Slashdot Mirror
New NRC Rule Supports Indefinite Storage of Nuclear Waste
mdsolar writes in with news about a NRC rule on how long nuclear waste can be stored on-site after a reactor has shut down. The five-member board that oversees the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday voted to end a two-year moratorium on issuing new power plant licenses. The moratorium was in response to a June 2012 decision issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that ordered the NRC to consider the possibility that the federal government may never take possession of the nearly 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel stored at power plant sites scattered around the country. In addition to lifting the moratorium, the five-member board also approved guidance replacing the Waste Confidence Rule. "The previous Waste Confidence Rule determined that spent fuel could be safely stored on site for at least 60 years after a plant permanently ceased operations," said Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC. In the new standard, Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rule, NRC staff members reassessed three timeframes for the storage of spent fuel — 60 years, 100 years and indefinitely.
Which is the bargain and which is the stupid, shortsighted compromise?
I agree that waste in casks at nuclear power plants is reasonably safe but it would still be better to move it to Yucca Mountain. If nothing else, security would be a lot cheaper. It's utterly ridiculous that all that money was spent on a waste repository that, thanks to NIMBYism on the part of Nevada politicians, doesn't look like it'll be used any time soon. At least nuclear waste is the one form of toxic waste that will eventually go away on its own. Arsenic, mercury, lead, thallium and other chemical poisons remain toxic forever.
Which is the bargain and which is the stupid, shortsighted compromise?
The compromise is the bargain, and it isn't stupid or shortsighted. A central repository would be extremely expensive. Billions were spent on Yucca Mountain, just on analysis and legal fees. On-site storage is "good enough" for now, and nukes will require security guards regardless. We can build the centralized storage facility in a few decades when our understanding of geology, robotics, engineering, etc. will have progressed. Or even more likely, by then we will have figured out economic uses for many of the waste components, and the "waste" will no longer need to be disposed of.
Or even more likely, by then we will have figured out economic uses for many of the waste components, and the "waste" will no longer need to be disposed of.
Bear in mind that we have the waste storage and disposal problem we have now because everyone made that same assumption back in the 1940s and '50s.
Or rather because anything nuclear in the US has been blocked for several decades.
Yucca mountain is a no go for political reasons, not scientific ones, so what else can we do?
The really sad thing is that there still is a lot of useable fuel in all that if we here allowed to reprocess it. Not to mention that reprocessing would greatly reduce the size of the high level waste. Carter really messed up with that decision...
So, for now, it's store in place and guard the stuff. But this is only really a problem until it cools enough to not require being under water anymore. After that guarding it isn't that hard or expensive. It can be packaged in such a way that getting into it would take hours and industrial equipment. Guarding it just means walking by every day or so and making sure nobody is messing with the containers.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
That stopped being true in 2012.
Thanks, Obama.
I'm not so worried about low-level nuclear waste, but high-level nuclear waste is deadly for many multiples of human recorded history into the future. If humans have only had writing for 6,000 years or so how are we supposed to convey information about this waste to people 100,000 or 1,000,000 years into the future? Latin letters have lasted for 2,000 years but modern English is only a few hundred years old. Most people on Earth use a written language that is only a few hundred years old at best. There are undeciphered languages. Modern languages explaining nuclear waste could become undecipherable, particularly if civilization experiences a sharp decline for example due to a meteor strike.
We assume that humans will continue to experience technological progress and have no set backs whereas in the past 6,000 years many civilizations have risen to lead the entire world and then fallen into chaos. We're still rediscovering technology the ancient Greeks and Romans were familiar with. How do we protect thousands of facilities across the globe from poisoning future generations? The answer is, we probably won't be able to do it.
Nuclear is the dirtiest (deadliest) energy possible, and is in no way a clean energy source. Thinking that we can find the equivalent of a smoke detector use (Americium) for high-level waste is very wishful thinking in my mind.
It's about damned time we started building new nukes
Unless of course you are invested to the hilt in fossil fuels and decide to use your cash on hand to buy political influence to stop them, like the koch bros
Nope, just anything "commercial" as the military programs have been doing fine.
Thinking that we can find the equivalent of a smoke detector use (Americium) for high-level waste is very wishful thinking in my mind.
Not does it not require any wishful thinking, the physics and technology of it is pretty straightforward and well understood. 94% of typical once-through spent fuel is still uranium and a further 1% is higher actinides, all of which can be fissioned in the appropriate types of reactors to generate more energy and shorten its half life by at around 3 orders of magnitude. It's the policy decisions that are in the way.
The key problem with Yucca is scientific misconduct with data fabrication that taints the site beyond recall. Once the USGS scientists engaged in that, there is no clear way to understand what else may have been compromised. http://www.senaahq.bravehost.c...
It's about damned time we started building new nukes
I've been a proponent of nuclear power for years, but given how fast the cost of solar power has been falling, I think the time for investing heavily in nuclear power has passed.
