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US Nuclear Plants Expanding Long-Term Waste Storage Facilities
mdsolar (1045926) writes with news of nuclear plants across the U.S. dealing with the consequences of the failure of Yucca Mountain. From the article:
"The steel and concrete containers used to store the waste on-site were envisioned as only a short-term solution when introduced in the 1980s. Now they are the subject of reviews by industry and government to determine how they might hold up — if needed — for decades or longer. With nowhere else to put its nuclear waste, the Millstone Power Station overlooking Long Island Sound is sealing it up in massive steel canisters on what used to be a parking lot. The storage pad, first built in 2005, was recently expanded to make room for seven times as many canisters filled with spent fuel. ... The government is pursuing a new plan for nuclear waste storage, hoping to break an impasse left by the collapse of a proposal for Nevada's Yucca Mountain. The Energy Department says it expects other states will compete for a repository ... But the plan faces hurdles including a need for new legislation that has stalled in Congress."
There's always recycling or transmutation.
The link goes to information about proposed accelerator driven subcritical reactors, but you can transmute plutonium, minor actinides, and fission products in sodium fast reactors (SFRs) or light water reactors with inert matrix fuel (LWRs). SFRs have nearly the same spectrum neutron energy spectrum as most proposed ADS blankets, and the technology readiness level is much higher. Basically anything you can do in an ADS you can do in an SFR, but you don't have the added cost of an accelerator. Moderated targets would be required for fission product transmutation.
Passive decay heat removal is necessary whether you are talking about an ADS or an SFR. Other than the worst reactivity insertion accidents (which can be mitigated by negative reactivity coefficients) I do not see serious benefits to an ADS over an SFR.
Thankfully, the American Mall, once a backbone of the consumer experience, has apparently hit hard times, thus freeing up a substantial (probably depressing) amount of parking lot. If Millstone Station has developed advanced parking-lot-storage technology, we should be set for centuries to come!
There is a disconnect - there is an incredible amount of nuclear waste from our power generation plants and from weapon production. That waste needs to be safely stored for thousands of years. Somehow steel storage tanks don't address the reality of the situation.
What is really needed is for the feds to spend some of that storage money on new molten thorium salt reactors that can convert nearly all of the 'waste' into fuel. In fact, I wonder if we could build a conversion unit into several rail-road cars that would allow on-site processing and then move to a new site.
Regardless, all of these short term solutions are SO wasteful, while ignoring better long-term solutions.
While I appreciate that Obama is pushing for a solution on the illegals (which if done right, will also solve the minimum wage issues), he also needs to focus on his 'all of the above' that he spoke about WRT energy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Who would have thought that it would be THAT hard to get rid of something composed of 95% Uranium?
But make sure it's clay. None of this organic shot for nuke waste.
Just store it all in tanks and when they're full or leaking, dump it in the ocean. So much cheaper.
The price per kwh often doesn't include the two hundred years of leaking storage and cleanup. How long until we start including the TOTAL cost of using nuclear with all of the long tail of management and waste control that drags generations into the future? I'm not saying we stop nuclear, but we MUST count the total cost. Coal burns, pollutes, and then is done with. Hydro and solar are instant power, with no real long term cost aside from equipment. So why do we keep saying nuclear is cheaper when we aren't even willing to pay the required costs to bury it in Yucca, or in some other long-term accessible storage? Let's get real and realize that nuclear is a lot more expensive than the initial cost of production.
The answer is dry cask storage. The industry couldn't wait for hysterical libtards to bless some hole in the ground and solved the problem independently.
Our pathetic fucking government will be keeping, and keep collecting, the billions in long term waste fees they've been escrowing for decades though. You can bet on that.
How long until we start including the TOTAL cost of using nuclear with all of the long tail of management and waste control that drags generations into the future?
We already have you stupid fuck.
So why do we keep saying nuclear is cheaper when we aren't even willing to pay the required costs to bury it in Yucca, or in some other long-term accessible storage?
We ARE willing to pay you incredible asshole. We've been escrowing money to pay for it for decades.
The problem isn't money and never has been. The problem is you and the fuckwits you vote into office that make dealing with the waste impossible.
So shove your lectures and your Millennial ignorance up your ass.
The link on the failure of Yucca Mountain misses the key issue: http://www.macalester.edu/acad... Scientists at USGS falsified Quality Assurance reports. Doing this meant that no confidence could be placed in the work. There was no way to know if Yucca was suitable and every reason to think it was not.
Unmaking the waste is the only responsible course. Using an accelerator to do that may require as much energy as nuclear power has provided. So, nuclear power is a battery that you use once and then have to pay back. Fossil fuels have some characteristics like this, but biochar production for carbon sequestration can be energy positive.
The molten salt experiment was a failure resulting in a huge mess.
