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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/
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
Yeah, a couple rockets of nuclear waste crashing on a metropolis would do very little damage. Oh wait...
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.
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.
This. By far the most efficient use for nuclear waste is reprocessing in a fast breeder reactor, but of course that isn't allowed because it produces plutonium.
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.
A single breeder reactor would eventually process all the US nuclear waste. So it is a good idea, but lets not go crazy and build 50 when we only need one, because its not as though its a free lunch and there is no waste. The waste is more compact... its just another bandaid, and brushes aside the core problem with temporary reprieve. We need to stop using nuclear fission reactors in the next 100 years, and completely switch to other cleaner energy technologies. It is reckless to keep investing on a global scale in such an outrageously expensive and potential massively dangerous energy source. No one can build these things without massive government subsidies. Compare that to other energy technologies that do not need massive government subsidies to exist. Then ask yourself why we are beating ourselves up just to spend more on energy and have the permanent waste problem remain.
The Admin and the Engineer
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.
> 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.
Renewables have received more government subsidies than nuclear. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...
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.
Encasing it in glass ingots doesn't waste it, it merely makes it a bit more difficult to access when you come up with a good use for it...but it keeps it relatively safe until you do.
Burying it at the bottom of a subduction trench, now, that's wasting it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Renewables have received more government subsidies than nuclear. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...
Regardless of your source, which in no way supports your claim, your comment is provably false. Quite, quite, quite the opposite. Every one of the 100+ commercial plants the US built cost the US at least $50-100M each. That's just one of the costs that were never, and never will be returned. And that is a tiny cost compared to what was spent prior to the first commercial plant being commissioned. Its obscene money that has been spent on nuclear... so much its not easy to get your head around it. You could say we'd have no national debt, but a rather handsome national surplus, had we not spent that money. If not for nuclear power... we'd all be a lot richer.
The Admin and the Engineer
To you and the AC above claiming that many trillions have been spent on nuclear energy: are you insane? Seriously, where in the world are you coming up with these figures? At it's peak development in the 1980's the US government was spending $2.4 billion per year on nuclear energy R&D and it's been steadily declining ever since (source). In total, nuclear has received $50 billion in R&D and more in various subsidies that total to $73 billion (source). The Manhattan Project cost the US $20 billion (adjusted for inflation), not the trillions that you somehow came up with. On the other hand, non-hydro renewables have received $74 billion in subsidies. Yes, nuclear plants cost money, but the government does not own any commercial nuclear plants. These are paid for by private companies and the cost is recouped through the energy that they sell, just like any other energy production. The assertion that we would have no national debt if not for nuclear energy is frankly absurd.
The only problem with subduction zones is they tend to spawn volcanos which would just spit the waste back up.
> 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.
Plutonium is the fuel a fast breeder reactor burns, actually. You use fertile uranium (aka nuclear waste) with a starter of fissile plutonium (or uranium?) and breed the fertile uranium up to fissile plutonium and split it. Usually this is U-238 to P-239. The main issue with this type of reactor is designs call for on-site reprocessing for better fuel efficiency and this is considered a proliferation risk. The proliferation issue is why Russia's fast breeder designs at Beloyarsk don't have on-site reprocessing and only achieve about 70% fuel efficiency (the US abandoned fast breeders in 1996, though private work continues). Still, 70% > .5-5% for conventional reactors, and it burns actinides and nuclear waste.
Fast breeder isn't the only Gen IV design, just the one most like conventional reactors, which is why the US and Russia both initially adopted that design.
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.
This thread is surprisingly short, and mostly has people either agreeing that fast breeders or something similar are a great solution (maybe with some bickering on the finer points), or off topic arguing about the total investments made in various tech. FWIW, I'm 100% on board with reprocessing. I can only guess that either:
a) most people are also fine with this, so no need to post to agree... let's just post in places where we can argue
b) the proliferation risks make the conversation untouchable to them
This seems to happen on every nuclear thread on slashdot. I really really really don't understand why the US doesn't just set up one plant to reprocess waste. I'm very much against burying all the existing waste anywhere (Yuka, shale, or any other hole). As it is, it simply has too long of a life for me to accept that it'll be fine - we're really bad at thinking on such scales. If it were reprocessed first into something with a MUCH MUCH shorter half life, then I'd be fine burying that stuff - I think we might be able to handle managing a big dump of stuff for 1-2 hundred years, though that's still a stretch.
