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Feds Want Nuclear Waste Train, But Don't Know Where It Would Go
mdsolar writes with news of a plan to move radioactive waste from nuclear plants. The U.S. government is looking for trains to haul radioactive waste from nuclear power plants to disposal sites. Too bad those trains have nowhere to go. Putting the cart before the horse, the U.S. Department of Energy recently asked companies for ideas on how the government should get the rail cars needed to haul 150-ton casks filled with used, radioactive nuclear fuel. They won't be moving anytime soon. The latest government plans call for having an interim test storage site in 2021 and a long-term geologic depository in 2048. No one knows where those sites will be, but the Obama administration is already thinking about contracts to develop, test and certify the necessary rail equipment.
...there's plenty of money left over to solve these trivial issues. Right?
These same people would be complaining that it was a waste since there was no way to transport anything to the repository. unlike the complaining idiots here, most people are capable of doing multiple things at once. And since there are a lot of people in the government, they can actually work on even more things.
Nuclear waste is regularly and safely carried by train in other countries.
Here's a video from 1984 of a crash test done in the UK on a train waste container:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It would be cheaper and likely completely safe to warehouse it in the US. The facility they set up to handle this prior to the political problems should have worked just fine.
But no one is going to be reasonable on the issue... so who can you pay to take it off our hands?
Find a nuclear power with capacity and will to deal with the problem. The US used to have this sort of capability... but we're a nation divided. And because of that... we are incapable of dealing with even simple problems.
It all could be resolved with a little mutual respect and consideration. But again... that's not going to happen. We don't respect each other. A large number of Americans hold large numbers of Americans in contempt. And until we let each other live and let live... we will remain at war with ourselves.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There is no reason the design of a waste hauling train should wait until a site is identified, thus delaying the removal of the waste from many scattered temporary storage sites. The hauling design and the site identification can proced in parallel.
Indeed: The characteristics of the hauling solution may limit the selection of sites to which the waste could be hauled with acceptable levels of safety. That would argue for the design to PRECEED site selection.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You can't just dump spent LWR fuel into a fast reactor - the concentration of fissile material is far too low for it to go critical.
Reprocessing's been done, but it's quite messy and there's no demand for the recovered fuel. Making MOX is much more difficult and expensive than making standard uranium fuel. It's cheaper, easier and probably safer to just store the spent fuel in dry casks until a suitable disposal site is found. Fortunately, those casks last a long time.
That way the 'waste' could be used as fuel with (as far as I know) very little, if any, reprocessing.
Even with modern fast reactor designs running on metallic fuel, some reprocessing is still necessary, though it's nowhere near as involved, messy and proliferation-prone as PUREX and aqueous processes. The most tantalizing prospect for fast reactors running on metallic fuel, especially for systems which incorporate fission product off-gassing and capture while in operation, is the ability to achieve extremely high burn up, which allows this reprocessing step to only be performed at very infrequent intervals (say once every 30-40 years). This means the power plant doesn't need its own attached reprocessing facility (as the IFR project proposed), but instead the investment in the reprocessing facility can be shared, concentrated into a single, well secured and efficient facility for, say, the whole country.
It's harder than you think, unfortunately. Nuclear weapons have a few kilograms of radioactive material, reactors have more than a few tons. The Yucca Mountain repository, the best that nuclear engineers could come up with, had to be certified to be safe for 10,000 years...but literally after 10,000 years things could have gotten out of control. It's a tough problem.
That said, it means that we have to try harder. The problem is not going to go away; we have to pursue better approaches.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Actually, the anti-nuke types tend to be left wing nutjobs.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I've visited the Nevada Test Site. Our fossil drilling history has given us an unparalleled ability to bore straight holes eight and twelve feet in diameter (standard sizes on the Site) for thousands of feet down. Start anywhere in the country and rill an eight-foot hole down through any sedimentary strata to basement rock, and then keep going for another few thousand feet. drop anything you want in there and allow room for a few hundred feet of sealing concrete before you reach the top of the basement rock layer, and you have a time capsule that will stay there for geologic eons.
We could dispose of our spent nuclear fuel that way, but we wouldn't want to. We would be wasting a large amount of usable fuel.
When you go back and read the history of how many potential sites were originally proposed by the DoE, and how those sites were eliminated from consideration until only Yucca Mountain was left, it turns out that both sides are anti-nuclear-waste. When the list had been reduced to three by years of deal-making in Congress, it was cut to one in a naked political maneuver involving a Texas conservative and Washington liberal in leadership positions. Following the closed-door committee meeting where the deed was done, reporters asked the chairman what had happened. The quote he gave them was, "We screwed Nevada." The change was attached to a budget reconciliation bill so that it could not be debated in either the House or the Senate.
A bill to restart the work at Yucca Mountain, or other western location, for a disposal site for eastern nuclear waste -- the vast majority of the commercial power reactors in the US are east of the Great Plains -- is one of the few things that would get the western states' Congressional delegations to vote unanimously, regardless of party affiliation. The last time it happened was for the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
It's pretty much impossible to fire something from the ground, or even the highest mountain and have it escape the Earth's gravity. The velocity required and the air you much push through is too high.
