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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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."
There are two new plants, the other 14 are existing plants that applied to put in additional reactors (25 reactors in total).
BM3
Even barrels and barrels of dirt.
What's to be done with 52,000 tons (47,174 metric tons) of dangerously radioactive spent fuel from commercial and defense nuclear reactors? With 91 million gallons (344.5 million liters) of high-level waste left over from plutonium processing, scores of tons of plutonium, more than half a million tons (453,592 metric tons) of depleted uranium, millions of cubic feet of contaminated tools, metal scraps, clothing, oils, solvents, and other waste? And with some 265 million tons (240 million metric tons) of tailings from milling uranium ore—less than half stabilized—littering landscapes?
Its a long article, but worth the read: Half Life—The Lethal Legacy of America's Nuclear Waste.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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).
We proposed this, but the uranium complained.
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!
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
Obama dishonest: 6.7 million results
Romney dishonest: 2 million results
I call that proof that Obama is 3.35 times more dishonest.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
In fairness all the highly radioactive (= short half-life) fission by-products with half-lives less than several months (or even years) isn't really an environmental issue - you need to be careful with it initially, but it disappears on it's own in short order. And most of the rest of the high-level "waste" is actually perfectly good fuel which could be reprocessed to remove the fission-damping contaminants (or just used in a more efficient reactor to begin with). Add in the fact that all your waste remains neatly fused into your spent fuel pellets where it's easy to deal with and the waste problems are pretty minor. (if handled intelligently)
Coal on the other hand releases all that uranium and thorium directly into the environment, whether in the smoke or the ash.
As for meltdowns - yeah, ugly things. But offhand I can't think of a single modern reactor that has even had a major containment breach - TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were all designed in the 60s, and fission wasn't even theorized until the late 30's, with the first experimental reactor achieving criticality in '42. That's only about 20 years of experience to go into their design, without any major catastrophes having occurred to inform their risk-management - compared to the 70 years and multiple accidents worth of paranoia going into modern reactor design. Probably the biggest problem with fission reactors is that the vast majority are still based on designs driven by weapons research (i.e. goal #1 was extraction of weaponizable byproducts). CANDU is the only in-use design family I can think of offhand that was designed from the ground up to be a power plant - and while a "meltdown" in such a reactor would be costly to repair it's highly unlikely that anything particularly radioactive would escape the core.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Maybe we could make glass with it. The color is quite lovely. Plates?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
no it doesn't disappear at the end of its halflife.. it's 1/2 as potent as it was.. still potent enough to cause serious problems. take caesium 137.. I believe the halflife for that is 30 years.. short, yes, but even at 90 years, it's still causing harm to the environment/food supply. the body treats it like calcium, so it'll end up in the bones and muscles of your grandkids. While I think nuclear power is a necessary reality, people really need to understand what all these related terms, numbers, and their scales imply.
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.
The meltdowns at TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukashima have made nuclear power release more radioactive material than coal over this period.
Oh, horse shit.
TMI released essentially no radioactive material at all. No deaths have been attributed to it.
Chernobyl was possibly the worst stereotypical example of batshit-crazy Soviet-era negligence I've ever heard of. Someone who attempts to hold the modern nuclear power industry to the standards of Chernobyl is not doing so in an effort to enlighten, educate, or warn, but rather, to deceive. Lay off the vodka, and you won't have a Chernobyl. It's as simple as that.
The Fukushima disaster resulted from similar incompetence. A 40-year-old nuclear plant was allowed to operate long past its scheduled 25-year design life, in a seismically active zone that was known to be prone to tsunamis, under the control of a corrupt power company with demonstrably inadequate oversight. Despite all that, it almost managed to survive an 8.9 earthquake. No one could possibly have been surprised when it didn't. The lesson of Fukushima is that events like Fukushima are 100% avoidable if existing laws and practices are followed.
Meanwhile, people are dying right now from coal-fired plant emissions, all over the industrialized world. It just doesn't look scary enough on CNN for people like you to notice.
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."
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.
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.
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.