The point I'm getting at is, if we had a fast breeder reprocessing all our nuclear waste, I think many of the other concerns about waste would just about disappear. The topic would change to protecting the much smaller amount of weapons grade waste. Since it's small and in one place, I think that's not only feasible, but much easier than dealing with protection and maintenance of more than a hundred piles of nasty waste spread all around the country. I'm not a nuclear engineer, but it seems like a no brainer to me, and the only argument I've heard against it is the nuclear proliferation laws and concerns regarding plutonium. To those, I saw WTF - that's very minor red tape in comparison to things like the Yuka Mt debate.
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.
um... you're forgetting the other 6 decades of insane spendatures and no return on investment, as well as the plant build subsidies, and the plant operating subsidies, and the plant waste subsidies... all the people that spent money on nuclear education... all the money spent paying retirements for these nuclear workers, all the lawsuits... you are barely scraping the surface with the Manhattan Project, which, by itself, was an amazing blue light special bargain considering all the nazi tech we got for almost free, and the savings of no land war in Japan. The bomb, as much as I hate it, was a great investment. Nuclear energy is the dog, not killing people with nukes. If its just business, killing people with nukes is a good buy, just don't go overboard with your inventory.
The Admin and the Engineer
True, Fast reactors, reduced moderation reactors could also get the job done (fissioning most of the Uranium on spent nuclear fuel or newly mined uranium or Thorium).
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.
Please provide sources. There are no plant build subsidies, only government loans (admittedly with low interest) that are paid back. I don't know what you mean by plant operating subsidies but the power produced is very scarcely subsidized, according the the Wall Street Journal, nuclear is subsidized at about $1.59 per megawatt hour, whereas solar and wind are given roughly $24 each per MWh. A research study on the externalities of energy found that nuclear externalized 0.2-0.7 cents per kWh depending on the country, while solar externalized 0.6 cents and wind externalized 0.2. For comparison, coal and oil were at around 10 cents per kWh. Plant waste is not subsidized, the cost of disposing/storing nuclear waste is added to the price of the electricity (source). I was unable to find any information on subsidizing retirements for nuclear workers, and I have no idea what you mean by money spent on nuclear education.
I am not "forgetting the other 6 decades", they were taken into account in the $73 billion.
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.
You're being intellectually dishonest. Your figures ignore the fact that nuclear is producing far more MW at the current time. So the $/MWh is a false analysis, even if true. If the energy produced by solar, wind and nuclear was at parady, THEN you compare the $/MWh cost, you will immediately see that nuclear is MANY TIMES MORE EXPENSIVE. Also, FWIW, solar/wind, no appreciable waste costs that go on and on forever and ever and ever (effectively)! You can lie to sell, lie to screw, lie to save your skin, but please don't be a liar just to make a thin point that is readily proved irrellivent.
The Admin and the Engineer
Price per MWh is not dishonest, those are the only units that matter in the field of energy production. Even if wind/solar were at parity with nuclear they would be receiving more per MWh. In 2013, nuclear produced 19% of US power, while solar and wind produced a combined 4.36% source. Let's assume that solar and wind are also producing 19% of US power, or 4.36 times their current level (interestingly enough 4.36 is almost exactly the square root of 19). divide the $24/MWh by 4.36 and you get $5.5/MWh, still several times that of nuclear.
The cost of waste is not infinite, they do eventually degrade, and it's irrelevant anyway because the cost of waste storage is 100% paid for by the nuclear plants, not government subsidies. If you would use actual data then we could have an argument, but it seems you're content to just ignore everything I say just because it doesn't fit within your worldview.
I may be wrong, it's very difficult to find reliable information on this as no reactors have been built since the 70's, but as of now there are very little incentives for nuclear power. Those that do exist are just loan guarantees and some tax breaks (source). If you do have more information let me know.