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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.'"
This makes me sad.
can't we just pump it into the air. its probably not half as bad as the stuff that a coal plant releases.
Uranium sealed in massive lead cans, encased in concrete, and stored deep underground in an area free of earthquakes.
Of course they should have also built other sites too. It makes no sense to dump all your waste in the same spot. Spread it out.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Are they also banning those types that can accept certain high-level wastes as fuel?
As a candidate, Obama said he was both for and against nuclear power. (I will not "rule out" nuclear power http://video.msnbc.msn.com/morning-joe/25494201) but of course he can't really believe both positions. We find out what he believes by his actions. Obama frequently claim to support both positions: for cutting taxes and raising taxes, for cutting the deficit and raising spending, etc. He has to be one of the most dishonest politicians in history. However, he is not called out on his lies. He should be.
We'll continue to burn lots and lots of coal for the foreseeable future.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
so this is how they will drive Solar production in the use ban nukes and then coal and then fraking to drive up NG prices
Store it in Washington, D.C. with the rest of the waste.
After the US has built and has in operation 104 nuclear reactors (half are over 30 years old) and they raise this issue now?? Bit late.
Analysts feel the agency can conduct its research relatively quickly without having a major impact on nuclear plants currently seeking license extensions or utilities seeking permission to build new reactors.
A technicality, no significant impact to anything.
Am I getting 15 mod pts per day because slashdot is dying and needs moderators that badly? Am I the only one?
It's solely about destroying all sources of energy that are NOT tied to Obama's pie-in-the-sky cheeseburger-farting unicorn fantasy of solar and wind power.
The world would be in a lot better place if you couldn't burn it until you'd removed an equal or greater quantity of CO2 from the atmosphere.
The fact is, that if we would add a couple of GE PRISM at all of the nuke sites, either running, shutting down, or shut down, we could burn up the vast majority of the 'waste'. From there, what would remain in 100 years, would fit easily in a corner of WIPPS and last only 200 years. Oddly, this would make loads of money for the plants while pretty much using up all of the 'waste'.
In addition, all of the new sites should be switched to a thorium cycle. Very safe to run and at a fraction of the price.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I wasn't aware that they were planning on building several new nuclear plants. I had heard of one or two, but sixteen is quite a few more than I expected. What caused this shift in new building versus how new plants were basically put on hiatus after three mile?
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
It looks like natural gas is going to be the fuel of choice for most new plants.
And then there are the conversions from gas to coal. GE has technology that can burn coal as clean as NG - so they say, but it costs too much compared to just using NG at current prices. And with the current boom in gas producton around the World and especially here in the US, gas prices are going to be low for a long time.
....that they built Yucca Mountain for?
No, wait, they closed that down. WTF?!?!?
Burial of Radioactive Waste under the Seabed; January 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Hollister, Nadis; 6 Page(s)
On the floor of the deep oceans, poised in the middle of the larger tectonic plates, lie vast mudflats that might appear, at first glance, to constitute some of the least valuable real estate on the planet. The rocky crust underlying these "abyssal plains" is blanketed by a sedimentary layer, hundreds of meters thick, composed of clays that resemble dark chocolate and have the consistency of peanut butter. Bereft of plant life and sparsely populated with fauna, these regions are relatively unproductive from a biological standpoint and largely devoid of mineral wealth.
Yet they may prove to be of tremendous worth, offering a solution to two problems that have bedeviled humankind since the dawn of the nuclear age: these neglected suboceanic formations might provide a permanent resting place for high-level radioactive wastes and a burial ground for the radioactive materials removed from nuclear bombs. Although the disposal of radioactive wastes and the sequestering of material from nuclear weapons pose different challenges and exigencies, the two tasks could have a common solution: burial below the seabed.
Also:
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
The question ought to have been asked 60 years ago; not today.
The half life of some of the waste is hundreds of thousands or millions of years. We're stuck with it for that long -- complete with storage facilities and, if necessary, security.
The real question is who pays. The nuclear plant operator (talk about a liability...) or the public (that's quite a liability too, and not one you can readily default on)?
We have the ability to store nuclear waste safely. We've been doing it for over 50 years. We have the ability to use reprocessed nuclear waste in breeder reactors. Nuclear power is in it's 4th generation and is safe and clean. It's far lower in emitting CO2. And yet? The Obama Administration can't wrap it's head around effective technology, preferring to utilize low capacity solar and wind instead. It's a sad state of affairs from an administration that can't conceive of any technology that doesn't preen with left-wing sheen.