Well said. GP is a complete and total MORON. Now go suck my nuts!
Done.
We could even get people to pay to help build the thing as part of a theme vacation. Everyone put on an Egyptian kilt and eyeshadow and grab a rope. On three now: heave!
The $25bn put aside from nuclear waste storage is still only a fraction of the subsidy that nuclear has received. The free government backed insurance is literally priceless, as no commercial insurer would ever offer it.
Nice attitude, by the way. Raving and foaming at the mouth really adds credibility and weight to your well reasoned argument.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If we're talking about the TOTAL cost of using nuclear power, then we also need to take the cost of the inevitable accidents into account.
No matter how well we engineer our nuclear plants, breaches of the reactor core, meltdowns, and the escape of fission products is inevitable. (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island almost). It would take too much hubris to believe that the human race, as a whole, is smart and careful enough to completely exclude the possibility of a meltdown (Perrow et al. Normal Accidents, 1984 -- note that this book was published before Fukushima OR Chernobyl).
Does this mean that we should give up on nuclear power? Absolutely not! A certain economic cost is incurred when the area around a reactor becomes inhabitable due to a meltdown/core breach. Through better engineering, we CAN minimize the health impacts of such a breach (Fukushima didn't catch on fire, Chernobyl did). The average coal power plant probably kills more people due to air pollution than Fukushima ever will. The full cost and benefits must be accounted for -- do the economic costs of fuel storage the occasional exclusion zone outweigh the incremental economic cost of global warming and human cost of lung cancer deaths?
One of the first sentences on the nuclear reprocessing page linked reads "Nuclear reprocessing reduces the volume of high-level waste, but by itself does not reduce radioactivity or heat generation and therefore does not eliminate the need for a geological waste repository." Emphasis mine.
Of course reprocessing would be great, but it doesn't let us side-step the political bungling of the repository issue.
Consume spent fuel and waste, and turn it into power:
http://gehitachiprism.com/what...
Though I think avoiding sodium (in a LFTR, for example) is a safer choice, given its behavior when wet..
The $25bn put aside from nuclear waste storage is still only a fraction of the subsidy that nuclear has received. The free government backed insurance is literally priceless, as no commercial insurer would ever offer it.
So should we kill the airline industry as well? Limited liability is not exclusive to nuclear, nor has it been a burden in practice with reasonable limits. Rather than calling it priceless, why don't you be honest about what that "free government backed insurance" has cost to date. I believe the word for that you are looking for is "zero". It may not remain zero, but per unit of energy produced, and relative to the alternatives, it will continue to be extremely small. Subsidies for renewables and fossil fuels on that basis have a very real cost, and are quite high.
At any rate, insurance figures will be meaningless as long as regulatory limits on radiation are so absurdly far below safe limits. When nuclear plants can not even be permitted in many places due to perfectly benign background radiation levels exceeding said absurd limits, there is clearly a problem.
Nice attitude, by the way. Raving and foaming at the mouth really adds credibility and weight to your well reasoned argument.
Your comments empty of any constructive ideas are no better. Given the endless "raving and foaming at the mouth" of anti-nuclear ideologues, the colorful language is understandable and more easily forgiven.
No containment can contain a meltdown, if it wasn't built to do so. The BWR containments, as used in Fukushima Daiichi, just weren't, because it wasn't deemed necessary. Nureg/CR-6042 made it pretty clear that the focus back in the early 1960ies was on definitively preventing "catastrophic deaths". Preventing contamination just wasn't the goal. From the perspective they had, it was sufficient if meltdowns were unlikely. This has changed, but at least in the US and Japan, the power plants weren't changed to accomodate this.
And I'm not cherrypicking my sources. Any of the well known and often discussed reports like Wash-1400 or Nureg-1150 make it very clear that such BWR containments would overpressurize and leak soon after a meltdown due to hydrogen generation (hydrogen can't be condensed, unlike water steam), leading to widespread contamination after a meltdown. That's not merely a chance, but a certainty. (Whether a meltdown can be prevented is a different matter.) All three also clearly state that flooding and tsunamis (in Wash-1400 "tidal waves") are a potential cause for a meltdown, despite the redundancy of safety equipment, because they cause a full station blackout.
All this is quite different in other containments. Pressure water reactors typically have a large dry containment, that is capable of containing a meltdown, at the very least long enough for most contaminants to settle down in the containment and not outside of it. (Without power to run any pumps, it takes some 20 hours for 99% of the Cesium to settle down. With power, you can run containment sprays and do it in a bit more than half an hour. BWR Mark I/II containments generally don't have such sprays.) Newer BWR containments are also much larger and much more capable of containing a meltdown.
Other countries such as Sweden, France and Germany fitted filtered containment vents to their nuclear power plants in 1980(Sweden) and 1988 (Germany/France). Which would have prevented any significant fallout, because the containments wouldn't overpressurize.
