphors? They're so easy to pick fun of that even people who are reasonably friendly toward the industry can't resist. I mean, yes, it would all fit into an Olympic swimming pool. For about a millisecond. Then it would go critical, and your swimming pool would be an area the size of texas covered in a very thin layer of radioactive waste, plus a big glass pit in the middle. Or maybe not--I don't actually know if such a pile would go critical, but am I not the only one into whose mind this image sprung the moment we read the metaphor?
That this thing pollutes by producing lead. (Which last I checked is the end product of alot of this stuff.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Already discussed this more than a year ago. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/01/30/1415200/Fusion-Fission-System-Burns-Hot-Radioactive-Waste
Enough energy falls on the surface of the earth from the sun every day to power the US for a year - capturing and harnessing that energy is the tricky part. Even if you can only grab a small part of that energy, it is still more than "adept" as powering much more than just calculators.
My wife's like that too. She loves having the heater and the air conditioner running at the same time.
Apparently it takes the humidity out of the air.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
Football Odds
If you ask me, I think it was very irresponsible of them to put all of that material in a swimming pool. They are lucky they didn't suffer a massive criticality accident.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
is what you make with it after you cut it down.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
indians are working hard on thorium cycle stuff. they figure enough thorium for 155k years. nice deals with the russian, so we can see some international interest here.
a useful question about solar installations is whether they are just batteries
I offer you my back yard to construct a power plant, and while I'm at it, wireless providers please feel free to put a cell tower back there too.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
"...actinides -- highly radioactive uranium isotopes that are the waste products of nuclear fission inside a reactor"
Really?
Whoo boy.
I wasn't aware nuclear physics had been rewritten to that extent.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
No he knew exactly what he was doing, and remember all he did was to remove a huge subsidy for weapons materials that were no longer needed due to the size of the stockpile.
He did nothing at all to stop nuclear succeeding on it's own merits instead of on taxpayer funded life support. The US nuclear industry has done nothing much since then apart from spend a lot of money on PR to get their free gift from the taxpayers back. Other places have actually put some work in and produced far more viable efforts - hence the established USA civilian nuclear industry being twenty years behind South Africa, China and India. The only real exeption is Japanese technology brought in to a US company that had otherwise been sitting around waiting for the handout for twenty years.
Startups and imports will bury them, and should have done it long ago.
The more recent Indian approach of accelerated thorium addresses many of the pitfalls of the Liquid Fluoridic Thorium Reactor that led to research being abandoned.
If you are going to advocate nuclear power at least learn about your subject matter and talk about something that will actually be better than the current reactors in use.
Hm. I think the two examples you gave mostly substantiate my understanding of the problem with the anti-nuclear mentality.
"...even after they were informed of the right answer, they still didn't change their opinions..." This is the crux. Despite revised knowledge, there's some kind of emotional resistance to nuclear. The emotional resistance started as fear of catastrophe which was not undone by learning different. The fear remained regardless of knowledge change. Emotions don't necessarily respond to logic/information. (Which you see in every online debate.)
Emotional inertia that happens all the time. Mostly it causes willful ignorance and confirmation bias, but I guess even a few weeks of education won't necessarily overcome it.
What needs doing is figuring out how that inertia works. Step 3, profit. Anyone understand psychology well enough that they can give pointers on research starting points for this issue?
There is more to it than federal research subsidies and politics. There is genuine fear. Fear does not need a basis in fact to be real.
A large part of the public is afraid of anything radioactive. It's invisible, has no smell, can not be felt or heard and it can kill you. It's the perfect bogey-man. I have found that facts don't usually matter when someone is truly afraid.
Then there's the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The people there are afraid for their jobs. The result is paranoia in regulation. If they decide that high-tech pipe B might possibly be even slightly better than high-tech pipe A, they will mandate an upgrade for all plants still under construction, even if it means jack-hammering 12 ft of reinforced concrete to replace the pipes.
When you factor in the lawsuits from self-appointed watchdog groups it becomes impossible to estimate either the total cost or when the plant will come online. With those in doubt it is impossible to determine whether the plant will be a good investment, and thus no private firm will take the risk.
If this accelerated thorium you talk about was an interesting technology there would be more information on it on the web, but it's just not there, but, hey, thanks for playing and you may try again as often as you wish.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Pardon me if I wait for a few non-Texas sources on scientific topics.
Will the corporation trying to sell this reactor design guarantee it's promises will be backed up with real cash?
