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Shale: Good For Gas, Oil...and Nuclear Waste Disposal?
Lasrick writes: Chris Neuzil is a senior scientist with the National Research Program of the U.S. Geological Survey. He thinks the qualities of shale make it the perfect rock in which to safely and permanently house high-level nuclear waste. Given the recent discovery that water is much more of an issue than originally thought for the tough rock at Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Utah, the unique qualities of shale, along with its ubiquitous presence in the U.S., could make shale rock a better choice for the 70,000 metric tons of commercial spent fuel currently sitting above ground at nuclear power facilities throughout the country. France, Switzerland, and Belgium are all considering repositories in shale, but it hasn't been studied much in the U.S. "Shale is the only rock type likely to house high-level nuclear waste in other countries that has never been seriously considered by the U.S. high-level waste program. The uncertain future of Yucca Mountain places plans for spent nuclear fuel in the United States at a crossroads. It is an opportunity to include shale in a truly comprehensive examination of disposal options."
I know Benzene is just a good idea to mix up with groundwater, so high level radioactive waste must be an order of magnitude smarter.
Captcha : osmosis
Every time they think they found the 'perfect' solution to storing nuclear waste. And every time it turns out it's not sufficient after all.
Traveling Wave Reactor
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
The best way to dispose of nuclear waste is to burn it in a reactor i.e molten salt
As if fracking wasn't bad enough. I remember reading some time ago a paper that was studying this exact subject and the probability of the waste migrating in the aquifers. Sadly, I cannot find the link anymore. Still, veeery smart. Hmph
Spacex could put 70,000 metric tons in an orbit that would eventually end up falling into the sun. Even if a couple of rockets burn up in our atmosphere, we would pollute our planet less than any other failed solution we have tried so far. The financial cost would probably be less than what has been spend on just looking for storage locations.
Yeah, a couple rockets of nuclear waste crashing on a metropolis would do very little damage. Oh wait...
The only example of proper underground storage is in Finland, and that is not dug in shale.
Why would we hide some of the most energy dense stuff known to man? Instead put it in long term storage, plan for say 200 years.
Sometime down the road future generations will reprocess it and use it. Unless energy gets super cheap, then in that case...Energy is super cheap and they will have no issue cleaning up the pasts mistakes.
The summary says Utah but Yucca Mtn is in Nevada
Both flyover states, never mind.
That "nuclear waste" is rather a fuel for FBRs. Just so far FBRs are not financially viable but in about 50 years when natural uranium gets depleted FBRs will recycle that "nuclear waste" into a new fuel. So there i no need for too much long time storage.
The link "water is much more of an issue" is broken (the "www." portion should be dropped). This link works: water is much more of an issue.
As I get older I am less impressed by the infinitesimal bit of knowledge that science has revealed and more impressed by the vast gulf of ignorance it has revealed. I hope however it is that our elites choose to bury this stuff, they invest at least a little attention to being able to dig it all up again when it turns out they were wrong about whatever.
Spent reactor fuel has many uses. Methods like encasing it in glass ingots simply waste a valuable resource. We shouldn't be hoarding nuclear waste in bunkers. The idea that we should be is bred out of unreasonable fears. We should be selling it to industrial partners who would do valuable things like use the tritium for things that glow permanently (as is done in gun sights).
That second link isn't working for me; good job doing basic checking, Slashdot "editor."
Try http://thebulletin.org/yucca-mountain-redux7800 instead, or just use the link from the summary above, and just remove the spurious ".html" from the end
I say WTF are these guys smoking?
If you want to dump nuclear waste into subduction zone of oceanic plates, ok. Expensive but ok. But now you want to stick it in some more accessible hole. A hole that is more accessible only because it was dug by someone else.
They must be downwind from one of these fracking wells to come up with this gem.
PS. On the positive side, dumping these wastes into one of these holes would at least prove that there is some vertical migration in fracking wells, and not just along the gas shaft. And another superfund site.
Yucca Mountain is in Nevada and that is the reason there is no centralized repository. Henry Reid's (Senator from Nevada) political clout was enough to kill the massive, half completed project. Even with potential problems of water there, having a secure location to store the fission by-products is much better than having vulnerable piles scattered around the country.
Almost none of the existing waste is stored in dry casks but rather water filled cooling pools . This type of storage requires a constant water supply and constant electrical source to power the water pumps. A major power outage or flood could bring the same sort of nastiness experienced at Fukushima to the U.S. In addition to the other problems, security at the reactor sites is horribly lax - unfortunately making the piles terrorist targets.
