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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.
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.
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.
Primary reason is the many billions of dollars of development needed to figure it all out.
There is no design for a "working commercial thorium reactors". It's all just bits and pieces of theory, and experimental reactors that only answered some of the questions.
It's a possible technology, just not an actual technology. Kind of like the guy at NASA who recently got into the news for a pen and paper proposal of how warp speed might be possible. We are still a long way from building interstellar spaceships. Just like we are long way from building a Thorium salt reactor that works and is economically viable.
I'm the guy who write the software for the reactor (and the accelerator) of TFA. And yes, it run Linux, on embedded Xilinx cards with custom FPGAs. I can't vouch for the ability of the system to transmute long-life waste in a semi-industrial way as it's only a research reactor, not even a demonstrator. But it's the 3rd prototype of its kind and it's working well enough. More information is available here in french, and, as a long time /. member, if you have questions about the control/command software, I'll be happy to answer when I wake up in the morning ! Yeah, the name of the experiment is somewhat confusing: Genepi/Guinevere/3C/Venus/Ganddalf. One is the accelerator, one is the reactor, one is the data acquisition, one is the combined experiment... I get lost too.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is really neat. So is the current control software in Mol using your code?
Yes.
Will MYRRHA use the same code base or does it require a complete re-write?
Myrrha is only a concept so far: no development yet. It will most likely be a complete rewrite looking as to how far the code has diverged from the original specs.
Are you using a real-time kernel?
No. Everything that needs to be real-time is done on FPGAs and then transmitted to the kernel and user app via GPIOs.
What kind of quality control are you using to ensure the software performs exactly as designed?
Basically years of testing. Anyway, since it is a subcritical reactor, the security requirements are much less stringent. Some purely security stuff (read: not the control/command and or acquisition), is handled by other systems which have no interaction with mine. And as for the original 'design', well, it is research, meaning that specs start from a white sheet and build from there as we add pieces to the machine.
Are you using a functional programming paradigm?
All in C.
Are the reactors computer systems networked to the outside world? If so what kind of security measures do you have in place to safeguard access?
They are indirectly accessible (2 sets of firewalls). Like I said it is a research system with much less stringent security requirements, and quite a few researchers work on it and need remote access.
Is your software a critical component of the control feedback loop e,g. reduces beam intensity based on the measured neutron flux? If so what kind of redundancy is build into the system?
One set of software runs on the cards themselves: a minimalist BuildRoot install with a basic software that does as few things as possible (transferring acquired data to the network, reacting to commands from the Control/Command, sanity checks, basic security, going into security mode in case contact is lost, ...). One or more linux PCs run the C/C software and communicate with those cards and tell them what to do. If this soft crashes, nothing actually happens, the system keeps running for a while. You can actually shut down one PC and start another and everything keeps running like nothing happened.
But all the 'real' security is done in hardware: thermal shutdowns, beam intensity shutdowns, etc... It's actually difficult to turn the system on: everything has to be just right and there are plenty of little things that do stop the process.
Non-Linux Penguins ?