A portable accelerator could transmute the waste at each reactor site. The places are already well connected to the grid so bringing power to transmute the waste to stable isotopes would not be a problem. Just think of nuclear power as something that must be repaid.
"and nukes will require security guards regardless." Yeah, but... are you seriously not getting the advantage of centralizing the security concern?
Nuclear is the dirtiest (deadliest) energy possible, and is in no way a clean energy source.
And yet burning coal still produces more nuclear waste. If it's the kind of nuclear waste that matters, then why not put it back into a reactor and encourage it to degrade into something more stable?
Because the Sun shines 24/7...somewhere.
If they spent billions on the analysis and legal fees thats because they were retards. There is a lot of military folk coming back who need a job, security guard type, without a home they can travel around the country. It's best to pick up all this garbage, and ship it to the Yucca mountains. Or better yet, to an undisclosed facility that is not fanfared all over the world. They needs jobs, and the cost of shipping by rail defended by military is not that great. Then when they have the technology to rework this crap and use it as useful fuel, then ship it back. The problem of storing it all in one spot at the Yucca mountain, is that you need lots of small chambers with thick absorbing walls separating the tiny batches, one of the rules of nuclear materials is you can't just pile it all into one big pile. For instance, Feynman fought during the Manhattan project with officials to be able to disclose what's going on, what material they are making, because otherwise he could not sell the idea to engineers and plant managers of a plant to scatter a skid each of the nuclear material all over the place in the plant, as opposed to in one neat stack of all the skids on top of each other in one place. That would violate the principles of critical mass, and may result in a meltdown. So I hope whoever spent those gazillions on Yucca mountain research, keeps such simple things in mind - you have to create an underground network of catacombs with many small chambers, with thick walls between them. Digging through raw rock is a bitch, but blasting makes it easy like child's play, because it's really brittle: drill a hole, fill with explosive, blast, shovel up the rubble, repeat. Explosives make it a piece of cake tunneling through a solid block of rock.
Even the 60 year time frame is subject to risk that civil unrest in the environs of the waste would breach security. In the indefinite time frame, that becomes a dead certainty.
And now we heard from the High Schoolers who never heard of Breeder Reactors except in the context of Carter banning then because of proliferation risks.
We have the technology to do many things safely. We also have whining, sniveling, lying environmentalists who will do anything, up to and including physical sabotage to prevent nuclear power from going forward. What we don't have is politicians who will tell said enviowhackos to fuck off and die.
And you don't need robots with the nuclear waste we presently have. Regular people on a proper schedule are able to work with nuclear radiation, and absorb it into their body. As in 10 minutes inside the plant, 2 hr break in the break room to recuperate, 10 minutes work again. 2 hr break again. It's cheaper and more robust than robots, though it would be nice if they invented remote control robots that can do maintenance work like taking apart pipes and unscrewing bolts and hammering lids shut on a drum, at which robots are very clumsy presently. But the real need for robots in the nuclear field is around the coolant agent in fast neutron reactors, which is liquid sodium - or NaK, and alloy of sodium and potassium metal that freezes near where mercury freezes and stays liquid at room temperatures - because operators hate getting sprayed by that shit. Robots with hafnium free zirconium limbs can take a beating and swim around in liquid NaK just fine. Well they do corrode, but not instantly, especially if the thing is cold. But the nuclear waste they are talking about has nothing to do with liquid sodium, it's away from the reactor.
How about a rule that after n years, they must either hand it over to the proper storage facility, or grind it up and airdrop it over the idiots who keep preventing anyone from building a proper storage facility.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
When they finally figure out how to run fast neutron reactors cooled with liquid sodium, and how to properly do reprocessing, we won't have any nuclear waste, because it will be precious fuel. However, presently, all major suppliers of nuclear energy only do moderated neutron reactors, that only burn the less than 1% U235 instead of the 100% U235+238, or even Thorium, because they hate liquid sodium, and they throw they hands in the aya saying we give up, we can't deal with liquid sodium, it costs too much, and when the fuel is so cheap, pressurized water reactors are easier, your real cost is security and proper operation and safety, not the fuel, and the 99% waste that comes by from only burning the less than 1% U235 is still extremely cheap to dispose of and deal with, compared to having to run a fast neutron reactor that gives you 100x power per lb of fuel, but it's a bitch to run, because of the way liquid sodium likes to corrode other metals, or glass, or anything. Maybe not graphite or diamond, but you can't make heat exchangers out of a solid block of diamond because nobody has such a piece of diamond for your sculptors to sculpt from, and graphite is really weak and brittle, it falls apart like a pencil lead, so that's not a complete answer either.