Most of the "waste" from pressurized water reactors still has about 97% of its extractable energy left in it. It could fairly easily be reprocessed and reused in a PWR again, or used almost as-is in the future generation IV design fast neutron reactors.
The reason most used fuel is not reprocessed now, apart from the NIMBY complaints about the processing plants, is that "virgin" fuel is so cheap and abundant that the small extra cost is not deemed to be worth it.
Well let's see. The cheapest space launch options are currently around $4000/kg. So that comes to around $280 billion. Nope.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Spacex could put 70,000 metric tons in an orbit that would eventually end up falling into the sun. Even if a couple of rockets burn up in our atmosphere, we would pollute our planet less than any other failed solution we have tried so far. The financial cost would probably be less than what has been spend on just looking for storage locations.
maybe
http://www.spacex.com/about/ca...
A Falcon heavy costs $85 million to put 21 tons into geosync orbit. More can be put into low orbit, but that may not be a good idea.
We make about 2,000 tons of nuke waste a year, so it would only take like 90 launches a year ( ~ 7.5 billion) from now on plus the 3,000 launches ( $250 billion) to catch up. We can afford that.
I don't know off-hand what sort of load could be launched into the sun (nor do I see why when the moon is much cheaper to shoot at), but getting beyond orbit would be more expensive.
Not that it makes much difference, but the Yucca Mountain site is in Nevada, not Utah.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
...and that the recycling process is how plutonium is extracted. That's why Jimmy Carter stopped the recycling of fuel rods in the US and had everything shipped to Yucca mountain instead.
What? I can't assume Occam's Razor was a slick fold-up scooter?
Now the people in towns nearby can have flaming AND glowing water.
Yes, and have just one shipment explode on launch and have a much larger catastrophe than Chernobyl, Windscale and Fuckupshima combined, and with immediate fine dispersal as an added bonus. Also, 1kg to orbit costs $13000 at SpaceX (and that orbit may not be high enough to cheaply get to the sun), i.e. disposal of said 70'000t would cost more than $910 Billion and would take more than 10'000 launches.
That idea is an utter failure and suddenly, nuclear power is not quite that cheap anymore...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So go back to Gerald Bull's idea of the supergun and get rid of the risky rocket. If you built a multistage coil gun on the side of a mountain at the equator you would only need a small booster to get it the last bit into orbit and from there you could have a station set up for aiming it at the sun or hell, use it to power RTGs for deep space probes. Its not like there isn't plenty of places in the solar system we haven't explored. As a nice bonus you could use a faster breeder to power the coil gun to cut down on costs AND on waste, so that at the end all you'd have would be the plutonium for processing into RTGs...its a win/win!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The chosen solution will be the most expensive option that doesn't work.That's the way communist politicians run an economy.
...you believe we are going to blow ourselves up real good by the time the waste will become valueable.
(the "What do we do for future generations of Racoon intelligences who we have poisoned the planet for?" argument)
There just is not that much waste.
If you believe there will be total polical breakdown so that no-one is guarding the stuff, then just bury it with a big sign on the top.
(the counter argument is "Do we want the terrorists,who will have no technology to make use of it except to fling it with catapults, to get it?")
Even if we could afford the sending-into-space option the real and perceived danger is too high (one rocket blowing up would - let alone hitting anything on the earth - would kill the program).
I worked on this exercise at one point. It is all statistical simulations of the unlikely outcomes. But infinite time begets near certainties we it comes to Murphy's Law.
So the real answer is finding all of the methods possible to limit the "sh**t happens" proposition.
It is most likely that people who KNOW what is there SOON will cause problems so either guard it permanently OR
bury it anywhere in sealed glass coffins and bury all potential entrances, and then booby trap it to do that multiple times before anyone can get to it.
It sounds inhumane to brazenly plan to multiply blow up future (scavenging) people, but it is better than to have it leak by foot or water over the millenia.
First of all, Mossad killed the last guy who tried to do that (supergun, and yes I'm aware there were additional circumstances).
Second, I thought that in order to achieve orbital velocity, the gun would melt the payload through frictional heating with the gun barrel and atmosphere. Even with the mountain.
Third, if you build a breeder reactor to power the gun... you don't need the gun! Not to mention that you had to build a nuclear reactor in a difficult location with insufficient cooling capacity.
Just build the breeder reactor. You're looking for an excuse to build a supergun and this isn't the reason.
