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Accelerator Driven Treatment of Nuclear Waste
quax writes "In the wake of the Fukushima disaster the nuclear industry again faces massive opposition. Germany even decided to abandon nuclear energy altogether and the future of the industry is under a cloud of uncertainty in Japan. But one thing seems to be here to stay for a very, very long time: radioactive waste that has half-lives measured in thousands of years. But there is a technology under development in Belgium that could change all this: A sub-critical reactor design, driven by a particle accelerator can transmute the nuclear waste into something that goes away in about two hundred years. Could this lead to a revival of the nuclear industry and the reprocessing of spent reactor fuel?"
I'll be long gone by then. Let someone else deal with it. Don't waste a cent of my money on it.
Well, fuck it all. I meant "It's not 'spend'...", but I fucked it up. This invalidates my rant entirely, and "spend" is now retroactively the correct past tense of itself, just to put me further in my place.
Its a step in the right direction, but it wont gain any sort of sustainable foothold until the technology can get the half-life of the waste down to within a single lifetime. In truth, what it really needs to accomplish is a technology that actually breaks even: something that reduces the stockpile at at least an equal rate to what our nuclear power use is producing.
Either that or productive Fusion, which does not produce near the lasting Radioactive waste.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
You do have to admit, it's pretty easy to confuse "spent" with "spent." Both are spelled the same. Sound the same. Both can even be used as the past tense of spend. But, alas, most just don't get the intricacies in the differences between spent and spent.
Thanks for clarifying.
"Nuclear is bad for everyone!"
Compared to what? Coal and natural gas, that are bad for us even when they're within normal parameters? Renewables that are nowhere near enough to properly replace what we're currently using without using up massive land areas?
I'll take a nuclear reactor in my backyard over a natural gas plant in my neighborhood or a coal power plant within a 20 km radius any day.
Back in the 1990s this was developed at Los Alamos and a few other accelerator centers. it's not new or unique to belgium.
http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/science21/ATW.html
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/1999/venneri.htm
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Uh, material with a half-life of a few years is hardly 'innocuous'. That's what we normally call 'crazy freaking radioactive'.
People seem to have this bizarre idea that a long half-life makes something dangerous, when it's precisely the opposite.
I keep hearing about thorium reactors. What I've read of it seems to indicate it'd be much safer and cheaper to operate than what we've been using. I really haven't read about any downside to these. Anyone care to fill me in on why we aren't using them?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Yes. Spent fuel has always been considered a long term asset by the nuclear industry. People in that industry believe that as mining the raw ore becomes more expensive and the technology for reprocessing the spent fuel becomes better it starts to become a more valuable source of future fuel.
The industry would be very different if the governments did not push the technology towards weapons production. The reactor designs we have are all old and they are designed in a way that facilitates the production of plutonium. If the research into other reactor and fuel designs that did not have as many dangerous byproducts were pursued it would be a safer industry today.
The most promising alternative is and was to use Thorium fuelled reactors instead of uranium. There is the potential for far safer reactor designs and far less hazardous waste when using that type of fuel. The USA took a relatively short look at this but then they stopped since they could not also produce weapons from these reactors and at the time it was all about the bomb. But from what I have read they will likely become a technology that becomes more interesting over time as it's capable of using depleted uranium along with the Thorium as a way to use up that spent fuel that's hanging around.
It should be obvious though there are significant challenges to getting the theory into a practical design. All those research reactor projects back in the 50's that gave engineers and scientists the knowledge to build the current reactors would need similar efforts to develop the technology for these alternative fuels and reprocessing technologies. It's starting to happen but in China and India where they have not lost their love for nuclear power yet.
... there's just stuff you haven't configured your second fast-breeder reactor to run on yet.
You're missing a very important point. Many governments (specifically the US) pay HUGE amounts of money for OTHER people to take the waste. So not only would you not spend a cent creating new energy... but you'd be paid for it.
The "transmutation" of nuclear waste into harmless substances, sounds too good to be true? That's because it is. This paper takes a more critical look at the theory: www.laka.org/docu/boeken/pdf/6-01-5-56-25.pdf
"Transmutation of all long-lived radionuclides into short lived ones to a degree sufficient to obviate the need for a geologic repository is practically impossible. In particular, the transmutation of separated uranium, which constitutes about 94 percent of the weight of light water reactor spent fuel and which is very long-lived and generally
contaminated with some fission products, would be counterproductive. The main transmutation route for almost all the uranium would be to convert uranium-238 (the dominant isotope) into plutonium-239. Hence, the complete transmutation of uranium-238 essentially requires the creation of a plutonium economy, which would be unsound
whether viewed from an economic, environmental, or non-proliferation standpoint. Almost all the uranium must therefore be disposed of without transmutation as a matter of practical necessity. Other long-lived fission products as well as residual transuranic actinides would also need disposal. Hence, a repository, as well as other waste
management and storage facilities would still be an essential part of transmutation schemes. "
We must ban this weapons-grade steel for the good of our children. Bronze is good enough for knives for shaving, tanning hides, working the fields. We don't need steel. The steel industry tries to convince us that steel has peaceful uses but we know that steel weapons easily fall into the hands of bandits and brigands. Arsenic poisoning is simply a lie by big steel so that they can create their death tools. In reality, bronze is safe, reliable and fulfills our tool needs.