They could look into the high carbide and boride surface coating things that might be more graphite-like, or there has got to be stuff resistant to sodium. At room temperature paraffin hydrocarbons are used to store sodium, unfortunately above 600C all hydrocarbons, including the stablest of stable ones, benzene and naphtalene and anthracene, dehydrogenate into char, which is graphitic. So organic substances and hydrocarbons are not the answer, because fast neutron reactors do like to run at high temperature, because of the benefits high temperatures bring about in heat engine Carnot cycle efficiency numbers - that is, the higher the temperature, the less heat goes through that massive nuclear cooling tower stack into the environment, and the more into the power grid as electricity. Presently the ratio of energies is probably 90% going into that cloud plume you see rising from a nuclear plant, and 10% going into the electric grid, and with fast neutron high temperature but corrosive reactors, the ratio might go to something like 70% waste vs. 30% usable electric, besides the near 100% consumption of the fuel, instead of 1% consumption and 99% waste, as "depleted uranium" makes a pretty good fuel for fast neutron reactors, and we have so much of that shit around these days, that the military uses it for high density kinetic penetrator bullets, as the density of uranium metal is near that of gold, 19 g/mL, and if depleted, it's nonradiating and nontoxic.
Both of you need to read the Wikipedia page about nuclear fuels, as it says something surprising: there is a window in half lives, that is the half lives are either less than ten years, or more than a couple hundred years, or something along those lines. So the decay profile of half lives is not continuous, you have some very hot and dangerous stuff, but that also blows out its punch relatively fast, and relatively mild and less dangerous stuff, but that takes a couple hundred thousand years to go away. (As in, you might almost be willing live next to it, but you don't want to ingest it for sure. There are things like cinnabar minerals in nature, that you don't want to ingest, or arsenic minerals, also toxic mushrooms, but might be willing to coexist with, and live next to them.) So these days the protocol is to hold spent nuclear fuel on site for the less than ten years part, and then when that's gone, all you got is the very low radiating but extremely long half life stuff left, which is kinda safe to ship around by rail and store. But indeed, the stuff fresh out of the reactor is deadly, and needs to be aged on site to give out its punch first. If you read up on the Fukushima disaster on Wikipedia, you'll see mention of such aging ponds.
Thorium mixed oxide fuel from lightly processed waste with say 10% Th would overcome the central storage problem. Already a bench/pilot scale technology in Europe.
I grew up playing in the back yard near a bed of Lilies of the Valley. Every part of those flowers is highly toxic. I don't remember ever being warned about eating them, but I must have got inculcated with the idea that it is super dumb to eat random things growing in nature. I never touched them, and neither did any of the neighborhood kids.
I mean touch as in ingest. We did pick bouquets of them and put them in glasses of water in the house.
I'm quite aware of how radiotoxicity of spent nuclear fuel works. There are in fact graphs detailing it. Fast reactors and actinide burners prevent the actinides from entering the waste stream in the first place, hence why their waste is below original uranium ore radiotoxicity levels after a few hundred years. After that, you can essentially throw the stuff back into the pit you got it out of, knowing that you've actually lowered the overall radiotoxicity of the original material. For current LWRs on a once-through cycle this doesn't occur until some hundreds of thousands of years in the future.
Actually, the worst nuclear waste sites are all military. Well, not counting Chernobyl and Fukushima, of course.
Even with cheap solar and wind we will still need nuclear, at least until somebody perfects a cheap, reliable and long-lived utility scale battery. Otherwise we'll never be able to retire all the CO2-belching fossil-fuel plants to match the varying supply with the varying demand.
There is a youtube channel i watch called We eat the weeds. I'm like yeah right, but if you think of it, somewhere down the road all veggies started out with we eat the weeds, and learn. Even lillies, you could ingest 1 flower, and wait and see, then ingest 5 flowers, and wait and see, etc. In fact those toxins might be helpful as medicine when you're sick with an infection for instance, at the proper dose. That's how rats treat everything they eat, as they are scavangers and a lot of things are rotten and toxic from the bacteria, fungi and yeasts on them, so they take a bite, then come back later to eat it if they don't get sick. Which is why rat poison has to be tricky. Presently they have vitamin K antagonists, that create no pain, but prevent blood clotting, so if a vessel ruptures in their brain or muscles, they get anyeurism, or if they get hurt and start bleeding, they bleed to death, but they eat it no problem because they don't sense feeling bad from taking a bite. And unless they do bleed in someway, like an external scrape or internal blood vessel rupture, they survive it OK. Sometimes when they try to make me work hard physically I think of rat poison and blood vessel rupture, and try to moderate the level of exertion. I also refuse to get a flat stomach and muscles there, because that's a great way to get a hernia. When it's all soft and muscle-less, there is nothing that really puts a great force on your intestines to exit your abdominal cavity. And hernia operations are expensive, and I refuse to buy health insurance on matters of conscience and principle.
I'll probably be modded down for expressing my opinion however this is a disappointing outcome for the Nuclear Industry.
When Dixie Lee Ray was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission he proclaimed that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be “the greatest non-problem in history” and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are in 2014, almost thirty years past that date and still there is no acceptable high level waste disposal site anywhere. The closest anyone has come is the Swiss and even thier project is a multi-decade test project and extremely expensive.
