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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?
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.
This comment is simply not true. Long-lived minor actinide/fission product waste transmutation can be accomplished in an energy-producing power reactor.
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.
The thing is that the volume reduction is about 65x. Quite a lot. In fact with correct on site processing and neutron spectrum control, and sub critialicaly in the right places. A 1GW plant needs a fairly small room to store all active waste for the required times. That is after about 100-200 years, the first stuff you put in there is now safe and can be taken out.
Such a nuclear plant however would be a major R & D project and there is nothing to say it would be cost effective.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
In practice the real problem is we're stuck with the dirtiest nuclear reactor design. The solid fuel, water cooled ones. Powered by Uranium.
There are quite a few designs that consume more transuranics than are produced (molten salt reactors, any fast reactor just to name two options).
Current nuclear reactors take 250tons of uranium, reject 215tons during enrichment (depleted uranium), making 35tons of nuclear fuel.
Of those 35 tons, just a single ton is converted into electricity (producing fission products), making 300kg of plutonium plus 10s of kg of other transuranics.
That means 99,3% of the original uranium is wasted (never fissioned).
By reprocessing the waste, usage of nuclear material can improve from 0,7% to over 1,5%, and nuclear waste can be reduced by an order of magnitude, without needing waste burning reactors.
A Thorium molten salt LFTR reactor would run on Th-232 / U-233, but up to 3% of the fuel could be nuclear waste, such a reactor would produce close to zero transuranics, and the resulting fission products could be partitioned (two elements have 30 year half life - 19% of waste, remaining 81% of fission products have less than 3 year half life, would be stable in 30 years), without the risk of using molten sodium in the core, without the trouble of fast neutrons degrading the reactor internal walls.