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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 )
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?
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.
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
Not quite. Nuclear waste is mostly made up of un-burnt uranium. The long-lived stuff is mainly even heavier elements than uranium, such as plutonium, americium and neptunium. What these new processes do is to recycle the heavy elements like uranium and plutonium from the waste so that it is all burnt. Thus while you still get the same amount of fission fragments per kilowatt hour of electricity, you don't get any of the heavier stuff mixed into it.
There are three huge benefits to this.
a) The waste fits in a much smaller volume
b) You can get almost 100 times as much energy from the same amount of uranium
c) The resulting waste decays to safe levels within a few hundred years as opposed to many thousands of years.
Since we can easily construct structures that can last a few hundred years, and because the waste volume is so much smaller, this technology would essentially solve the nuclear waste problem. The improved utilization of uranium also makes sure that the fuel will last for any foreseeable future.
The snag is that so far all reactors of this type has been prohibitively expensive compared to existing technology, and there are concerns about how to implement the recycling step in a manner that makes it possible for inspectors to monitor the process to ensure no plutonium is diverted for weapons use.
After reprocessing you don't just pour the waste into storage tanks, you want to stabilize it first. There's two ways to do this. You either mix it with glass and cast it into a stable solid, or you separate it into noble metals and other waste products, the latter of which is usually turned into a ceramic.
Because the amount of material you need to add to the waste to stabilize it can vary depending on the wastes' exact composition ( in particular how much heat it generates ) it's not really possible to accurately know the final waste volume before you've worked out the entire process.
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.
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?
Do a google search on LFTR, a Liquid Fluoridic Thorium Reactor. A LFTR does the same thing as described: It consumes 99 percent of its waste or, even better, you can feed it existing nuclear waste and it will happily consume most of it while generating electrical energy. Check this Youtube video out (16 minutes) Thorium LFTR described in 16 minutes
Also this forum is, in a sense, developing the "open source reactor" by its forum members Click Here
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
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
An Olympic pool is 2500 cubic meters: 50x25x2. All the gold ever mined is estimated at 10 billion troy ounces, which has a volume of roughly 25m cubed, or 15,625 cubic meters, or 6.25 Olympic pools. If you assume that the storage containers are about 1 meter in height, you'd need an area of 2,500 square meters, or about half the size of a football (American or otherwise) field. Even if you assume that you need 100% additional space for walkways, containment, etc, the area is only 4 times that of the pool, which is hardly multiple orders of magnitude larger.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
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.
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?
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.
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.