Nuclear power is energy intensive *after* the energy has been produced simply because material technology is not adequate to produce a Nuclear reactor that has a life span that matches the geological time frames of the fuel. This exposes the facility to all the issues associated with decommissioning reactor sites every 4 decades or so. A reactor design that lasts at least 1000 years and is a closed loop, i.e. the plutonium goes in and nothing comes out (except electricity and possibly hydrogen) and avoids all the energetic costs associated with mining, enrichment and decommissioning/demolition of the reactor is the reactor technology issue that has to be solved for Nuclear Energy to be viable because otherwise it can never realize the full energetic yield of the fuel.
This looks like the authorities are effectively giving up on producing the solutions that the Nuclear industry requires to be viable. The first step is a geologically spent fuel containment facility, with appropriate infrastructure to support it is the first step in reviving the nuclear industry. It doesn't matter whether you are for or against Nuclear power this is a basic structural issue that need to be solved. If you're for Nuclear Power then it is a requirement to develop new reactors, if you're against Nuclear Power then it is a requirement to keep radionuclides out of the environment.
Just leaving it around existing reactor sites is a admission that a proper solution is too hard and that further investment in the Nuclear Industry is pointless, when in actuality investment in containment infrastructure is essential.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Even lillies, you could ingest 1 flower, and wait and see, then ingest 5 flowers, and wait and see, etc.
Even easier, just break open a stem. If the sap is milky, it is likely to be poisonous, and even more likely to taste very bitter. If the sap is clear, it may not be digestible, but it is not likely to be poisonous.
How ironic that this dodge is an expedient to try to license new plants.
Did the right thing to pull the plug on Yucca. Fabrication of data pretty much made proceeding impossible. He was handing out license extensions like candy and won't be missed on that account, but I think he would not have pulled this bozo move. Indefinite above ground storage in flood plains? What can they be thinking?
I also refuse to get a flat stomach and muscles there, because that's a great way to get a hernia.
lol yes that's why your belly is big.
And hernia operations are expensive, and I refuse to buy health insurance on matters of conscience and principle.
lol ur trolling us.
We have a fossil fuel power generation industry that is deeply invested and wants to get full value out before abandoning it to a 'better' competitor
whiny environmentalists are just one of their tools
if they can't read our ancient languages or have lost the records what are the chances of them digging far enough safely...
oh wait you're not storing them safely underground.. not that it matters since if you're still running an active power plant at the location you're going to need security anyways.
for finnish aspect, maybe check this out
http://www.intoeternitythemovi...
furthermore, if they have "lost" all civilization(capable of detecting the threat) then it's going to be a quite localized threat, like asbestos landfills and what have you... since if they have lost all that they're not going to be moving on about long distances.
also a rant about descending into chaos in the past 6000 years - GLOBALLY there has not been any descent into such chaos, it's all been unifying and forward going progress and the more there has been trade and communications the faster and more the advancement has been.
we have quite well known already for quite some time how the romans technology worked, how the greeks did their thing and of the things we don't know exactly we know several explanations how to have done those. we know better how they built the pyramids than the fucking romans knew and todays chinese know how the romans built their aquaducts...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Obama appointed Gregory Jaczko as the chairman of the NRC in 2009, and Ernest Moniz as the Secretary of Energy in 2013. Jackzo bypassed his four fellow commissioners and released highly irresponsible and inaccurate statements sowing unfounded fears during the Fukushima incident, and has since come out as strongly anti-nuclear. Moniz is unduly conservative about the value of nuclear energy and both are strong advocates of natural gas. Moniz also hired Kevin Knobloch, the head of a prominent anti-nuclear organization (UCS) as his Chief of Staff.
Obama may pay it lip service, but does not support nuclear in any meaningful way.
Ronald Reagan's NRC appointees approved zero new reactors. George HW Bush's NRC approved zero. Clinton's NRC approved zero. George W Bush's NRC approved zero new nuclear reactors.
Obama's NRC has approved 4 new reactors. They can't be all that anti-nuclear.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-new-nuclear-reactor-in-us-since-1978-approved/
How ironic that this dodge is an expedient to try to license new plants.
It will appear that way but it won't be the result. The 2005 energy act disassembled the PUCHA put in place after the depression. Companies are now free to come in and make plans for locating pre-approved reactors and despite the claims of NIMBYism the same 2005 act denies local residents the right to have any involvement in the considerations for placing those reactors.
Not that it matters. Only oil and coal companies have the financial clout to pay for reactors and this is a clear way for those companies to plunder ratepayers with the tax credits they will receive even if they don't build the reactor, as they drive America into another depression.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The US isn't the only country with nuclear power. Some like China and India have been pushing it hard and investing vast amounts of money in developing it, yet have still failed to deal with this problem.
Also, nit-picking perhaps but "several decades" implies nuclear was being blocked back in the 50s, which clearly it wasn't.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That seems to be a mistaken view. Not much storage is needed. http://www.engineering.com/Ele...
