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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!"
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...
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.
The last time a reactor like this came up, then President Bill Clinton signed the bill killing at, after Senator John Kerry led the charge to end the program. Read the wikipedia article on the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). Oh, and that was 1994.
Clean nuclear is far more realistic than the fantasy that is clean coal.
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
"I guess we don't have you to thank for civil rights, women's rights and now healthcare. I mean, why bother ?"
Those are emotional issues, which attract the same sort of emotional activists who HATE nuclear power. Their particular flavor of idealistic outlook is not pro-technology.
Come up with something that uses solar, ponies, or solar ponies and they might bite.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
Come up with something that uses solar, ponies, or solar ponies and they might bite.
And then you'll have the animal right activists complaining.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
Because they hate progress, not nuclear power. If the general public could understand who really apposes Nuclear power and their reasons are simply that they want to return us to some mythical agrarian society where everyone lives off vegetables they grow in their back yards and spends the evening reading books and listening to bluegrass, I think we might have a chance. But as-is they just associate any nuclear reaction with BOMB and all the sheep get scared.
And the times before that it was Reagan and Bush Sr. who killed the breeder reactor research project. And before that is was Carter. This is not a partisan issue, both parties are equally retarded in respect to nuclear power.
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.
Come up with something that uses solar, ponies, or solar ponies and they might bite.
Your solar ponies are an affront to God, a crime against Nature, and completely Awesome. Please make more!
And for the record, they definitely bite.
The enemies of Democracy are
Solar *is* nuclear power. The reactor is just rather... large.
And unlicensed, we must shut it down ASAP!
"By the way, I'm sending shitloads of free energy your way every day...why the fuck are you wasting it?"
You think the sun's trying to help us? Ha! The sun's been trying to murder us for as long as we've been around, but the stupid ozone layer and magnetosphere keep getting in the way!
You realize you're basically teasing it right? It's like you're wearing a bulletproof vest that turns impacts into electricity for your iphone, and you're telling the guy in the machinegun turret "Hey thanks for the free kinetic energy!"
The enemies of Democracy are
The anti-nuclear group will always come up with something to deter nuclear plants from taking off.
And the pro-nuclear group will always have a reason why nuclear plants are never a danger, any accident would never happen again, and nuclear waste is absolutely no problem because waste from burning coal is more radioactive, so that means concentrated nuclear waste has to be safer than diffuse coal plant waste, just like a glass of arsenic is safer to drink than a glass of sea water because there's more arsenic in the ocean than in a glass of arsenic. Strawmen are fun on both sides!
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.
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?
You're wrong (sorry). As humans we tend to have a horrible idea of how things scale outside of our instinctive narrow range. The energy density of a solar-thermal plant is indeed considerably less than a coal plant - but not that low, and plenty for all but truly heavy industry (and that's what nuclear is for) once you understand the engineering involved. Also, it's not just watts:area of the plant, it's watts:area:cost where cost is capital plus maintenance and supply, and area is plant plus its logistics chain.
Coal plants have coal mines, heavy road/rail infrastructure to transport fuel and waste, emit large quantities of pollution (not just at the plant but also at the mines and along the transport routes, and not just heavy metals but also more radioactives by mass per watt than nuclear plants), high maintenance costs, high worker casualties, etcetera.
Solar-thermal plants have the sun, light road/rail infrastructure to transport workers, emit no pollution, low maintenance costs, low worker casualties, etcetera. The use of heat storage/recycling (e.g. molten salt tanks) allows night-time power distribution.
Or to put it another way - sure, you need orders of magnitude more surface area for solar-thermal than coal - but we've got that available, and while your capital costs work out higher your ongoing costs are orders of magnitude less to your civilisation as a whole.
Coal: Quicker, easier, more seductive. But you end up ugly and alone.
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.
Companies which run plants pay a small portion of their income over the life of the plant to the federal government to pay for the eventual decommissioning costs.
So no.
They have not just walked off and left all the cost to the federal government.