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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
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.
You mean not sufficient for politicians?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You mean not sufficient for politicians?
The uncertain future of Yucca Mountain places plans for spent nuclear fuel in the United States at a crossroads.
Yucca Mt. was a political construct from start to finish, and was NEVER a serious consideration by those in power. What left the US at a crossroads was about 20 years ago when every temporary nuclear storage facility in the US was at capacity, and nothing was done about other than this Yucca Mt. fiction.
I think the solution to the energy crisis is never going to be solved with more nuke plants (though that may help reduce the waste problem... but with more deadly longer, more concentrated waste), but with laws that require every new structure built, residential, commercial, industrial, to create and provide a certain percentage of its own power cleanly.
One of the problems is that the nuclear industry is large and powerful. There are a lot of people employed there that would be happy to continue living in the lie that nuclear energy is cheap and clean and have waste buried everywhere as long as they can keep their career. Its ludicrous. 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).
With the aging reactors we now have, I think we can expect another nuclear incident, perhaps not Fukishima scale, probably 3 Mile Island scale, but terrifying nonetheless to residents local to incident.
The Admin and the Engineer
3 mile island scale... you mean a media induced panic over a non-event that hasn't harmed anyone, compared to the absolutely devastating cost of coal alone to the environment and human life?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
A great opportunity for an innovator to develop lunar panels to supplement solar panels! That reduces the problem to moonless nights.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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"
TMI was the perfect accident, dramatic but with no deaths - a wakeup call from the complacency where the plant wasn't even monitored as well as a fertilizer plant had to be.
It showed the dramatic contrast in attitude between the early stages of design where the containment vessels were made to be the strongest in the USA due to the risk of a plane crashing into it on approach to the nearby airport, and the implementation of the control and monitoring systems years later that sucked by any measure. It resulted in the early retirement of some other reactors that were frankly death traps and the improvement of all the others.
The engineers of the time didn't write it off as a non-event like you are counterproductively doing. Such bleating as above harms the cause of nuclear power instead of helping it. Instead of ignoring it the engineers put in the work and extra care that resulted in nothing like the Chenobyl incident happening in the USA, despite some of the older plants initially being inherently more dangerous.
> 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.
Billions? BILLIONS? I do not think you know what that word means. The US has likely invested close to half a trillion in nuclear energy development. Whatever change accidently slipped out of Uncle Sam's pockets and into solar R&D is, in comparison, quite nothing at all. Also, had the US invested just 5% of what they spent on nuclear energy development since the 1950s on solar, we wouldn't even be arguing. Solar would be crazy cheap! And nuclear, still where its at... competitive with coal, (not beating the crap of the cost of coal, but just competing with it) until you see the its hardly even the tip of the iceberg of the cost.
Nuclear energy is a dog. A very very expensive dog with toxic crap. It has an extremely high initial cost of building a power plant, as well as the continuing forever cost of maintaing the waste. It's been this way since the start, so its amazing that with nearly 70 years of this crazy money being thrown at nuclear that we keep doing it. And it keeps biting the finest nuclear engineers and architects in the ass. I'm not afraid of radiation. I'm not even afraid of the mountain of toxic waste we have piled up for our children's children's children's great great great grandchilden. What bothers me is it is a poor investment. The money we already invested got it only so cheap... so it is clear we screwed up. We needed fuel for bombs, or thought we did, and we went nuts building these things... 110 plus military and resarch plants... and 1 plant would have provided all the bomb fuel we'd ever need... and we're stuck with this dirty, outrageously expensive power. And yet I'm arguing with someone that likely belives nuclear energy is some kind of solution, still, at the expense of investing that money in cleaner energy technologies. I imagine you just like nuclear power, irrationally with no compelling reason, probably like gun people just like guns... you don't need a gun, more a danger to yourself than any criminal that wants to hurt you or rob you, but they're neat. We don't need nuclear, but we have this really expensive infrastructure and all these workers trained... heck... lets just keep going down that road until we're bankrupt and living in waste!
The Admin and the Engineer