Nuclear power over promises and under delivers so it mostly trips itself up. http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
Coal produces zero nuclear waste.
The DoE is responsible for dealing with the nuclear waste. The NRC is responsible for nuclear safety. This regulation indicates that they do not want to do their part of the job. A freeze on new plants should remain in place until DoE gets its act together. This claim that indefinite storage of nuclear waste out in the open is safe is obviously wrong. Now that the NRC has made it, then all their claims to be pursuing nuclear safety are suspect as well. The NRC is out to promote nuclear power at any cost including subjecting the public to nuclear hazards.
Why am I not seeing much more discussion of the "Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor" (WAMSR)?
http://news.discovery.com/tech...
According to the description, the WAMSR produces power like any other nuclear power station - but it is fuelled by "nuclear waste", which is essentially just fuel that has been 5% consumed and then discarded as no longer viable. Its proponents say that the WAMSR could provide all the power the human race needs until 2080, while using up all the nuclear waste that people are so upset about.
Better still, if necessary we can go on running conventional nuclear plants, and feeding their waste directly to WAMSRs.
OK, please tell me what's wrong with this picture? I obviously have missed some serious problem, but I'm puzzled that I haven't read articles debunking the WAMSR - instead, it's been completely ignored. Just as puzzling as the way bacteriophages are being ignored as replacements for antibiotics.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Yeah, Hanford is definitely "fine." It's certainly not one minor earthquake away from filling the Columbia River basin with radioactive sludge.
Idiot.
The low-level stuff you're not worried about is the long half-life stuff that you are worrying about.
Anything so radioactive as to kill you is decayed and gone within tens of years. Thus, the previous policy when Yucca Mountain was still on the table.
at least until somebody perfects a cheap, reliable and long-lived utility scale battery.
Like sodium sulphur batteries? Japan has been using 50MWh utility scale sodium sulphur batteries for a few years to smooth the output of wind farms. They are cheap and pretty safe, and easy to recycle.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No, it just produces massive chemical toxicity that never breaks down. Arsenic, mercury, sulfur dioxide, carbon pollution, airborne particulates, and tens of thousands of dead people per year from respiratory disease. Oh, and whole mountains being blown up in order to find the gigatons of coal necessary to keep the furnaces running.
At least with nuclear, the waste is a problem that eventually takes care of itself. I know you're a solar power shill, but I think we can all agree that COAL IS BAD, AND SHOULD BE REPLACED BY ANYTHING ELSE.
there are so many energy storage mechanisms under study and developement it's not even funny.
hydro-pumping, compressed air, etc.
Plus it's not really a given that storage will even be needed. A well designed smart grid could adapt to load and switch capacity in and out.
A truly global smart grid, the ultimate goal, wouldn't even see any variance as the variance would be so small in comparison to the overall capacity.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Chris Dudley (Solar power reseller for the Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative) over promises and under delivers, so he mostly trips himself up
Joe Biden is a square shooter. Joe Biden for 2016!
It's also gluten free, but wtf does that have to do with the price of breast milk in cambodia?
Stop burning coal today and aside from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the ecosystem will have forgotten the effects. That is not the case with Chernobyl or Fukushima or the nuclear waste releases the NRC is promoting with this new rule.
Nuke nuts are blinded by their strange love for nuclear power so they end up saying a lot of ridiculous things. That was one of them.
Nuclear power is on the way out. It just can't get costs down and alternatives are getting cheaper and they will remain cheaper. The money to deal with the waste needs to be stockpiled now while there is still some revenue to tap. Just the opposite is happening however.
Outside of the US the fast reactors keep leaking and fuel can only be reworked once for only a fractional reduction in waste. Ignoring pie in the sky reactors significant volumes of nuclear waste are still a necessary by-product of nuclear power.
Untrue:
http://www.scientificamerican....
Great. I guess that means the waste stored in metal shed buildings here at Indian Point can just stay there forever....a pile of dead radioactive waste, forty miles north of NYC, with a river that runs in two directions.... What could go wrong ? If the Roman Empire had nuclear power, we'd still be dealing with the waste. I'm for nuclear power, but allowing the waste to just sit there....well, you don't mess where you eat.....
> Even with cheap solar and wind we will still need nuclear, at least until somebody perfects a cheap,
> reliable and long-lived utility scale battery.
Or you do what everyone is actually doing, and using gas peakers in those periods.
And we already have most of what we need in that department for the "opposite reason", that most nukes don't power cycle for peak following.
It makes no difference to me if you have 50% of your load coming from NG turbines to make up for daytime peak that the nukes can't supply, or nighttime baseload that the PV can't supply.
It does make a difference to people who oppose renewables though. They say that building out renewables requires backup, and that you need to factor the price of the backup into the renewable. However, they fail to note that the exact same argument is true for nukes, or even coal plants for that matter, yet they never mention that fact. Imagine that.
and the storage problem would go away in a day. Hopefully the day of Reid's departure, natural or otherwise, comes soon. Then again Byrd lingered on for nearly a century...