I don't want to think what would happen if you shot radio active nuclear waste out of a cannon (or rail gun as you suggest) at over 25,000mph (+ a few 100,000mph to compensate from atmospheric drag) in the atmosphere.
The only way to get something out of Earth's gravity is to strap a rocket to it, so you can continue to accelerate it once it's outside the atmosphere.
You want to keep spent fuel. It's not really "waste" - the anti-nuclear lobby just likes to call it that to hype up opposition. Current light water reactor designs use only about 5% of the U-235 in the fuel rods, and only about 1% of the total energy extractable from the uranium. That's why spent fuel remains "hot" for so long - the vast majority of the energy it contains is still there, and is emitted over time as radioactive energy as it decays.
So in essence, the "waste" is really fuel containing 100x as much energy as you've already extracted from it. If you send it to a breeder reactor, it can use the "waste" as fuel thus extracting more energy. The "waste" from that process converts it into a form which light water reactors can use again as fuel. You extract a much larger fraction of the energy from the original uranium, and the end product of all this would only remain "hot" for a few centuries instead of dozens of millenia.
"OMG - this solves the nuclear waste problem! Why aren't we doing this?" Unfortunately, breeder reactors create weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct. That's the only reason we don't do it - it's a purely political reason, not technical. President Carter banned the commercial use of breeder reactors in the U.S. in the interest of non-proliferation (the military still can and does use them).
I won't judge whether Carter made the correct call - that's a political decision. But you can see why you do not want to be selling spent fuel to a country you frequently butt heads with on the geopolitical arena. First, you're selling them cheap energy (that we ourselves choose not to tap for political reasons). Second, you're selling them the means to make more nukes.
It would probably take 20 years for the conceptual designs, material selection, laboratory testing of the materials, CAD design, prototype building (a dozen or so), THEN come the lawsuits, Congressional hearings, de-funding, re-funding, de-funding again, re-funding again, route selection, more lawsuits, different route selections ( Repeat ) and finally protestors chaining themselves to everything in the way before the first load of wastes is ready to go anywhere.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Folks: What would happen if instead of trying to figure out where to send the waste to via rail; we would have a portable vitrification system that can be sent to different power plants via rail. Vitrification (go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... for the wikipedia article) could possible be implemented via a portable facility that can be transported by rail. The portable vitrification facility would go from power plant to power plant and vitrify the waste to a glass like substance, which should be safer to handle and store. If all you are railroading around the country is a vitrification plant; there should be no problem with local communities. All you are moving around is an electric (or gas) furnace and associated support equipment. If that derails or is involved in an accident, then it would be no worse than just a piece of machinery such as a lathe or miling machine falling off of a train.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
Both links you posted prove my point.
You need rocket engines to get out of orbit.
The second link, a railgun accelerates the vehicle to Mach 1.5, a turbojet then accelerates it to Mach 4, a scramjet fires to take it to Mach 10 up to 200,000 feet, but then a rocket is required once out of the atmosphere (although at 200,000ft, you're still in the atmosphere, it's just too thin for the scramjet to operate).
The idea is to reduce the weight of the vehicle by removing fuel. The railgun requires the vehicle have no fuel at all, the turbojet is a reasonably efficient engine and doesn't require an oxidizer but it has upper speed limits and requires oxygen from the air. The scramjet works at higher top speed than a turbojet but has lower speed limits. It too requires oxygen from the atmosphere.
You'll notice that the railgun only accelerates to Mach 1.5. Why wouldn't you speed it up to Mach 4 and do away with the turbojet engine? It would save a lot of weight. The answer is the air is too thick at lot altitude and the turbojet is more efficient. You'd need to carry more fuel.
The first, is a bunch of armchair scientists blabbing on that you could in theory shoot yourself off into space at Mach 25 if you had a long enough track. There are a few unanswered comments that mention overcoming friction due to the atmosphere hasn't been taken into account.
Pro tip: If someone calculates it's possible to do something that requires high velocity without taking friction in to account, don't believe a word they say.
Why do you worry about some yet to be born for a hundred generations person digging a shaft thousands of feet deep and killing themselves when they hit a nuclear waste deposit.
Is it really that easy to imagine a future culture with the tech to drill through thousands of feet or rock or reinforced concrete and not have the ability to detect raditiation, and plug the hole they made?
...ask yourself this: would you really want 1600 tons of radioactive potential death rolling through your city just waiting for an errant snowflake to land on the line to derail the whole kaboodle?
Say it doesn't happen. Go on. I dare you. Those were just a few I dug out from a cursory google search.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
We had a waste repository at Yucca Mountain, until the Obama administration shut it down. Billions of dollars and 30 years of development down the toilet, and yes, that is entirely on the Obama administration.
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