This has been talked up for a decade or two, but needs cost and capacity numbers.
There's also the painful fact that every reactor design that had anything mechanically non-trivial inside the reactor has been a flop. There have been two German pebble-bed reactors, both of which had pebble jams serious enough to cause major accidents with significant radiation leaks. Tsinghua University in China has one that's worked for a while, and that design is being scaled up. The Rongcheng Shidaowan Nuclear Power Plant, with two pebble-bed reactors, is under construction now. Completion in 2015. Maybe they can make it work. We won't really know until there are a few hundred reactor-years on that technology.
High temperature, gas-cooled reactors have been tried, but were troublesome. The only big one was Fort. St. Vrain, which had a lot of troubles with auxiliary equipment and corrosion. It only ran 10 years. No big safety issues, though; just high maintenance costs.
They spend the money on bread and circuses while leaving the waste at the plants. Typical federal government.
Actually leaving the waste at the plant may in the long run prove to be the right decision.
After all, if this method works it is likely to be co-located with an existing generation plant, because it has the potential of transmuting the spent fuels into something useful again.
As TFA points out: In 2006 France changed its laws and regulations in anticipation of this new technology, and now requires that nuclear waste storage sites remain accessible for at least a hundred years so that the waste can be reclaimed.
Transporting, burying, and sealing waste up into vaults that may be too dangerous to open, could turn out to be exactly the wrong decision.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
In the long term, all of our current methods of producing electricity is dead. Just depends on what your definition of long is, and just because it is not the perfect solution for eternity doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile until we discover something better.
We must ban this weapons-grade steel for the good of our children. Bronze is good enough for knives for shaving, tanning hides, working the fields. We don't need steel. The steel industry tries to convince us that steel has peaceful uses but we know that steel weapons easily fall into the hands of bandits and brigands. Arsenic poisoning is simply a lie by big steel so that they can create their death tools. In reality, bronze is safe, reliable and fulfills our tool needs.
Uh-huh, that's exactly what a pro-bronze shill like yourself would want us to think!
Obviously, anything more advanced than rocks tied to sticks is far to dangerous to be allowed to fall into the 'wrong hands,' better go ahead and ban it all...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Actually, you wouldn't as long as you accept that the output will decline over time. When the output declines enough, re-processing again might be useful. However, the big improvement is that it makes the highly radioactive material into an asset rather than a liability. People are inevitably more careful managing assets than liabilities.
Haha, no. It's the only technology immediately available that can deal with a doubling of energy usage. Green technology has, unfortunately, been mostly a wash -> we blew a huge amount of the economy on its fairy-tale promises of reducing our environmental impact and creating tons of new jobs; it was meant to replace current technology with something equally as capable or better; it's nowhere near that mark. What we have, instead, is a giant bill and a bunch of green technology that might be able to put a worthwhile fight against something from the 1800s, but definitely not against something from the 1940s, let alone current technology.
Face it -> battery technology isn't there yet. Most of the green power-plants work only in certain places, under certain conditions, and many of them have an even greater environmental impact that the technology they're trying to replace. Nuclear fusion would be nice, but we still haven't cracked it. Which leaves coal, natural gas, oil, and so forth, where coal is the most popular option on the table right now; this is coal, mind you, where entire mountain mining communities are ready to vote for anyone who backs it (thus giving themselves a job), while being the biggest polluter.
With nuclear technology, the waste is contained. Yes, it's dangerous, but it's a bloody known dangerous, and as long as you do not hire someone from the bottom of the barrel to take care of it, you're pretty safe. What more, there are reactor designs, breeder reactors, which burn this waste, but are somewhat outlawed as they can be used to create weapons-grade material. Only an irrational fear of radiation keeps us from re-adopting it as a technology.
And Fukushima was an ancient reactor, build to yesterday's standards, which still held its own against a larger earthquake than it was designed to withstand. The inability to keep up with industry standards for running a nuclear reactor was a political / accounting problem, not a technology problem. You might as well argue that a B-2 bomber wasn't built to withstand a passing meteor storm; it wasn't built with that in mind, but if you'd be willing to untie our hands / remove some red-tape and give us the damn resources to fix the problem...
I am John Hurt.
A large part of the cost of Yucca Mtn was that it was designed to be monitored and the waste recovered.
That ship has sailed. We're more or less committed to breeding it away. Which is most likely the right call. Liquid sodium complications and all. We should suck it up and buy the technology from the frogs. If they don't want to sell, we'll just have to steel it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Is Nuclear Waste Really Waste? The short answer, is "hell no"; while there is a very small part of spent fuel which could actually be considered waste, the vast bulk of it is a goldmine of energy and a source of other highly valuable fission products.