But the deal is, whoever owns my house gets free electricity, in any amount they want to use (as a Minnesotan, I can see the value of a heated driveway & sidewalks).
I always thought they should have done something like that when building a new nuke plant. To make nice with the neighbors, all residents within an X mile radius get electricity at a sharp discount (aka wholesale prices).
Has their been any significant progress toward Breeder reactors? Reactors that use existing spent fuel and can tap energy from our rotting nuclear arsenal always sounded lucrative to me but progress towards reactors of this sort has been slow. What are the challenges of producing reactors like this?
It is not responsible to operate a reactor if you don't have a solid plan for dealing with the waste.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All the Old reactors need to go away but we also need to use safe nuclear power. We have to stop using old fuels like coal and petroleum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
The federal government is shutting down coal mines, holding up nuclear power plants, and denying permits for oil drills and pipelines. It seems like every week we hear about another solar power company going out of business because of mismanagement, fraud, and/or because they can't make a panel that works. We've dammed up every river worth a dam. Where are we supposed to get our electricity?
Wind power might actually pan out as cheap and viable if only the federal government would let someone run the wires from where the wind blows to where the people need the electricity. Since the wind blows when it wants we'll still need some sort of storage or backup. Natural gas seems to be booming despite the best efforts of the federal government to stop that too. If we add pumping stations to the hydro dams we got we could store the electricity when the wind blows. Wind, pumped hydro, and natural gas might make for a nice mix for our electricity, each complementing the others. Problem is that at some point we're going to run out of natural gas. Can we build enough dams and windmills to power our world? Can we do it cheap enough to maintain our standard of living?
The problem of nuclear waste is a creation of the federal government. They decided that we cannot recycle the "spent" fuel from current reactors. The so called "spent" fuel still contains large amounts of usable fuel, it's just tainted with the fission products of the fuel that was used up. The fuel waste problem would actually be solved with new, more efficient, nuclear reactors designed to use the "spent" fuel from the old reactors.
We supposedly have a Department of Energy to solve these problems. What are they doing for us?
It's just so frustrating seeing the government foul things up for us. The energy problems we have now are all political. The government is causing more problems than it's solving. Don't get me wrong, we need government. I think the government has just gotten too big. To get a power plant built or a pipeline run a person would have to satisfy dozens of different agencies that often have conflicting goals. We need to trim down the size of government, getting rid of the Department of Energy is as good of a place to start as any.
Rant over.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Disenfranchising is nothing new and definitely not limited to the Chicago machine (which Obama was only minimally a part of). Bush ran a particularly dirty campaign in 2000. For example, Rove's people called a bunch of voters suggesting that McCain had an illegitimate vietnamese child to win the primary (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll#Political_push_polls:_United_States ) Then a bunch of paid GOP staffers were responsible for starting a riot that stopped the recount in 2000: http://archive.democrats.com/images/miamirioters.jpg
This has been going on long before Obama: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression#Examples_of_voter_suppression_in_the_United_States
The licensing was shut down because the NRC issued a report indicating that existing solutions are safe and effective, and didn't report what would happen if they were wrong.
This is sort of like the stupidity around "the LHC dragons":
Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”
Here, let me help them out: "If we're wrong about being able to store nuclear waste, we could all be turned into Super Mario characters. If that doesn't work out, we'll have to reprocess the spent fuel, with the down side that energy becomes cheap and abundant and we have power forever.".
No problem! COVER the entire United States with really big wind turbines that make some people vomit from vestibular overload! The remaining operating nuclear plants can be used for excitation current.
And while we're making uninformed blanket statements, I'll say that "nuke lovers" have never witnessed what happens when sodium mixes with water and have no idea how corrosive steam can be. Add a bunch of plutonium into the mix (radioactivity causes metals to become brittle over time) and you've got a disaster waiting to happen. You don't want to be anywhere near one of these if the sodium/water heat exchanger in a PRISM type reactor develops a leak. And since you've probably never worked as an engineer in the nuclear field, you probably have no idea that we're still learning about the behaviors of materials under these conditions.
Sorry, can't treat your Ebola ... the drug sometimes causes stomach aches ...