The free government backed insurance is literally priceless, as no commercial insurer would ever offer it.
The meat of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act is the indemnity, not the insurance subsidy. No commercial insurer can offer legal indemnity, that's why they aren't involved.
Considering nuclear plant operators are responsible for accidents that aren't even their fault (e.g. terrorist attack), it seems like a pretty fair compromise. And calling it a subsidy doesn't really make sense.. you have no dollar figure to compare it to, as you pointed out, so you have no idea how big the subsidy is. We'll have to wait until money is actually paid out by the government to call it a subsidy.
Monarch shouldn't have stored giant monster eggs there in the first place!
Judging from the comments, it looks like we still don't have a solution to the problem of nuclear waste in spite of years of study and research.
It would probably be best to stop making more nuclear waste until we have a safe method of getting rid of it.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
We should store it all up Harry Reid's ass. Plenty of room there for all the waste ever generated.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
"Well, my friend, I'd like to tell you, but folks who work here have a little saying: What happens at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility stays at the Yucca Mountain Federal Nuclear Waste Disposal and Encasement Facility."
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
Harry Reid (Dirtbag, NV) won't be running the US Senate forever. The former tick-weight boxer might be mighty in D.C. in the era of Obama, BUT he's a fairly old guy (75). Whether he loses his power this November in the elections, or spouts an aneurism during one of his hate-filled rants on the Senate floor (where he's famous for slandering people McCarthy-style (because he knows US law gives him immunity there)), or simply finally grows too old-and-tired and retires ... sooner or later he will lose control of the Senate and lose the ability to help his home state of Nevada keep the piles of money that went there (to enable nuclear waste storage) while keeping the waste out of the otherwise value-less Yucca Mountain. To keep his control of the Senate, old Harry needs to not only keep his seat (which is NOT up for a vote this fall) but he needs people all over the country to not know that a vote for a Democrat for their Senate seat == a vote to store nuclear waste in parkinglots in their cities instead of in a secure national facility designed for that purpose and already paid-for (so that they vote for enough senators to keep his party in control and him as leader).
Note: many people think of nuclear waste as just spent fuel rods - it's not. The spent fuel is VERY dense, does not require most of the volume, and is only changed-out at something like 20-year intervals. Most waste, by volume, is stuff that's less-dense than fuel - stuff that's contaminated. Much of that "fluffy" waste related to things like the medical industry. You might THINK you have no nuclear waste in your city because you have no nuclear power plants nearby, but if you have a big hospital with modern cancer treatment capabilities, or modern medical diagnostics capabilities then you have nuclear waste in your city (instead of in Yucca Mountain) and you can thank Harry Reid.
Isn't that what was done before? With Nevada winning the competition, and all those jobs building the repository at Yucca Mountain?
ok, no one wants to store the stuff. No one seems to want molten salt reactors. No one seems to want sodium cooled (or lead cooled). IFR was canned (it's a sodium cooled reactor, if I recall correctly). Hi temp gas cooled fast-neutron breeder reactors are not on the shopping list either. Can we consider something like CANDU heavy-water reactors, which at least can burn up more of the fissionable stuff than a standard PWR or BWR?
I'm not particularly a CANDU fan, the design isn't perfect... They've had some issues with up-time. They have a high-ish up front capital cost (heavy water is expensive). but if we're not willing to jump to Gen IV designs, CANDU seems like a better stop gap than building more BWRs and storing the used fuel for a century in, what is in essence, a parking lot.
The number of conspiracy theories expounded here is like a garden of skunk cabbage. There is one conspiracy in this matter, the effort to falsify quality assurance data at Yucca. Everyone's unstable and and cracked vessel reactors failed on their own lack of merit. We tried them, they were not any good. It is a matter of attrition. The next big accident in the US will kill the other reactors as well. Nuclear power is too expensive to survive in any case so maybe we'll be lucky and Fukushima will be the last tragedy.
"Discouraging development of nuclear not only prevents safer designs and a solution for the waste issue, but also assures continuing dependence on fossil fuels in the many cases for which renewables are not suitable. "
Perhaps the rule for limiting/funding future nuclear power should be that it has to:
1) Make the waste issue safer/better (Less bad stuff out there, including bad stuff in 'storage'.)
2) Make power to help the carbon cycle (Better that carbon neutral.)
3) Make sense economically (Cheaper that alternatives that actually deal with the waste issue.)
If one could come up with a plan that meets these guidelines, could it be funded by the money nuclear plants have been paying for waste handling over the years?
But, how do you recycle spent fuel for use as fuel without reprocessing? And if the fuel is reprocessed, there are still fission products to deal with, even if the uranium and transuranic elements are burned in another reactor.