You claim uranium is nuclear waste?
But when your refrigeratorâ(TM)s compressor needs to run, can it wait a few minutes? Certainly. The same is true for air conditioning, heating, and many other âoeautomaticâ loads. Smart grid technology can be added to appliances, allowing the grid to control these flexible loads.
It's bullshit.
"Smart grids" work perfectly if they need to power ONE house. Then you can "smartly" decide to delay one compressor for few minutes because another one is running.
On a large grid, it's smart by fucking default! Anyone with any clue about statistics knows this. Compressors in your fridge "don't run" because someone programmed a timer into them or on some "SMART grid" signal. They run on local conditions inside the fridge and that is 100% probabilistic. If you are naive and start to muck around with this to "oh, wait for 10 minutes", all you end up is getting a spike of demand in 10 minutes as thousands of alliances are delayed.
As to relying on solar or wind for energy, well, around here they have windfarms. Very efficient they tell us, 40% load factor. Except this summer. First day with 30km/h wind is today for months. It's been calm and hot since June otherwise. If it wasn't for hydro (and lots of extra water causing unprecedented floods - thanks AGW!), it would by lights out and "kids, stare at the stopped wind farms".
Oh, and we get to stare at the stopped windfarms in winter too. Too cold for them to run just as we need electricity to heat the house. You know, even geothermal heat pumps don't run without electricity.
So yes, all hydroelectric power around here. 100% dependable and wind is only used to augment hydro. For places without hydro, well, wind + solar will only get you so far. If you depend on them 100%, you will get fucked at some point. That's a certainty.
And yet it works. http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r... Perhaps this a forest and trees issue for you.
It is if it isn't being reclaimed from the fly ash.
> And now we heard from the High Schoolers who never heard of Breeder Reactors except
> in the context of Carter banning then because of proliferation risks.
And now we hear from the deliberate forgetfuls who fail to recall Superphénix or the fact that the economics of such systems are so marginal that every one of them has been a failure on those grounds.
Conventional plants are going in around $7.50/We on paper, but if you include the constant price overruns, it's closer to $9 to $10. No one can afford that, which is why everyone is giving up on it. Plans are being abandoned much more rapidly that they are going forward, and that is a simple statement of fac.
But let's not put the blame where it actually is, because that would require self-reflection. No no, let's blame someone else, it's the American Way! So who should we blame... hmmm, how about those patchouli-scented kids we all get our hater-aid out for. Yeah, that's the ticket.
It's a sad comment on any industry if you think a group of people who can't hold down a job at Starbucks have managed to bring down an empire consisting of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, like GE and Westinghouse.
So unmined uranium is nuclear waste?
> Not that it matters. Only oil and coal companies have the financial clout to pay for reactors
If an oil and gas company could do it, so could Apple or Google. But they're installing solar.
Why? PV is $1.79/W in 2013, and nukes were around $8 to $10 depending on pre- or post-price-rise numbers (ie, Flamanville).
There is exactly one reason nukes are in the dumps now: CAPEX. When someone figures out how to get that back down to the $4 range, they'll start building them again. As long as it remains north of $6/W, its dead. That simple.
Thank you Ralph, it is always refreshing when people interject facts into a discussion being trampled by rhetoric
Un-mined Uranium ore is still pretty toxic...but it's underground...This Uranium (not to mention all the other nasty shiz in coal ash) is put into the air and water table. I would consider that nuclear waste, yes. Considering the insane levels of regulation for even the tiniest levels of radiation surrounding nuclear plants, the fact that coal-ash gets a free pass to just store whatever in unlined pools next to lakes and rivers is pretty ludicrous.
Speaking of nit picking, several does not mean what you think that it means
It is completely appropriate for use to represent more than 2 and less than many (whatever that is)
several
sev()rl/
determiner & pronoun
determiner: several; pronoun: several
1.
more than two but not many.
"the author of several books"
synonyms: some, a number of, a few; More
Coal ash has the same uranium concentration as dirt. And neither have associated fission products unless the dirt has been contaminated by the Chernobyl accident or something like that. You can call natural uranium nuclear waste, but since we don't allow reprocessing of nuclear waste, you are stuck with CANDU reactors if you want to use it as fuel. I think you are being silly. Coal use actually reduces radiation exposure through dilution of carbon-14 in our diet. Not a good reason to burn coal of course.
"Or you do what everyone is actually doing, and using gas peakers in those periods."
At some point in the not-too-distant future those are going to be so heavily regulated and taxed that nuclear will be cheaper.
Bear in mind that even the old BWR plants are throttlable (they run at full power for economic reasons, not technical) and the MSR processes were shown to be highly throttlable (5 minutes or less) before Nixon forced the test rig to be shut down.
Assuming that Thorium MSRs take off (and I think that's a pretty safe assumption given the amount of money China's putting into them), the "waste nuclear fuel" problem won't be around for more than 50 years after they become mainstream power sources and most of the rest of the issue is "hot" but shortlived material with a dangerous lifespan of 2-300 years at most.