// task: can you find the unsafe production practices in this psuedocode? // assume we can create this // important first step: use fissional fuel // might be a while
class ThoriumCycle {
VALUE money;
LICENSE licence;
REACTOR Reactor;
REPROCESSOR ReprocessingFacility;
FUEL fuel;
vector<MESS> wasteStorage;
ThoriumCycle (VALUE &startupMoney, FUEL &Plutonium) : money(startupMoney) {
licence = Government.Lobby(money,influence);
assert(licence.recieved(), "damn protestors");
Reactor = license.Factory(REACTOR);
Reprocessor = license.Factory(REPROCESSOR);
fuel = Plutonium;
}
Running(vector<FERTILE> &ThoriumSupply) {
Reactor.FuelWith(fuel);
(heat, neutrons, waste) = Reactor.Burn();
wasteStorage.push(waste);
forall (Th232 in ThoriumSupply) {
MESS U233_Th232_mixture = Reactor.Breed(neutrons, Th232);
(fuel=U233, residualTh232, waste) = Reprocessor.Mess(U233_Th232_mixture);
ThoriumSupply.push(residualTh232);
wasteStorage.push(waste);
if (not_enough_to_be_critical(U233) or Reactor.BeyondServiceLife() or money<minimum) break;
Reactor.FuelWith(U233);
(heat, neutrons, waste) = Reactor.Burn();
wasteStorage.push(waste);
ENERGY electricity = ELECTRICITY(heat);
money += CASH(electricity) - currentOperatingExpenses;
}
}
~ThoriumCycle() {
wasteStorage.push(Reprocessor.Decommision(money));
delete Reprocessor;
wasteStorage.push(Reactor.Decommision(money));
delete Reactor;
waitFor(wasteStorage.isSafe(money));
assert (money>0,"oops not viable operation");
}
};
And living here, I for 1, applaud this decision.
Ah yes, the 24 hour news cycle commingled with the gnat-like attention span of the myopic Ritalin user. Toss in the competition for consideration that includes your Olympic games, the latest headline seeking mass murderer, and hell, a forty two hour work week....
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I have never understood why we keep nuclear waste on the planet. Why not send it into the sun? It would be like sending a BB at a freight train.
Here is an idea, start building reactors that have a closed fuel cycle (thorium) or use reactors that can burn transuranic waste into waste that is less long lived (i.e. breeders, and CANDU). I think the biggest mistake that was ever made was the curtailing of nuclear reactor research. We have technology that can do this, but the morons in charge keep kicking the can down the road so it doesn't have to be their problem in the future.
Serious question:
I caught part of a science friday program where it was claimed solar power was cheaper than nuclear power. (I wasn't able to jot names down)
First I thought this was nuts, but then I started to wonder about handling the waste. Is nuclear waste disposal government subsidized?
Is solar power really cheaper? Anyone know?
Actually, molten salt reactors such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) could be the solution the our nuclear waste problem.
Here's the issue: besides the spent uranium fuel rods, we also have a large amount of plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons that need to disposed of. With an LFTR, the spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium can be reprocessed into a form that can be dissolved with molten sodium fluoride salts and used as LFTR reactor fuel. We get a large source of nuclear fuel, and best of all, the radioactive waste from a LFTR only has a half-life of under 300 years, which means very cheap waste disposal by using disused salt mines or salt domes as disposal sites--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
It amazes me how our own government is so efficient at killing present and future jobs.
Actually, the old reactors DO need to go away. But all of them need to be replaced with GE PRISMS. Look, we have a number of plants that are LOADED with 'waste' fuel. Well, in addition, they have cooling, connections to the grids, barriers around them, and loads of equipment on site for dealing with steam power, such as generators. Basically, the PRISMS will not only give us back power, but will massively reduce the waste. All while increasing the amount of power AND increasing profits.
In fact, I wonder if most of the money that was set aside for handling waste, should not be used to buy these PRISMS? Thank about it. This will reduce the amount of waste by 85-90%, and drop the lifetime for the waste (from 20K+ years to 200 years), while providing LOADS of new money for dealing with future waste (which will actually be a fraction of what it is today).
Keep in mind that I support the PRISM for current sites, but not for new ones. For new ones, thorium is the way to go. Likewise, thorium should replace about 1/2 or more of our coal plants.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The waste stored underground at the closed Humbodlt Bay reactor is ready to be inundated by sea level rise. The court is obviously right that the NRC has its head up a lower orifice granting new licenses or renewing old ones.
