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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.
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
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!
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.