It is totally silly to talk of "waste treatment" or "destruction"--this is just another way of doing fission. It is equally silly to talk about destroying enormously vast reserves of energy, just because our antiquated reactors are terribly inefficient and make a mess of the partially burned fuel. It does not have to be that way, and modern molten salt reactors like LFTR burn the fuel so completely that there is barely any waste left at all.
We need to take another look at spent fuel. Aside from burying it, which merely delays the problem, the only way to rid ourselves of it is by fissioning it. There are many ways of doing so, but the best would be to harness the energy contained within in safe and inexpensive LFTRs. Such reactors are capable of providing not only for our electrical needs, but also the production of liquid fuels, as well as process heat for water desalination, foundries, fertilizer, concrete, and more.
Certainly, fissile material like U235 and Pu239 should be disposed of, but it should be done so in a manner which maximizes its value, and fast reactors or other waste eaters are terrible in this respect. LFTRs require much less fissile material to start up, and if we were to use the fissile in this way, we could ramp up their production very quickly, and eliminate it just the same. Only this way would be safer, simpler, more efficient, and vastly cheaper.
Your initial supposition is basically wrong so the rest of your argument falls apart rather.
The materials in a nuclear reactor structure exposed to high levels of neutron and gamma flux are chosen so they don't activate easily or indeed at all. For example the steel alloys used for the reactor vessel don't contain cobalt as Co-59, the most common isotope plus a neutron produces the very radioactive isotope Co-60 with a short halflife of five years producing an intense gamma ray on decay. The fuel rods are jacketed with zirconium for similar reasons since it is pretty much transparent to neutrons. The result is that after a BWR or PWR has been opened for refuelling and the hot fuel rods removed the level of radioactivity within it is miniscule and people can work around and even inside the open reactor vessel (once it has been drained) with minimal protection.
Decommissioning a reactor is carried out either quite quickly after the reactor is shut down for the last time e.g. the Japanese Tokai 1 Magnox reactor which was reduced to brownfield status in about ten years or the alternative process employed by the British for its older Magnox reactors is to remove the fuel rods, demolish the rest of the site (turbine halls, control room etc.) and mothball the reactor building, leaving it for eighty years or so for residual radiation to decay to the point where the future demolition job has no radiation problem to deal with at all.
The long-term radiation problems with reactors really only accrue from the fission products and some of their daughters in the spent fuel rods. Separating them out for vitrification and geologic burial is a solved problem -- it costs money to carry out but it reduces the volume and mass of true waste quite substantially while returning 90%+ of the original fuel rod material to the fuel cycle. The US for political reasons does not reprocess fuel rods and the bulk and mass of the resulting stockpile is starting to become problematic hence the Yucca Mountain project and its political aftermath.
Search for stuff on ADSR's (accelerator driven subcritical reactor). Or the Energy Amplifier, which is patented by a CERN guy. The basic idea is (insert car analogy) a turbocharger. You have a barely subcritical reactor that by geometry of the tanks/reactor (if using molten fuels, which is a good thing by the way) can't go critical. You have a freeze plug in the tank bottom, so if it overheats, the thing drains the fuel into multiple dump tanks, which by geometry, prevent it from being critical. Now, you have an electrically driven (probably high temperature superconductor) particle accelerator at or above 1GeV firing at a (probably molten due to the particle stream) lead target in the middle of the tank, that spalls neutrons into the surrounding fuel. Fuel gets hot, heat exchangers take the heat to conventional steam generators to make electricity, some of which is fed back to the accelerator. For waste transmutation, either the waste is directly mixed into the fuel, is formed as a inner liner between the lead target and the fuel, or is in an outer liner around the fuel but before the neutron reflector. They've gotten to the point that the accelerator can use less than 10% of the gross electrical output of the generators, so it is practical. It also avoids needing highly enriched uranium or other stuff for starter fuels in a molten fuel (typically thorium).
For a molten fuel based design that is likely a pool based design, the freeze plug drain and the accelerator operation itself as a "virtual" control rod setup makes it pretty safe. You would a need a monumental disaster to cause the draining fuel to collect enough to go critical. Anything else cause the accelerator to trip, causing the reactor to essentially shutdown due to lack of neutrons, but the pool type molten reactor can stay molten long enough for the accelerator to be restarted in a reasonable amount of time (if you aren't using electric heaters to keep the thing liquid). Doesn't directly solve the remaining core heat problem of a sudden shutdown, but since it is molten by design, the dump tanks should be much more survivable compared to conventional reactors if shutdown cooling is lost.
For more
ADSR/ADS/ADTR/MSR/LFTR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_system
Professor Rubbia from CERN, now supported by Aker solutions, working on EA/ADSR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/297967?ln=pt
http://www.akersolutions.com/en/Global-menu/Media/Press-Releases/All/2010/Aker-Solutions-wins-Energy-Award-at-IChemE-for-its-innovative-ADTRTM-power-station/
GEM*STAR work at Virgina Tech
http://www.phys.vt.edu/~kimballton/gem-star/pub/w.shtml?home/overview.jpg
MYRRHA
http://myrrha.sckcen.be/