> We have myriad energy solutions now... and in fact most are at parity with the cost of nuclear power (if you're honest about it, and include government R&D and subsidies in the cost).
You sure you want to include the billions in taxpayer subsidies it takes to get 1% of our energy from solar? I don't think Comedy Central instructed you to point out that solar-electric is 4.8X times as expensive during the daytime, and far more costly at night.
Geosync orbit is a bad idea. That orbit is very useful for other purposes and already a bit crowded.
OTOH, it wouldn't need to be *very* much higher to be much more reasonable...but be sure to put it all in one place. You don't want even more junk spread around.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
And if that worked, don't you think it would be the default method to launch satellites and other payload into orbit instead of unreliable and expensive rockets? Guns are very well understood, and, News Flash!, do not work for this application.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
..EARTH !!!!! It burned 20 mm towards the middle of the globe ! Can you imagine this desaster !!!!!!!
Actually, I find this very instructive about the Power Of Propaganda.
There are plenty of very dangerous sites where you have some of the nastiest chemicals buried. And most importantly, there are plenty of places where NATURALLY there is dangerous stuff in the ground. Think of Asbestos, a natual occuring mineral. Or think of the natural nuclear reactor* somehwere in Africa. You SHOULD NOT dig up these sites without knowing what you do. Neither should you fuck with each and every girl that looks nicely onto you. STDs and so on. Where is the warning sign attached to swingers ???
Occam's razor points to: You have been subjected to a powerful psychological operation. The objective was "deny nuclear reactors and weapons so that the U.S. retain their ability to be A) rich and B) strike at will everywhere". If you are American, the crap in your brain ("nuclear waste is infinitely dangerous") is Collateral Damage. The shite information was rained down on many countries like Germany and for that end it had to be rained down in the U.S. too. Good pysops must be plausible, you know.
Google for Herman Kahn and his friends in the GREEN* movement. They are clearly OIL and GOV operatives.
That wasn't very nice.
Mossad killed the [b]2nd[/b] to last guy who tried to do that. After HARP there was SHARP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_High_Altitude_Research_Project
Dr. John Hunter of Quicklaunch Inc gave a really interesting "Google Tech Talk" road-mapping a path to commercialization:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IXYsDdPvbo
Their website 404's now(which implies that this venture didn't get funded) but Dr. Hunter was also working with a nonprofit called "The Water Project" in San Diego last I checked.
More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicklaunch
If it's highly radioactive, doesn't that mean it has unspent energy in it? I think anything dangerous for than a certain number of years simply needs to be sent through again. I've heard people say anything that stays dangerous for more than a few hundred years still has unspent energy.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2010/apr/07/region-ten-years-later-water-station-work/
They just don't want to have to pay pennies per use for Synroc.
Unlikely in the extreme.
DeltaV required to reach the sun from Earth surface is about 31.7 km/s.
For reference, deltaV required to reach Earth orbit is about 9 km/s.
Note that fuel usage on a rocket varies exponentially with deltaV requirement. Assuming a Falcon 9 could put a 40T payload in Earth Orbit, it would be capable of putting about 60kg into the Sun.
And that 60kg would include the rocket housing the waste.
On the other hand, if a couple Falcon 9's full of radioactive waste were to burn up in atmosphere, they'd pollute our planet with less radioactivity than the coal plants on the planet do every day. Do remember that the largest source of radioactivity in the atmosphere today is coal smoke. By orders of magnitude....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
My undergrad thesis supervisor knew that guy and talked to him as late as 1989 about using very high velocity projectiles to compress solid parts out of powdered metal. Bull manage to piss off both Iran and Israel, with a few other nations holding a grudge and was working for Saddam who had a reputation for killing scientists that he thought were too slow to produce results. While Mossad were/are infamous for that sort of thing the list of suspects resemble in scale the middle of an Agatha Christie novel.
Also fast breeders are pretty well waste generation machines in addition to fuel production - they turn carefully selected very high grade waste into a small quantity of fuel and a very large quantity of medium grade waste. They are a fuel reuse idea and most definitely not a waste management idea. There's stuff like synroc for that sort of thing.
I don't know where the writer of this article got their facts from, but Yucca Mountain is northwest of Las Vegas in the state of Nevada and not Utah. Maybe the writer needs to visit Wikipedia every now and then to do some fact checking before posting an article.And I am sure that even after its pointed out that writer has made a very big error in the story they will not correct it. This is how misinformation is spread.