Fuck NO! Not one has. Not one corporation has stood behind a reactor it built through decommissioning.
Every damn one of these power utilities that has built a nuclear reactor has abandoned the reactors along with and the cost for decommissioning the reactors on the US Federal Government.
I recently read about renewed interest in thorium reactor technology, which was explored by AEC physicists during the 50's. Supposedly the thorium/uranium technology burns hotter, is more efficient, and leaves behind much shorter lived isotopes in the waste stream, i.e 10's to 100's of years. In any case, there are now a bunch of interesting reactor possibilities on the table that make the nuclear power discussion much more promising than the old, "more of the same is good enough and safe enough, so just trust us." Regards
What are you? Al Gore?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Funnily enough, the air conditioning in a lot of older buildings (especially hotels) does exactly this. The air is chilled centrally to a really low temperature and then the temperature is regulated in each room by heating it up again, thus reducing the humidity.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
You people don't remember all the promises of Nuclear Power 1.0.
This is just another chorus of promises that mask the dangers and inefficiencies of using radioactive materials to boil water.
Why should we be spending orders of magnitude more than other power sources just to build new terrorist targets and devices that spew the ultimate terrorist material?
Even if somehow a scalable, cost effective process to "burn" nuclear waste was created, the reactors themselves become high level nuclear waste that has to be dealt with.
There are so many reasons that nuclear power technology now available or is on the horizon is bad and so many better alternatives, why are we wasting time on it?
We have known how to do it for several decades. Scientists at Los Alamos have an active program on using accelerators to transmute nuclear waste, e.g. http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/science21/ATW.html and books have been published on the topic, e.g. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=4912
The problem is simply deciding to build the required facilities and incorporate the cost of making the radioactive material non-radioactive into the cost of producing electricity (which I suspect is the toughest hurdle).
It is also worth noting that if real molecular nanotechnology were available the "separation" part of the equation (producing a stream of pure radioactive isotope ions) would be much easier (and presumably cheaper). All concern regarding long term storage of radioactive isotopes is completely pointless since we will have the technology within this century to completely get rid of them.
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.
Compared to the billions of tons of pollutants from coal-fired stations -- pollutants which make their way into the sea, drinking water and the very air we breath, I think a few thousand tons (safely ensconced in hardened and safe locations) from nuclear is pretty damn fine by me.
No you've got it wrong about reprocessing. The French do it right now and now how hard it is which is why they, India and a few other places are busy looking for alternatives that don't need it. I suggest you look up some details of the approaches they have taken to make it cost effective over the last few decades.
Spend a bit of time thinking about the concept of handling this material to reprocess it. Spent fuel rods are highly radioactive so everything you have to do with them has to be done remotely - you can't walk up to one with an angle grinder. Also the stuff is quite strong mechanically so it's a fairly major effort to cut it into small enough parts to reprocess.
It's a hell of a lot more expensive than digging up new Uranium, Carter and everyone who advised him on nuclear matters knew that. It made it a cheap bargaining chip for a treaty that has now long expired.
... WTF are these guys smoking?
Actinides aren't the big problem as far as nuclear waste is concerned - fission products are. Especially the long-lived ones that are very mobile in the environment, easy to incorporate (iodine, cesium, strontium) and basically impossible to separate from the rest of the waste chemically (unlike actinides). Heck, many actinides are actually nuclear fuel or could be turned into nuclear fuel. Fission products are just nasty, deadly poisons.
That's why I'd rather spend more on researching fusion power - you'll still end up with some radioactive waste, but you have some degree of control over its composition and you will not create any of the problematic isotopes mentioned above.
It should read "The French do it right now and KNOW how hard it is". Also they have tried many approaches to make it more cost effective but it still costs a lot more than new fuel - I didn't make that so clear above.
Superpheonix was supposed to solve it all but it just threw up more problems so a different approach is needed. There's been some work done since then but it's not the solved "clean, too cheap to meter" thing that makes any commerical sense yet - it's a very messy and dangerous industrial process which is fine so long as you keep it contained but that makes things expensive.
Anyway, check out things such as accelerated thorium which can use expended fuel rods or expired weapon materials without reprocessing.
You are not looking very hard. India is in the process of building one.
>The reactor destroys waste by firing streams of neutrons at it, reducing atomic waste by up to 99 percent!
I wonder when I hear this, is it going up in smoke into the atmosphere, or really disintegrating...
there is a difference, as the smoke could be toxic, and should it get out, contaminate the air,
where as disintegrating it, would mean exactly that, no longer exists.