But all of those isotopes remain locked into the fuel pellets rather than being pumped into the environment, an important distinction. As for being easy to handle - easy is a relative term, I think you'll agree it's a lot easier to manage the contamination problem of a bunch of spent fuel pellets than a mountain of smoke and ash distributed across the countryside. The problem is that coal plants have been grandfathered in and we don't actually make them deal with their contamination in any meaningful way. If we did then the business picture for nuclear plants (and every other energy source) would look a whole lot rosier.
As for fuel reprocessing - we'll get that as soon as there's either a business model or government push for it. It's dangerous, expensive work, especially when you have the cost of building prototype reprocessing plants between now and then - as long as there's plenty of readily accessible uranium ore it's a lot cheaper and easier to simply rely on the existing infrastructure and cross our fingers about the pools. Which brings up another issue - even with reprocessing you'll probably have cooling pools - it takes a few year/decades for the mostly useless short-halflife stuff to burn out (at least down to the radiation levels of the long-lived stuff). So basically you can work with the spent fuel today and deal with extreme radiation, or wait for a while and deal with much lower radiation levels but the same basic concentration of valuable fuel. As for storing it at the nuclear plant-yeah, grade A stupid, but you can thank poorly considered regulations for that - nobody else has the proper clearance to handle the stuff in it's short-lived "hot" state, and no politician is going to risk a NIMBY outbreak by opening a hot-waste "internment camp" somewhere. Sort of like the situation we were in (has it improved?) where nuclear plants were reaching their limit on stored waste quantities, but there were nowhere to sequester it so instead they shipped it from one side of the country to the other, and back, and forth, and... basically storing our spent nuclear fuel in semis rolling down the highway - the worst possible solution because nobody was willing to suck it up and do what had to be done (either build a storage facility, build a waste reprocessing plant, or shut down the power plants)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.)
The engineering and store has been solved on all technical details. Environmentalist who know nothing about nuclear power, storage, risk or containment are always given too much voice.
Let the people who have the actual knowledge debate these issue, the rest of the public should just shut the hell up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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)
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.
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.
They also know nothing about Coal power as well. Or really much of anything other than hysteria borne of bad science. I have yet to meet an "Environmentalist" that wasn't, at heart, either a raving lunatic or a dyed-in-the-wool hard core Communist. Most of them run on nothing more than Utopian fantasies of a primordial "perfect state of man" that never existed and never could.
That said, Coal fired power plants are actually quite clean as power plants go. For some reason people hear "Coal Fired" and think of an old steam locomotive gobbling up tons of coal while producing a comparatively small amount of steam power and spewing tons of smoke and ash and unburnt coal into the air.
The reality is FAR from that. Here in Buffalo we have a coal fired power plant that produces large amount of power for the area. (No, we don't get most of our power from Hydro, most of that is sent all the way across the state to New York City.)
I have been into this plant and seen how it works. Much like Nuclear, the coal is used to generate Steam which is used to turn turbines. However, the efficiency is MUCH higher because of how they burn the coal. Essentially, the coal is pulverized into a powder somewhat finer than talcum powder. it is dried with hot air (about 650 F) and then blown with even hotter air out of a compression nozzle into the firing area of the boiler. The pressure from the nozzle heats the powered coal and air to the ignition point and you get a blowtorch of incinerating coal dust and air blasting out of the end.
Not only does this create tremendous amounts of heat (which is used to generate steam, like a Nuclear power plant) but it much more thoroughly burns the coal, (something like 70-80% burned) leaving just a tiny fraction of ash left, which is removed from the exhaust air by scrubbers. Modern coal fired plants produce ALMOST NO airborne waste, and contribute far less to air pollution than diesel plants of similar generation capacity. They also produce no radioactive waste, so the lasting environmental effects are minimal.
That said, Nuclear is STILL the preferred solution, but Big Government Eco-Commie-Utopianists are once again getting in the way with their fantasy desire to have 0% impact ever on anything, but still somehow have a modern society.
We NEED to get these morons out of office and out of government. They will be the death of our society.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory