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.

Comments

Transmutation in SFRs or LWRs too

[ghack]

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.

How convenient...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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!

what a waste

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:what a waste

[dbIII]

The nuclear industry killed off the molten thorium salt reactor by lobbying against it due to fears of it's success cutting back on the lifetime of their investment in Uranium reactors and infrastructure. They drove the head of that project out of the nuclear industry for daring to suggest that thorium designs would be safer than existing plants. Unless something changes to prevent their opposition or to prevent them getting money into the right pockets your thorium dream is not going to happen in the USA.
However there is some hope in India, although some of their earlier thorium stuff was partly smokescreen for a weapon program. Molten stuff is potentially vastly cheaper than conventional reprocessing.

Re:what a waste

[KonoWatakushi]

It would not be a subsidy. The Nuclear Waste Fund has accumulated a balance of $25 billion dollars, paid in fees over the years by nuclear plant operators. The parent is only suggesting that it be spent on developing the technology which has the greatest potential for managing the "waste", rather than waiting it out. In the end, those are the only two options: fission it, or bury it.

Nuclear "waste" and "spent fuel" are misnomers, as conventional reactors extract less than 1% of the energy from mined uranium. It is insane to treat it as waste, when the technology exists to completely transform the remainder into energy, while eliminating virtually all of the long term radioactivity. The technology was proven decades ago, and the remaining development and commercialization could be completed using a small fraction of the available fund.

Molten salt reactors like LFTR would not only produce enormous amounts of electricity from that "waste", but also valuable medical isotopes, radioisotopic fuel for space probes, and rare earths. As a high temperature reactor, even the rejected "waste" heat has many potential uses, including desalination and producing ammonia or other synthetic liquid fuels. Another interesting application is carbon neutral cement.

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. (Including the production of more renewables, which require a whole lot of steel and concrete. Or to provide energy while the wind and sun are unavailable.)

Re:The real cost of nuclear is the long tail of wa

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Elephant in the Room

[Antique Geekmeister]

> The above-ground casks can easily last that long.

Really, no. Between simple exposure and the fascinating chemical interactions with the low level radio-active material of numerous kinds, there's no evidence that the inexpensive containers will last that long. It's much like a start-up companies sales chart: a few early bits of information are extrapolated into a hopelessly optimistic long term graph that is unlikely to be relevent even for the next six months, much less the next 50 years.

There's a reasonable Scientific American article about this at http://www.scientificamerican..... They're apparently only rated for 100 years, and I consider that _extremely_ optimistic.

Re:Elephant in the Room

[knightghost]

We have the design and site. Yucca was killed because Reid runs the senate.

Re:Politics of Yucca

[homey of my owney]

Well sure. It was an incredible find for the opponents, and an incredibly sloppy move on behalf of USGS. But the science was redone by Sandia Laboratories and it, not the prior science, was submitted to the NRC during the licensing process.

The POLITICS of Yucca was that Harry Reid did not want it, Obama had a Nobel prize winner (Chu) illegally cancel the project by pulling the license. The two had the NRC deliberately disobey a law, passed by Congress and signed by the prior President. A Federal court has so ruled that to be the case - http://www.world-nuclear-news.....

But again, the POLITICS of Yucca, left a site and Congressional mandate unable to move because there is no funding.

Re:Elephant in the Room

[Mr D from 63]

There is a great skew in risk perception, in large part due to association with weapons, Hollywood portrayals, and general FUD mongering. I find it interesting that the average person exposes themselves to an untold number of toxic chemicals and materials. We live and work among pesticides, herbicides, and material coatings and preservatives. We expose great numbers of workers to manufacturing process hazards, breath dust from construction materials and lists of other airborne contaminant sources, and eat foods with additives we don't even recognize.

Yet, when we have a comparably small amount of waste, kept away from us, that has not harmed a soul, in tightly controlled containers, is easy to monitor and detect even the smallest presence outside its compartment, it causes the country to freeze in fear. And considering that the waste is from an energy source that has offset the generation of more airborne pollutants than wind and solar combined can hope to offset in the next two decades, and you just have to wonder. Yes, there are problems with nuclear waste, but in the bigger scheme of things, we have to weigh those risks against the risk of failure to reduce the continued increasing emissions globally, betting that less affordable and reliable sources in a few countries will really get us where we need to be.