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New NRC Rule Supports Indefinite Storage of Nuclear Waste

Posted by samzenpus on from the can-I-leave-this-here? dept.

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.

20 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Ridiculous by Phil+Karn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Ridiculous by Ralph+Wiggam · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Let's blame the people responsible- Nevada voters. The politicians are just representing their constituents. I supported the Yucca Mountain project before I moved to Nevada and I would be an asshole to change my opinion afterward.

      The proposed site is over 100 miles from Vegas in the absolute middle of nowhere. Even if they stored the waste in a big open pit above ground, it still wouldn't affect anyone.

      But people here are terrified about transporting the waste along the rail lines through town. There is a freight train that goes literally 100 feet from my office every day with tanker cars full of ammonia and sodium hydroxide. Nobody bats an eye.

    2. Re:Ridiculous by Phil+Karn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not far from Yucca Mountain you will find hundreds if not thousands of craters under which are buried the fission and activation products of decades of US nuclear testing. They're not reprocessed and contained in silica glass, they were simply mixed (quite violently) with the soil and rock. And yet they don't seem to go anywhere. There is no need for Yucca Mountain to contain reactor waste for even a hundred years because it will surely be removed and burned as fuel in fast reactors. Once people wake up to the fact that global warming is a vastly greater threat than nuclear power, and that nuclear power is just as essential as wind, solar, geothermal and hydro in combating it, people will realize that "spent" fuel from light water reactors is far too valuable to just throw away.

    3. Re:Ridiculous by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Even if they stored the waste in a big open pit above ground, it still wouldn't affect anyone.

      We actually tried that in the UK, at places like Sellafield, and it didn't work out very well. Stuff started to grow in the ponds, rain water mixed in, birds picked it up and flew off with it, it evaporated into rainwater...

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by Livius · · Score: 2

    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.

  4. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by khallow · · Score: 2, Informative

    Or rather because anything nuclear in the US has been blocked for several decades.

  5. What else can they do? by bobbied · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:What else can they do? by brambus · · Score: 2

      Carter's ban was reversed a few years later. The true problem is the lack of a national policy on the way forward with this. The original nuclear pioneers envisioned us burning up the spent fuel in fast reactors. That was pretty much put on hold indefinitely when 20 years the Clinton administration cut the funding for the project just short of producing the first commercially viable fast reactor power plant designs. This could have been solved problem were it not for the environmentalist policy of stalling any progress on nuclear technology in order not to lose the political bargaining chips that R&D would have eradicated. The only thing they've achieved, though, is that it'll get developed somewhere else. In fact, using the future tense may not be necessary anymore.

    2. Re:What else can they do? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Carter really messed up with that decision...

      We can change that any time. Don't blame Carter. It's being done deliberately. Ask yourself who stands to gain if the status quo is maintained.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:What else can they do? by brambus · · Score: 2

      I admit I was oversimplifying a bit when I said the environmentalists caused nuclear R&D in this country to get all but killed outright. Of course it's a bit more complicated and you need to follow the money to find out who's really behind the push. Environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and campaigns like Solar not nuclear have often been financed by fossil fuel industries, the reason being that these industries knew damn well that while solar & wind might pose a threat down the line but at present still require fossil fuel backup (thus cementing their position in the grid), nuclear posed an imminent threat should the US go and pull a French on them, kicking them off the grid in one or two decades. Nuclear development projects such as the IFR got caught in political cross fire and for some reason got labeled as being "Republican", so Democratic congresspeople like Kerry led a massive push against it in the early 90s to get it defunded, which they ultimately succeeded in doing in 1994. After the Republicans took office following the Clinton administration, their oil buddies sure as hell didn't want to see the project resurrected, so it was left alone. Ultimately, the IFR project was killed by a lack of political allies, the Democrats being backed by powerful environmental groups (who are often, but not always backed by Big Gas and friends, though they've also got strong grassroots movements) and the Republicans being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry.
      Now if you look at counties who are less susceptible to industry lobbying with more centrally planned economies, like China and Russian, they are moving towards nuclear in a big way and are bringing it online both on-time and on-budget.

    4. Re:What else can they do? by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 2

      > Environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club [time.com] and campaigns like Solar not
      > nuclear [atomicinsights.com] have often been financed by fossil fuel industries

      And was the financing of attacks greater or less than the amount the same fossil fuel industries spent denigrating these same people that you say are the problem? I'd like to see the numbers, because it's relatively easy to find that millions of dollars have been spent on the anti-solar campaign:

      http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/opinion/sunday/the-koch-attack-on-solar-energy.html?_r=0
      http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-solar-kochs-20140420-story.html#page=1
      http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/04/23/the-koch-brothers-extra-baggage/

  6. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by brambus · · Score: 2, Informative
    There is a workable solution - burn down the actinide contents so that after a few hundred years, it's below the activity levels of the original ore. No sensible nuclear engineer thinks sequestering it for hundreds of thousands of years is a good idea.

    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.

  7. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by crioca · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  8. On site transmutation by mdsolar · · Score: 2

    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.

  9. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by sillybilly · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by brambus · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  11. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by Phil+Karn · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 2

    > 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.

  13. Re:central storage or n^x security guard costs / s by stoatwblr · · Score: 2

    "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.