Let's not forget that the MOX facility at Savannah River, designed to recycle excess weapons plutonium into fuel, where it can be burned up and destroyed, is in the process of being shut down (for "budgetary reasons") before it really opened.
Congress has their eyes on the waste disposal fund, and will loot it (or use it to "balance the budget", which is almost the same thing) unless the public stands up and demands that a permanent, safe waste disposal technology be implemented in our lifetimes. Remember that Harry Reed has already forced a study to compare the costs of doing nothing with the cost of doing something effective.
I'm not claiming that Yucca Mountain was perfect, but it was a far better proposal than piling radioactive waste up along the rivers and shorelines of the US, which is exactly where it resides today.
So there is an interesting question. Why are Gen I reactors still operating? I don't know anyone who still drives a 1960-era car as their primary transportation. Technology marches on. Or it would if NRC regulation hadn't ossified nuclear into what it is. R&D spending on nuclear in the past 40 years is a bad joke. Much like space policy, every Congress and President seems to prioritize canceling whatever projects their predecessors started (except for projects that involve killing some group or other of brown people).
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
Thank you. Let me also add that "Coal burns, pollutes, and then is done with" is the most irresponsible and stupid thing I've heard all week. Coal not only produces huge amounts of highly radioactive waste, it spews it all into the atmosphere instead of a controlled waste facility. And coal produces huge amounts of heavy metals. This is all besides the fact that it has 3x the carbon emissions of oil and gas.
If done right, nuclear is really our only option for cheap, clean, safe energy. Btw, I'm a millenial too, and no, not all of us are retarded.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
There are no Gen I reactors still operating. (Whether you count Wylfa in the UK as Gen I is a different matter that will be resolved this year, when it shuts down.) Almost everything is Gen II (and has been for decades).
Why are they still running? They are reliable, they were designed for the liftime they're at and margins were generous. Also, alternatives haven't been forthcoming in the last 20-30 years. (30 in the US, 20 in Europe) The trouble I see is not, why are they still running, but why (especially) BWRs haven't been fitted with filtered containment vents. It has been known since 1966 they would leak after a meltdown and a filtered containment vent would provide a leak that conveniently doesn't contaminate the area around the power plant too much. (In Germany the rule is that 99.99% of the Cs and 99% of Iodine must be filtered out.) That is the main problem. When the shit hits the fan, the (Mark I and Mark II) containment of a BWR doesn't do nearly enough. PWRs are just better in this respect, but still have been fitted with filters Germany and France.
There has historically been quite a bit of resistence of the utilities in the US towards any kind of major retrofitting of the internals of the powerplants. There seem to have been efforts to upgrade emergency power supply, even before Fukushima, and provisions against flooding, storms etc. But no major retrofitting of the kind we saw in Europe in the years around 1990, or what we see today in Japan. (Can't think why that would be.)
For a long time it seems that many nuclear reactors in the US were operated by small utilities that genuinely couldn't afford retrofitting. (Which is meant purely as an explanation, not as an excuse.) While in Japan the utilities were large enough and too closely connected to the government to avoid most additional safety measures. It's quite telling that the Japanese government only started thinking about accident management in 1992 and took all the way to the year 2002 to implement anything, which includes such things as a rule that every reactor should have at least two emergency power generators. Hydrogen recombiners or filters were not part of it until 2012 and 2013 respectively. For comparison: In 2006 every operator of nuclear power plants in Europe was made to check their safety measures because two out of four emergency power generators failed to start up in a nuclear power plant in Sweden, due to faulty electrics ...
"waste fuel" - isn't and shoudln't be buried. in 300 years it will be a valuable plutonium source when the shortlived radionucleides have boiled down to safe emission levels. It will probably be a valuable fuel source far sooner than that if/when MSTRs start becoming ubiquitous.
Waste "other stuff" probably is waste (neutron absorbtion) and the only approach there is to minimise volumes before disposing, or hold past several hafllives.
It's probably arguable that current approaches to radiation levels are overly cautious, given we have 60 years of jet aircraft aircrew being exposed to substantially higher radiation levels than nuke plants workers with few rad-linked ill effects.
(Disclosure: A researcher at my current employer ran a study of the levels of hard radiation received at normal flight levels which involved stowing instruments commercial passenger 747 flights for several years during 2000-2005 (the instruments were onboard for months at a time). No results have ever been published, but apparently cosmic ray (essentially high speed neutrons) levels were 3-4 times higher than expected, as was gamma exposure.)
Germany is going to quit nuclear energy production by the year 2022, but the country does not have any feasible long-term nuclear waste storage facilities yet. It is not valid, to hope, there will soon be any antimatter-annihilation-reactor, all that stuff can be thrown into in order to convert it to pure energy, so it does not need to be stored at all.