You'd probably want the more recent SUPER PRISM design (optimized for betterness; I think it's fewer larger cores for increased efficiency, along with updated calculations of various sorts)... Though that gimmicky name probably doesn't help in convincing people... Too bad we largely stopped doing research on the PRISM based designs in the 90s.
And I suspect thorium/PRISM/etc. have a major hurdle in economics. The US's current fleet of reactors has a ~91% capacity factor (aka fraction of max electricity/year that we're getting). The capacity factor is highly dependent on highly optimized materials science from the past decades. You don't have that for different fuel/coolant setups. Good luck convincing the power company to build the reactor that's going to have 70% capacity factor instead of one with >90%.
The US is full of 40+ year old nuclear reactors that are still in active use, even though their safety is under debate. I presume that (a) old power plants won't be decommissioned until they have a replacement, and (b) new power plants produce a less or equal amount of radioactive waste compared to old ones. So why do they stop issuing nuclear power plant permits, instead of just requiring each new power plant to replace an old one?
You have to look at what sort of radio element are released and how it is going into human body. What was predominentely released in Fukushima for example, was AFAIR radio element of short half live, and most of it went into the ocean anyway. Tchernobyl had a lot more long lived element, but they mostly deposited on the ground, what you got in coal are very long lived element, *AND* they are released in region of inhabitation all the while in the atmosphere in a trickle. Which is why coal is thought to generate more respiratory problem and lung cancer than chernobyl ever was.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The contaminated material at the Gore site is 20 million metric tons of source materials in the form of uranium, uranium oxides, uranium fluorides, thorium, radium, and decay-chain products in process equipment and buildings, soil, sludge, and groundwater.
Citation needed. Here's the description of the site: http://www.wise-uranium.org/edusa.html#GORE (11-14 acres) and here's what I could find on the reclamation: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/gore.htm. In fact that link uses the exact words you used, which leads me to believe you have read it. It also says, in the same fucking article, that "The total radiological and hazardous waste volume is estimated to be 141,600-311,520 m3 (5-11 million ft3)." I leave it as an exercise to get the density of your material using these numbers and find something on earth that dense. The latter site does mention that they have a licence to "possess" up to 20 million tons of stuff including groundwater.
In fact, do you have the foggiest notion of what 20 million tons is? Assuming a density of 5 tons per cubic meter (rough approximation, within one order of magnitude) that's 4 million cubic meters. Since I bothered to google, I know that the area where the waste will be stored is 11 to 14 acres, or around 4.5 hectares. 4 million cubic meters over 45,000 square meters is about 900 meters tall. So tell me, is your claim bullshit or are they building a mountain of contaminated material?
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
One thing is plants built in the wrong places or run by incompetent people... there's room for improvement there.
The waste is really a non-issue if you just get a bit creative about it.
The safest way to get rid of nuclear waste is to hurl it into the Sun. Of course current launch methods are still far too unreliable to make this a safe option. A waste rocket blowing up will be a truly bad thing...
A very safe alternative would be to drill a very deep hole (20-30 miles or more) and dump it in there, then plug the hole with concrete and rocks, possibly using explosives to collapse the hole at one or more points. Doesn't matter if the waste melts down or even goes nuclear down there. It will never affect or reach the surface in anything but geological time, and on that time scale the stuff is harmless if it ever works its way to the surface.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
"We are now considering all available options for resolving the waste issue,"//
pulverize it. add it in "minute, harmlessness amounts" to breakfast cereal.
-or-
pulverize it, add it to coal before burning.
Please ignore my post above about the myth of 100% waste reduction which for some reason I attached to your post instead of a post by someone that actually believes the myth.
Not a problem. There is no way to burn it ALL up. BUT, we can burn up most of it and what remains is fairly short lived.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The difference is that much of the Fukashima and Chenobyl radioactivity will be gone in a century, from short lived fission products. The radioactivity from coal (Th232, U235, U238, K40) will mostly still be here in hundreds of millions, and billions of years. Albeit, mostly buried in "our" geological layer.