There are a number of areas with similar background radiation levels to Chernobyl and Denver has far higher background ionising radiation levels than Fukushima simply by being at altitude. If ionising radiation was a dangerous as some of the scaremongers insist, the average lifespan of airline pilots and cabin crew would be down in the 40s, not "no different from the general population" (Fallacy #1 is that radiation exposure is cumulative over your lifespan.)
As with the USA, the problem sites in other countries are predominately military.
There's a coral reef in the mid pacific with several kg of plutonium powder scattered across it. The same location is leaking high-level radionuclides into the water at a depth of a few hundred metres, which are being picked up by currents and are detectable at other islands hundred of km away (volcanic seamounts are basically giant piles of sand)
It would have been safer for the French govt to run its nuke tests in an area with a nice solid deep basalt base - like under the Pyranees, but it was politically expedient to do it in the middle of nowhere and play fast/loose with the health of workers where noone could see and pesky protesters could be kept at bay by sticking a limpet mine on one of their boats in a nearby foreign country.
"I'm not so worried about low-level nuclear waste, but high-level nuclear waste is deadly for many multiples of human recorded history into the future. "
Please stop drinking the koolaid.
Contrary to popular belief, plutonium and uranium aren't particularly radioactive unless you put a lot of the pure stuff in a small enough space for the atoms to start affecting each other and give them a bit of assistance by arranging things "just right". The greater danger is chemical - they're both highly reactive and highly carcinogenic heavy metals (depleted uranium shells are decidely _non_ radioactive. They kill tank crews more by incineration than by kinetic energy, once they get through the armour and that chemical toxicity means they will leave a nasty legacy where used for decades to come)
"spent" fuel rods are blazingly radioactive thanks to high levels of calcium, cobalt and other unstable isotopes (handling one will kill you from the gamma exposure in very short order)
However: stick 'em in a safe place for 300-400 years and that gamma emission level will have dropped to a level low enough that the rods are safe to handle without requiring special kit - and once the contents are chemically processed, they can be reused as reactor fuel (enough plutonium in them to offset the near-natural uranium balance.
If you don't want to wait that long, just dump it all into a MSR and things will be "burned down" much more quickly - the big "positive" is that given the thorium cycle's calculated efficiency, you should be able to achieve 97-98% usage of the starting fuel, instead of 1%, so the amount of "hot stuff" coming out the other side is minimal _and_ shortlived. It's better to keep "hot" stuff in the reactor and extract the heat as work than it is to dump them in the bottom of a pool and let it heat the water.
MSRs are really good at producing heat and lousy at producing plutonium (it can be done, but it's a LOT harder than any uranium/water setup), plus they don't need massive cooling (they run much hotter than traditional plants, so thermodynamic efficiency is better), can't burp gasses, melt down or explode (the nuclear side is all unpressurised) - and the lack of water in the nuclear loop means they can't leak thousands of gallons of low-level contaminated water either. That makes them a far "safer" system from actual risk point of view.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
The steam turbine side comes with the usual issues of steam plants, but that can be entirely decoupled from the reactor itself (it's entirely possible to use sterling engines or thermocouples too) and any steam explosion is just that - a steam explosion
The fact that you can get hot side temps of 700-1400C means that the heat can be used directly in various industrial processes (eg: at ~1200C, water can be cracked to produce hydrogen, then air + plain old Haber–Bosch methods make ammonia from that and end products range from plastics to fertilizer).
Guard those "waste" piles well. They will be useful in the future.
It releases more radioactivity each year in the form of radium (alone) than several chernobyls. There are a bunch of other nasties in there and as others have mentioned a bunch of heavy metals, etc.
Most of the elevated mercury levels in the world's oceans over the last 150 years is from coal burning, as a f'instance, not chemical releases.
We're very good at ignoring what we can't see but is dangerous and demonising stuff with low risk that has high impact (the fear of flying thing - you're more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport than to be injured in an aircraft)
I like how "it works" means "a study of a hypothetical situation which confirms my biases".
Thorium reactors, as previously run at Oak Ridge National Labs, were able to consume much of the radium based wastes as part of their fuel stream. What comes out tends to have shorter half lives than what we see coming out of the current generation of reactors. Still, I doubt we will have enough foresight to go there. India and China are way ahead of us on thorium based reactors.
Dandelions, or Taraxacum officinale, has a white sap, and it taste bitter, but it's not that toxic. They have a modification, a breed, where they make rubber out of the milky latex, as the regular wild type has low latex content. They are gonna make tires of it, just like from the white sap that exudes from rubber trees, natural rubber latex. Natural rubber is mostly inert, it passes through you, not that toxic - just chew and swallow a latex glove which is processed natural latex into a solid form - though some people are allergic to it. I bet there are tons of things where the sap is clear and are toxic, as clarity is dependent on the suspension of insolubles, mostly latex-like rubber particles, and if the toxin is soluble, then it can be deadly yet the sap clear. True that a lot of toxins in nature are extremely complex, and mostly insoluble in water - snake poison for instance is white too. But it all depends on the makeup, and if it has enough hydrophilic groups, it may be soluble at very high molecular weight.
