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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.'"
Whats worse is the government ALREADY collected billions (32 billion) from nuclear power customers to store the spent fuel and has so far refused to provide the facility or transportation to such facility despite them already collecting the funds. The funds were probably put into the general fund and spent already meaning the choices are:
1. Take from the general fund to actually open a site.
2. Refund the customers the billions already paid.
3. Screw the middle class again, don't refund, and don't open the site and call the fees a tax instead.
Guess which one will win? When you give the federal government money or authority you lose every time. No matter who you vote for the government wins.
http://www.powermag.com/nuclear/The-U-S-Spent-Nuclear-Fuel-Policy-Road-to-Nowhere_2651.html
Actually, they should be recycling it to get at the 95% or so of the unused refined fuel. Then take the waste products and bury them somewhere that already has a nuclear industry. Nevada's only claim to the nuclear age is that it was a test site for bombs.
Nuclear waste: An engineering problem looking for a political solution.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Actually, they should be recycling it to get at the 95% or so of the unused refined fuel.
Unfortunately while recycling works to extract useful fuel, since that is a small percentage of the total it does nearly nothing to reduce the amount of high-level waste posing a storage problem. It's also a very complex and hazardous process, far more so than refining raw ore was originally. An additional problem is that some of what is recovered poses even greater weapons-related concerns than the original fuel. France, which processes more spent fuel than anyone else, still does so with only a small percentage of what they produce.
Beyond coping with products of normal fuel production, operation and dismantling, Japan has vast amounts of contaminated material to put somewhere. Someone was joking that they should make another island out of it, and have some government, power industry, and banking officials live there.
So other countries are off-shoring fuel processing, and requiring that the waste not be shipped back. If that's not obscene exploitation of a poor country, I don't know what is.
The talings are mobile, permeable and contain high levels of residual chemical leachants that were chosen specifically to extract the radioactive materials, and remain highly corrosive. The probability radioactive toxins would enter groundwaters also used by humans would be ridiculously high.
Most uranium mines historically range between 0.1 to 0.5% U3O8, or 1 t0 5 grams of Uranium oxide per tonne of dirt. If you chose vitrification, you would need to turn more than 300 tonnes of ground up rock into glass for every kilogram of yellowcake produced. Tailings also have a high volume of water which is hard to evaporate completely (tailings dams form a crust quickly, the slurry left behind remains semi-liquid for years). Heating so many tonnes of damp tailings would generate immense amounts of toxic, corrosive, radioactive steam, which would need to be contained and managed separately. You would also need to transport the tailings to a vitrification plant, increasing costs, probability of contamination and adding pollution.
Having said that, it would be a cheap solution, so I'd be surprised the nuclear industry isn't already lobbying for licenses to do it.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Chernobyl was possibly the worst stereotypical example of batshit-crazy Soviet-era negligence I've ever heard of. [...] The Fukushima disaster resulted from similar incompetence.
This special pleading is typical engineer mentality. "Don't blame the technology, blame the humans!" Yes, fine, but the fact is that all of these plants are operated and managed by humans, and there will continue to be errors due to all those messy irrational things that humans do (politics, cost-cutting, negligence, incompetence, etc.). When those errors take place in nuclear power plants, bad things can happen. While better-enforced regulations can help, you'd be a fool to think that we're never going to have more nuclear accidents.
Fine, whatever. But if you want to climb onto your high horse and preach about the amount of radioactive material released, why pick on a few isolated unintentional nuclear accidents? Why not cite the thousands of nuclear weapons tests that were deliberately conducted during the Cold War? Any one of those tests probably released more radioactivity into the air than Fukushima, and we know for a fact that people have died as a result. But did they ever kill 13,000 people a year?
(Admittedly, that's probably some kind of nuclear-industry astroturf site, but I'll still stand by the point that we would never tolerate the environmental harm caused by coal-fired plants if it were as obvious as a Fukushima or Chernobyl.)