And yet, the limeys are considering the PRISM for exactly what I am suggesting. It comes down to what makes more sense: simply throwing away all of this fuel and then relying on a mix of fossil fuels as well as AE, OR burning up what fuel that you have, so that your TRUE disposal costs go WAY down. And considering that we currently have more than 70,000 tonnes of waste in the USA, that is a LOT of money. OTOH, if we put in new reactors that make use of the old and current sites (minimal EPA studies), use the same factory produced reactors on these sites, and burn up the 'waste', then we can get down to below 10,000 tonnes on this. Now, costs are feasible.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The engineers knew the site was faulty in many ways, the IAEA knew the Japanese reactors had lots of serious subcode issues, relative to US/European standards. No body could motivate or hold willful TEPCo management responsible. Still can't.
Comments about how "stupid" the operators of Fukushima or Chernobyl were remind me of that story in "The Right Stuff" about how the the pilots always reassure their wives that flying isn't dangerous if you are a good pilot. Every time a good pilot gets killed they deal with the cognitive dissonance by saying it was pilot error and pinning it on his personality in some complicated, technically detailed narrative.
One word: Thorium...
While that would indeed be better than the current fleet of water-cooled reactors, I'm skeptical of sodium-cooled IFRs, given their less-than-stellar track record over the years. IMHO, molten salt is the best way forward. LFTRs have gotten some attention lately, and I'm all in favor. But there's another MSR variant being developed now that is specifically designed to use our existing waste stockpile as its fuel, called WAMSR (waste annihilating molten-salt reactor).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Has there ever been a US nuke plant not given extension after extension after extension by the NRC? Regardless of age, penny-pinching maintenance cutbacks, or operator apathy / incompetence, for all practical purposes they are given permission to 'run to failure' with very little drama involved. Yes, there are upgrades... around the edges, anyway.
A new analysis of pollution data for the Port Augusta region contradicts reassurances from the South Australian Government that smoking can be blamed for high lung cancer rates. Residents of the region have long complained about health problems they link with two power stations, Playford and Northern, which burn highly-polluting brown coal.
The lung cancer rates around Port Augusta are said by medical experts to be double the expected number.
...but isn't the point of uranium extraction to *remove* the radioactive material from the ore?
What's the residual radioactivity of the tailings? It's gotta be way, waaaaay less than the original ore was, after having all the uranium pulled out.
After reading all of the comments thus far, I see the discussion is stuck in a head-butting stalemate.
Much like religion, mathematics will always have people arguing over the issues of its relevancy rather than actually working to find a true solution. No pun intended.
Is it me, or do the vast majority of environmental activists seem to be stuck in an Armageddon scenario infinite loop? To be sure, nuclear energy presents issues, like everything else, but I'm not sure that engaging in maximalist interpretations of all events is helpful.
Consider the United States Navy's nuclear program. Other than the Thresher incident, the USN's nuclear program has had remarkably few incidents or major mishaps (caveat: these reactors are designed to generate power, not weapons material.)
The agency thinks it's safe, but didn't detail what the consequences would be if the agency was wrong?
Come on now, the answer to that depends entirely on which particular item you are asking if the agency is wrong about. If you ask "what are the consequences if the agency is wrong about their belief that the radiation won't drive away Santa Claus", the only answer is that the radiation will drive away Santa Claus.
This sounds like a question asked so the answer can be given a political spin. "You don't think it'll blow up the world?" "Of course not." "But what are the consequences if you're wrong about that?"
What drugs are these bureaucrats doing? We've known the solution for 4 freaking decades. Build a LFTR reactor and consume all the waste as fuel. What is left over is 2% of what was originally there at most. After 10 years 83% of that is inert and can be mined for valuable elements. The other 17% will need to be stored for 300 years instead of 10k to 20k.
- Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8&feature=player_embedded
Maybe those decision makers could join the 20th century now that we are a decade plus into the 21st?
Nevermind that we're the only retarded country on the planet that doesn't recycle spent fuel.
This technology is completely safe, 'old news', and has been totally demonized in this country by short sighted, greedy individuals in the nuclear power industry.
Start reading here: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf69.html
Not that I have a specific preference. I just want to know what page the Obama administration is on.
I had not seen that one before. But, I like it. Very Simple. Of course, metals to deal with that molten salt will be even more difficult than molten sodium. In addition, it will take time to get that approved.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That which can be readily made isolated safe and retrievable is not a problem it is a resource. Darn the yuppie environmental terrorists!
Having a really long-lived radioactive source in a small container could be really useful for sending probes into outer space to heat them up, and there may be other applications for such a specialised material.
I was thinking mod up the parent. But thank you any way.