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US Freezes Nuclear Power Plant Permits Because of Waste Issues
KindMind writes "The U.S. Government said it will stop issuing all permits for new plants and license extensions for existing plants are being frozen due to concerns over waste storage. From the article: 'The government's main watchdog, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, believes that current storage plans are safe and achievable. But a federal court said that the NRC didn't detail what the environmental consequences would be if the agency is wrong. The NRC says that "We are now considering all available options for resolving the waste issue, But, in recognition of our duties under the law, we will not issue [reactor] licenses until the court's remand is appropriately addressed." Affected are 14 reactors awaiting license renewals, and an additional 16 reactors awaiting permits for new construction.'"
Lots. The physical plant itself, at least the components that become "waste" after being in contact with radioactive primary coolant. Tools. Protective gear worn by employees. Also, in the case of naval reactors - the entire reactor section of the sub or carrier. An so on.
There are two new plants, the other 14 are existing plants that applied to put in additional reactors (25 reactors in total).
BM3
Some numbers: Fukushima 900 PBq & Chernobyl 5200 PBq.
Total radioactive releases from coal power plants from 1937 to 2040: 100 PBq (2,721,736,430 millicuries).
So, just Fukushima and Chernobyl have released 61 times the radioactivity released by burning coal for electricity for a century (predicted).
Let's compare this to all of the proven coal reserves in the world being burned: 860 billion tonnes (950 billion tons) at 0.00427 millicuries/ton and 3.7e10 Bq/curie equals 150 PBq.
Obviously, these values are codependent, but we can probably safely assume that at least 200 PBq would be released (meaning that we have burned all of the known coal in the world). Fukashima alone still beats that value by almost 5 times and Chernobyl by 26.
Ouch!
Actually spent fuel is more a regulatory problem than anything else - it's typically almost entirely perfectly good fuel contaminated with just enough fission-damping byproducts to make it unsuitable for the reactor it was in. the problem is just that nobody particularly wants to reprocess it when the incremental cost of mining fresh stuff is so much cheaper than the capital costs of building fuel reprocessing plants.
The other alternative is of course to move to more efficient reactors in the first place - even just doubling or tripling the efficiency (typically in the low single digit %s now) would dramatically reduce the waste flow, and most thorium-based reactors are typically projected to operate up in the 80% or higher range, leaving only short-lived "ash" that would decay to background levels within only a few hundred years, and many designs would incidentally be able to consume existing "spent" fuel as a percentage of its load. Not to mention the benefits of a fuel that needs minimal processing and is currently a waste product of many rare-earth mining operations.
Its worth nothing as well that the reason current reactors produce so much plutonium waste is that they were designed to do so - they're almost all based on the fuel cycles researched early on when the driving force in the field was nuclear weapons research and plutonium was in high demand.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm not sure that this is the right comparison. A Becquerel is one decay per second. But the output from an exploding nuclear plant is mostly comprised of freshly-created short-half-life isotopes that decay within days or weeks. The radioactive isotopes in the ash from a coal plant are super-stable ones that have lasted since the formation of the Earth, and will keep putting out radiation for billions more years. So if you take the integrated radiation produced from the waste over the decade or so after it's released (measured in Bequerel-years or equivalent), then the coal plants should come out on top.
But even that isn't the right comparison, because the waste/ash doesn't stay in the environment, in an easy-to-expose-yourself-to form, for decades. And then we have to start considering the particulate size and inhalibility of the fallout from a nuclear accident versus the ash from a coal plant, the specific isotopes involved and how well they bioaccumulate, etc.
There's no point applying reason. All of these people seem to be thinking of these reactors as running on magic instead of radioactive decay. You can never eliminate the waste, neutrons flying about ensure that anything close enough becomes radioactive enough that it has to be treated with some care. Of course different reactors produce different waste and some can be dealt with far more easily than others.
The answer is to actually deal with the waste instead of the childish "pretend it can all be magiked away" attitude that comes out in places like this. Today we do have ways to deal with nuclear waste effictively which were not available in the 1970s, but are not often applied because it's cheaper to pretend there is no problem and just store the hot stuff in pools of water onsite indefinitely.
Anyway, Yucca is apparently too wet but a plan like that in a different place using something like synrock instead of glassy stuff - or maybe just use synrock at Yucca since it doesn't have the leaching problem of glass phase encapsulation.