Instead of trying to find new ways to store nuclear waste for thousands of years we should be looking for ways to burn this stuff for energy, medical isotopes, and other useful things. One technology that comes to mind is the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor. The people from MIT that are working on this claim WAMSR can destroy spent fuel from conventional uranium fueled reactors while also producing electricity and/or industrial heat.
There are two things that destroy radioactive waste, time and neutron bombardment. Setting this stuff aside for millennia means building structures to store the stuff and then maintaining them until the stuff is no longer a danger. Burning this so called "waste" in a reactor means getting rid of it for good while also generating valuable heat, electricity, and medical isotopes.
I believe anyone that claims we need to store radioactive material is ignorant, misinformed, or has something to sell. I think these people have something to sell.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Yes, and have just one shipment explode on launch and have a much larger catastrophe than Chernobyl, Windscale and Fuckupshima combined, and with immediate fine dispersal as an added bonus. Also, 1kg to orbit costs $13000 at SpaceX (and that orbit may not be high enough to cheaply get to the sun), i.e. disposal of said 70'000t would cost more than $910 Billion and would take more than 10'000 launches.
That idea is an utter failure and suddenly, nuclear power is not quite that cheap anymore...
Why would it be a bigger disaster than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined?
Consider that those disasters happened with operating reactors having meltdowns. This is a very very different scenario from spent fuel rods getting dropped into the ocean.
Fuel rods typically cool in ponds for 5-10 years before becoming suitable for dry storage and have lost a great deal of their radioactivity.
Well, the plutonium will always be there as far as we are concerned. On the other hand, the toxicity of plutonium is widely exaggerated.
Most orbital launches are done over the ocean and orbital velocity is reached over the ocean, so aborts would either fall into the ocean or abort into a low orbit, and there is no reason why an abort or even an explosion would result in fine dispersal. We're talking about metal rods in metal casks.
Personally, I think launching spent fuel into space is a bad idea simply because it's a waste of money.
We can store it here in the same fashion that we're doing it now for a fraction of the cost.
For another thing, the chemicals dumped into the atmosphere from solid rocket boosters would be a much worse pollution event than some casks falling into the ocean, or even on land.
It is guaranteed that out of all the launches needed to get rid of our fuel there will be failures, but some spent fuel on the bottom of the ocean is not really a problem. Why do I say that? Because of the negligible after effects of the Chernobyl and Fukushima meltdowns. Sure, those towns are toast, but it's not a big deal to the rest of the world.
Shale is kilometers below the aquifers dude. However, I prefer the Russian method of dumping nuclear waste into a subduction zone - best is to put it back where it came from.
Geosync orbit is a bad idea. That orbit is very useful for other purposes and already a bit crowded.
OTOH, it wouldn't need to be *very* much higher to be much more reasonable...but be sure to put it all in one place. You don't want even more junk spread around.
Yep, I agree there. I only mentioned geosync because that's what was in their price catalog.
Disclaimer: I do not support sending spent fuel into space because it's not the best solution, and perhaps is the worst idea.
I only joined in because I like to run the numbers on things.
This is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard. There is already plenty of evidence that fracking fluids (which are pumped into shale in order to get the oil and gas out) get into the water table all the time. Okay so you are excavating caverns in shale instead of cracking the formations via fracking to release the gas. But how long will it be till some greedy corporation will want to frack right next to the nuclear storage reserve (and there goes your impermeability) because it is the only gas shale left in America? I'll bet they will have a study done saying that will be perfectly safe too.
"but it hasn't been studied much in the U.S"
Don't ask questions that you don't want to hear the answers to. It's a good motto for the real Dilbert-esk world.
Shales naturally seep into water areas; coastal California is a prime example. They also seep up into seas and lakes. Fracking is already polluting (some) aquifers with leaking boreholes and fractured interfaces.
What could go wrong?
Salt domes are better choices, well distributed, and more geologically stable.
Yucca mtn is a good choice, but no other State wants further States' waste on the their roads to get there - that was what killed it.
It makes perfect sense! All we have to do is take the casks of radioactive nuclear waste and store it with all the other radioactive waste we have scattered about. You know, mine tailing (Anaconda, Wyoming), Fly Ash (around any coal power plant), etc. I am sure there are some hard rock mines in geologically stable areas like Arkansas that would make great storage places as well. We could also use just about anywhere in those wastelands on the east coast... like Trenton, Norfolk, Newark, Maryland...
The only problem with subduction zones is they tend to spawn volcanos which would just spit the waste back up.
It does not matter who is pysopsing whom. Lack of relative risk assessment in the American Public mind is good enough.
