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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!"
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!
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.
It's fission. They are fissioning minor actinides which normally do not completely fission. This needs a reactor with improved neutron economy (such as a fast reactor), because these MAs will need more than one neutron per atom to fission (usually they will first capture one more neutrons (transmuting in the process) before fissioning).
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.
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.
No one ever mentions the other possible solution: Use less energy.
That's because it isn't a solution. Unless you're also going to somehow make there be fewer people, and have them do less, with fewer luxuries like sanitation and refrigeration, it won't work. Energy powers civilization. Hybrid cars, taking the train, fluorescent lighting, and turning the thermostat down to 68F/20C in the winter is not going to make a fart in a thunderstorm worth of difference where it really matters. A ridiculously optimistic projection would have it reduce our dependence on coal from 60% to 40%. That doesn't solve the problem, it just puts it off a little longer. Reducing power use enough to where we can all live on fluffy bunny wind generators and happy little solar panels essentially requires us to throw away the very technological pyramid which supports the manufacture those very same windmills and panels. There simply isn't enough "waste" to make conservation a workable plan for fulfilling our future energy needs.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
Yes, of course, no one even mentions energy efficiency, which is why the Obama administration has been pushing for more energy efficient lighting, applicances, homes, automobiles, and industry. But don't tell anyone I mentioned it. It's a secret!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
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.
No, if we can cut energy use by 30% (try it sometime, by the way), then that's 30% more coal plants we can shut down after we build some nuclear plants.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
But you've been completely wrong, it's exactly like calling what you excrete food. While there is plenty of energy that can be recovered from that it takes a lot of work or something else with a completely different digestive system.
The whole reason people have been saying for years that Uranium is running out is only because ore of very high purity was running out - there was a lot of other stuff but it was a lot more expensive to turn it into fuel.
One of the things about some newer designs is they are nowhere near as fussy about their fuel, so a shortage of high purity Uranium ore doesn't matter to them, or they can use retired or stockpiled weapon material, or even some kinds of waste. It's a lot better than the reprocessing attempts by the French over the last thirty years that resulted in fuel a lot more expensive than making new fuel from ore in the first place - use something that can use the waste without so much reprocessing instead.
The Japanese happen to use roughly half the energy per capita as the US. The same with Denmark, Switzerland, Germany and several other developed, high tech societies all use maybe 40-50% less energy per person as the US. How you can honestly say there's not much that can be done is baffling.
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.