No no no, I remember it too. Lots of jokes regarding WoW.
Watch out for the silithid.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The answer is yes, and this morning Rocky Mountain Institute and Chief Scientist Amory Lovins were featured in a New York Times blog in response to last years Presidential Debate. Energy efficiency, a solution at the core of RMIs work, was discussed as a viable and economically profitable resolution to both energy and economy issues. New York Times writer Kate Galbraith points out that RMI and Amory Lovins have consistently advocated the benefits of a soft-path approach to energy, with efficiency at its core. You can read the article here.
When it comes to nuclear power specifically, every dollar invested in new US nuclear electricity will save approximately 2-11 times less carbon, and will do so roughly 20-40 times slower, than investing in the same dollar in energy efficiency and micropower (cogeneration plus renewables minus big hydro dams). Buying new nuclear capacity instead of efficiency causes more carbon to be released than spending the same money on new coal plants!
These conclusions and the empirical evidence supporting them are summarized in Forget Nuclear, and fully documented in The Nuclear Illusion, available for download here, which is to be published in early 2009 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences journal Ambio.
Hopefully our vision will help put these widely publicized issues into perspective and move us all toward a better understanding that takes us beyond politically divisive issues to collective and viable solutions.
San Francisco Photographers
[citation needed]
Anyone that seriously believes that we can get out of the current situation through "energy efficiency" is seriously deluded. If there was a way to effectively (not even efficiently) store energy so that wind and solar could be used 24x7x365 we could have a chance at doing that. But there isn't an effective way to store energy today and so with much of the load coming after 5PM in the US there is no way that wind or solar are going to really help all that much.
After 5PM is when people get home from work, turn on the cooking appliances, turn down the air conditioner (in the summer) and turn on the TV. There is a huge load increase and it is way past the peak time for solar. Wind? Maybe, but the problem is that it is always "maybe".
The simple answer is to just turn it off. If there isn't wind power available, no TV. No computers, no Internet. No air conditioning. The US lived like that in the 1930s and the standard of living was a lot lower then so we could certainly get along. Use ice instead of refrigeration. Use batteries. Use whatever there is as long as it doesn't depend on a steady supply of electricity.
This would certainly be a "conservation" choice. If it deterred some growth, some additional resource usage this too would be welcomed by folks that think we can conserve our way out of needing more electricity.
1. Are you talking about the (so called) problem of renewables being intermittent, or of efficiency? These are separate issues, but you have conflated them.
2. Solar Thermal generates electricity for hours after the sun goes down. Not all night long, but much longer than solar-voltaic. Certainly long enough to deal with much of the people come home, turn on TV and AC's.
3. In any one place, the wind is not always blowing, but the wind is always blowing somewhere. Enough wind power in enough places overcomes the intermittency of wind.
4. Some sources of alternative energy don't suffer from intermittency. Wave, tidal, geothermal, small scale hydro...
5. Energy storage from renewables can be as simple as pumping water up a hill.
6. Experts who have studied energy issues all of their adult lives believe that efficiency is one of the most powerful tools we have. See http://www.rmi.org/ for a good start. Saying they are "seriously deluded" is an ad hominem attack with no real substance to back it up.
6. If you wish to turn off your electricity, I won't stop you. However, I think that coming up with solutions that allow a comfortable modern lifestyle have a better chance of the mass acceptance we need to succeed.
San Francisco Photographers
If you include insulation as an advance in efficiency, you can probably get rid of most of that 5 pm air conditioning spike.
Of course, I don't think the haves can conserve anywhere near fast enough to offset new use by the have nots, so I certainly see the need for increased production.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
DIE DIE DIE!
Deleted
There simply isn't enough "waste" to make conservation a workable plan for fulfilling our future energy needs.
WTF? Carnot.
Cars throw away around 80%.
Deleted
You are not bothering to look.
To show how easy it is to find google "thorium India". The first entry is the wikipedia page for thorium, the second is this:
www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
The plant is a fast breeder at Kalpakkam.
The third link google give you is to an article entitled "India to build prototype thorium reactor" but it has a lot less detail.
http://www.bellona.no/bellona.org/english_import_area/international/russia/npps/co-operation/31261
Then there's plenty of others. It really astounds me how many nuclear advocates are stuck in the 1970s and don't even bother to learn much about the nuclear power they are advocating.