People cannot assess short term, let alone long term, risk over several factors. Why do you think Insurance Companies exist?
Trying to influence public opinion in this area is pointless. E.g. relative risk of movement:
Why would anyone suggest weaponizing Nuclear Waste by moving it in any high speed way?
Sitting where it is it is at most a danger to those who live near it perhaps 10,000 years from now as long as it is coffined and covered.
On preventing the intentional side:
Any small scale attempt to do anything less (in RAD potential) than stealing some polonium/plutonium is totally innocuous within the first fews years (barely perceptible over the background radiation - see Fukishima long distance radiation).
Anything more would require the capture and processing on site: I.e. a large scale government operation. All we are doing by putting more thought into it is making such an operation more expensive (and perhaps the collateral damage worse because of future limited resources)
> please stop making up numbers and posting them all over this story
Since I said "billions" and you replied with a link to where someone posted $73 billion, I can only guess that English isn't your native language and you didn't actually mean to say what you said. I suppose the alternative is that you're so completely closed to the facts that in order to maintain your faith in Comedy Central as your policy adviser you've convinced yourself that $73 billion isn't "billions". That would be sad.
FYI, citing something someone posted on Wiki is like us8ng someone's Slashdot post as your source. The authoritative source for energy data is EIA.
Or, you know, we could just build a Molten Salt Reactor and burn off a lot of the fuel and then the waste only has ~300 years or less instead of thousands/millions of years. Perhaps in that time we'll find another use for the waste.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/alternative-power-sources/nuclear-reactor-powered-spent-fuel-121109.htm
http://www.gizmag.com/hitachi-reactor/33585/
I know that the fuel has a lot of usable energy left that could be used in politically toxic reactors. I'm curious how difficult it is to transport that stuff? I know we use cooling ponds ad current reactors, is that the stuff that's the most lucrative in breeder reactors? How do you transport that kind of material? Or is the good breeder fuel just the stuff that has been moved the casks/etc that doesn't get so hot and volatile.
Well, sending spent fuel into orbit isn't a bad idea, but it should be enclosed in a thermionic generator when you do it. You don't need Plutonium for that if you don't want to use a minimal weight for a long period of time. If ;you're willing to use a bit more weight, or run out of power a bit sooner, there are lots of other choices.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
> Look closer, I was responding to catmistake, not your post.
Mea culpa. Catmistake, if you're reading this, pretend I said "my bad".
Spent Nuclear Fuel is still FUEL !
At least 98% of SNF is fissile / fertile nuclear material.
Out of 35 tons of Enriched Uranium used to make fuel, just 1 ton is fissioned, 34 tons remains as Uranium, Plutonium, Neptunium, Americium and Curium. All of that stuff can be fissioned using a fast reactor. Using more complex reprocessing Uranium and Plutonium can be extracted and recycled into fuel any reactor could use.
The USA isn't doing nuclear fuel reprocessing due to economical reasons, the technology is available, the French, Japanese, Russians and others reprocess nuclear fuel all the time.
Using higher efficiency nuclear reactors (Fast reactors, Molten Salt Reactors or Reduced Moderation water cooled reactors a virtuous cycle where with reprocessing at least 99% of mined uranium could be fissioned). Why is that important ? If we used high efficiency reactors a typical person would use less than 1Kg of Uranium for all of their energy needs for their entire lifetime, and that 1Kg of Uranium would become 1Kg of fission products. 80% of fission products are stable in a few decades, the remaining 20% are stable in 300 years.
So any plan to inject SNF into shale rock is stupid. We should instead be investing on fast reactors. If all the money put into Yucca mountain went into MSR research we would already have two designs hitting the market. Even the most basic MSR Uranium burner uses 1/6th the Uranium a regular reactor needs per GWh of electricity produced.
Well, sending spent fuel into orbit isn't a bad idea, but it should be enclosed in a thermionic generator when you do it. You don't need Plutonium for that if you don't want to use a minimal weight for a long period of time. If ;you're willing to use a bit more weight, or run out of power a bit sooner, there are lots of other choices.
Hmm, thermionic generator could be handy for moon bases, if we were to drop them there.
Dude we can't even get a single rocket built in this country that doesn't use parts from the failed shuttle thanks to all the pork, you REALLY think they are gonna let you replace a project that has parts spread to nearly every state for a project that would only require barrels from a single supplier?
Look up Gerald Bull's Supergun and Iraq, the entire reason he was killed by Mossad is because there was every indication it WOULD work and that is why they killed him.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.