Yeah.
These kinds of studies tend to be pretty thorough. Perhaps you reject it because you'd have to learn you are mistaken as I did. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/20... I thought we would need storage temporarily.
I thought we would need storage temporarily.
I thought we would need storage permanently in a situation where we're relying heavily (80%) on variable sources of power.
The "smart grid" just throws the cost of energy storage and brown outs (when supply can't meet demand) onto the end user.
lets get mPower from B&W, TransAtomic, and Flibe funded and building new reactors.
In particular, mPower can have their first reactor ready in under 5 years. We should provide them a contract for 10 reactors which are then put in place in CA for water distillation, along with electricity.
Then Transatomic and Flibe will take a while to get ready, but they are IDEAL for putting on-site at the old reactors, and burning up the 'waste' fuel. And it would allow the old reactors to be taken down slowly, with the profits from the new reactors.
By all means do not remove the old 'waste'. Leave it there. Instead, ship a unit on a grain that is designed to reprocess the waste into fuel for transatomic and flibe.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Get rid of the far right and left, and fund new reactors. And yes, it is the far right that is blocking this as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The REAL problem is that we are throwing away useful FUEL. None of that waste should be buried. Instead, it should go into new reactors that can make use of it, and then what is left from that, should be buried.
Right now, the greatest detriment is that the far left and far right are INSISTENT on pushing their own form of energy.
The only one being smart is O who wants to push them all, but is too busy dealing with the house neo-cons/tea*
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Pretty sure there is transmission in that mix.
> Not that it matters. Only oil and coal companies have the financial clout to pay for reactors
If an oil and gas company could do it, so could Apple or Google. But they're installing solar.
Because they know a good investment when they see it.
Why? PV is $1.79/W in 2013, and nukes were around $8 to $10
Great, PV is more viable than nukes! thanks for the info.
There is exactly one reason nukes are in the dumps now: CAPEX. As long as it remains north of $6/W, its dead. That simple.
Well it seems like the figures prove nuclear is dead then. Great news, thanks!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
And yet, silicon valley is now funding Transatomic who can burn up 'waste' in a far simpler reactor. This makes them DIRT CHEAP.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Only a fool thinks that Nukes are dead, or for that matter, wants them dead. Heck, with JUST the nuke waste ( both from nuke plants and from rare earth mining) that we have, if we use transatomic and flibe reactors, we would have enough ENERGY (not just electricity, but full energy) to do 100% of America's Energy for over 100 years.
And note that we got into the mess that we are, because we took coal to over 60% of our electrical usage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Only a fool thinks that Nukes are dead, or for that matter, wants them dead.
Well I don't think I'm a fool and I did say that it "seems like the figures prove nuclear is dead then". I do support reactor development, however I think the current nuclear industry is in such a mess that it's going to take a lot of money and some very big infrastructure project to fix it, and I don't see any political figures anywhere that are going to get involved with multi-decade infrastructure projects.
Yep, I said it was great news, because its such a mess and if it isn't going to be fixed, which is what the capital expenditure seems to indicate, then it may as well be shut down before any more of the old aged reactors have a serious accident, I don't think that is foolish either. So, since you have said something like that, do you support a spent fuel containment facility?
Well, actually, there is enough there for 5000 years of energy needs to be supplied - but do you seriously think there is a politician or company or even an economy with that kind of forward planning capacity?
No, Nuclear is in the mess it is in because it did not look after its house and put infrastructure in place when it had money to do so. More importantly when it had the political and financial support to do so. Now it is being slapped in it face for its own arrogance and, frankly, it kind of deserves it. The Nuclear industries PR machine has been one of the most voracious in slapping down the criticism it received and is now harvesting the inability to answer that criticism.
We are in the mess we are in because we heavily biased our subsidies in favour of Nuclear, Coal and Oil. Renewable energy puts too much control in the consumers hands and no company wants it's customers to have any control.
So I think that it is probably dying, not dead yet, but this is a big sign that it is over.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
And yet, silicon valley is now funding Transatomic who can burn up 'waste' in a far simpler reactor. This makes them DIRT CHEAP.
So what. Same problem - different fuel cycle. Thalluim 233 a very nasty gamma emitter and a whole new set of radioisotope analogues in the environment. It doesn't matter what type of reactor technology is focused on it's the rest of the Nuclear industry that has infrastructure problems. Were you even aware of that type of reactors spent fuel product?
Therefore the only way to progress *any* reactor technology is with associated spent fuel containment facilities to manage it. To put it into economic terms, the metal itself is quite valuable AND dangerous. No one leave piles of gold just lying around, it's carefully stored and managed. The difference is that gold doesn't cause human health issues on top of being dangerous.
Think about it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.