Cool Tool: The Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator

Lasrick writes: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a very cool new tool that will excite anyone interested in understanding the per kilowatt cost of nuclear energy. Developed over the last two years in a partnership between the Bulletin and the University of Chicago, the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator estimates the cost of electricity produced by three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle:

1. The once-through fuel cycle used in most US nuclear power plants, in which uranium fuel is used once and then stored for later disposal.
2. A limited-recycle mode in which a mix of uranium and plutonium (that is, mixed oxide, or MOX) is used to fuel a light water reactor.
3. A full-recycle system, which uses a fast neutron spectrum reactor that can be configured to 'breed' plutonium that can subsequently be used as either nuclear fuel or weapons material.

This online tool lets users test how sensitive the price of electricity is to a full range of components—more than 60 parameters that can be adjusted for the three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle considered. The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.

Comments

Coal fuel cycle

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's The Coal Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator that includes all the hidden costs?

What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[Z00L00K]

What about the cost for taking care of the waste from the enrichment process?

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[dbIII]

Ssh, the cargo-cult fanboys want to pretend there isn't any and that it can all be fuel, so instead of starting a fight let's humour them so they will at least start to consider costs for once instead of pretending it's all "too cheap to meter". Maybe they will learn something and be informed about the topic instead of thinking of it as magic perfected in 1970.
However if you want an answer, for the very active waste there is Synroc - bit of a guess as to how much it can be scaled up to drop costs but at least it (finally) exists. The less active stuff is a lot easier to handle and store, which is just as well because it makes up the majority of the volume of nuclear waste

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[Viol8]

What about the cost (enviromental and financial due to climate impact) of the CO2 from fossil fuels? Oh wait, 21st century western society can simply be powered by windmills and solar cells, right? Suuure.

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[serviscope_minor]

Maybe they will learn something and be informed about the topic instead of thinking of it as magic perfected in 1970.

Does anyone actually think that? As far as I know pro-nuclear people lament that the excess of irrational fear led all development to stop completely in the 70s. Given that it was originally initially developed at the time as computers, that's the nuclear equivalent of using a PDP-11 today.

We could be a lot further on if people weren't so bad at judging risks.

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[AmiMoJo]

Greenpeace published a plan to move all energy production to renewable sources. I'm sure you have read it, but if not it is published on their web site. It has been peer reviewed and contains vast amounts of evidence, shows how numbers were arrived at and is fully costed. They are assuming that we intend to maintain our current or better standard of living.

So, can you explain why their plan won't work, giving specifics? It might be a long term plan and fairly expensive (although they claim otherwise), but you seem to be suggesting that it can't work at all.

You have done a careful study of this topic, right? Can you post some of your notes?

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[Rei]

The waste issue (as well as inherent safety) is part of the reason that there's so much research on ADSRs right now (note: the article says that an ADSR "would use thorium as a fuel", but it's not actually limited to thorium, it can use any subcritical fissile core). Spallation can rip apart the long-lived actinides that don't have a sufficient (n, gamma) cross section to prevent their accumulation in nuclear waste. And of course, since the core is inherently subcritical by design, simply not enough neutronicity under any condition to sustain a chain reaction on its own, when you shut the beam off, fission ceases instantly (though you still have decay heat like with any other nuclear power plant). Spallation source provides no more than about 10% or so of the neutronicity, but it's the amount needed to push the core over the edge.

I have my own very radical variant on the concept of an accelerator driven fission that I'm working on simulating now in Geant4 (although that was probably a poor choice of software, apparently their thermal scattering codes are really immature... as far as CERN is concerned, once particles get down below the MeV range they're usually not particularly interesting). But anyway the concept is to have a core with literally zero neutronicty - a lithium-burning reactor. The basic concept is as such:

1. A planar proton beam is delivered by one or more high power linac beamlines. Commercial-scale linac costs - without any improvements in technology - are expected to cost $5-20 per watt. The particular design would call for very high voltage (~16MV) klystrons to drive it - and not simply to reduce size (more in this shortly)

2. The proton beam bombards a fragment emitting target inside an axial magnetic field in a vacuum. The estimation of deceleration efficiency is estimated at over 90% in fragment reactors due to the lack of Carnot losses (according to the published research on the subject). The resultant HVDC will be direct converted to the klystron voltage in producing the electron beam that drives the linac. About 60% of the energy of spallation goes into fragment production. Fragments will be drawn away from the fragment target en route to the collector via a slightly expanding axial magnetic field. Fragment collection allows for automatic isotope separation.

3. The maximum power output of a fragment reactor is limited by its surface area and its ability to radiate heat. Fragment-emitting targets can be either electrostatically suspended dust or rapidly rotating with thin fibers or planes of target material, in order to radiatively cool without melting. Spallation targets, for efficiency, need to be high-Z materials, such as lead, tungsten, mercury, etc. Tungsten is particularly attractive due to its high melting point of 3695K. High-Z metal-rich ceramics are also possible targets, with very high melting points. The temperature of the chamber's beryllium walls being radiated to will be around 1050K. This means heat exchange between a ~3000K emitter (4.6e7W/m) and a 1050K receiver (6.8e4W/m), or about 4.5MW per square meter. In short, this allows for a surprisingly compact core, limited more by the length necessary to ensure a sufficient proton spallation cross section.

4. Neutrons emitted by spallation (at a cost of 30-40 MeV per neutron) are heavily biased by

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[CastrTroy]

I haven't read this plan, but I think the key to the future of power generation is maintaining the same standard of living while using less power. I have an old PC sitting in my basement that has a 95 watt CPU in it. Meanwhile, Intel is coming out with computers with 4.5 watt CPUs that have much better performance than my old computer. Add in the use of solid state drives instead of spinning platters like I have now, and I could probably run the entire computer on 20 watts, where as my old one probably uses at least 150 watts.

There are a lot of other places where household power usage can be saved. A lot of electronics are being designed to use much less power when switch off. This is a huge advancement. Some devices used to use inordinate amounts of power even when not being used. I can read a book on my back-lit e-Reader with the lights turned off. That whole thing uses less power than reading a paper book with even a single light bulb, no matter the what type of bulb is used (LED, CFL or incandescent).

Of course, there are other places where power usage is going up or staying the same. All the advances in power usage by TVs haven't made a difference because somebody who normally would have only had a 27 or 30 inch CRT, now has a 50 or 60 inch LED tv, which despite being more power efficient per unit of screen area still uses almost the same amount of electricity.

I think that over time will will see a net decrease in the amount of power consumed in houses. We will also be able to smooth out some of the spikes in power usage through the use of batteries in the home, which means the power stations themselves won't have such high peaks and can be designed for a more constant load. We will also see more houses with solar panels leading to, again, a decreased load on the central power grid.

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[AmiMoJo]

Bingo. It's actually cheaper to save energy than generate more in most cases. There are vast power savings possible that actually increase quality of life. Insulating a building better not only reduces heating and cooling costs, it makes the building more pleasant to be in, it reduces costs for the owner, it makes less pollution and thus does less damage to health... It's a huge win.

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[silas_moeckel]

That plans has a number of non starters, like cap and trade, sure lets go get the whole world to participate in it. There is no fair way to implement it. If you use current levels current bad actors like china are rewarded. If you use by population again china is rewarded, and the US would be massively penalized.

Prioritizing renewable on the grid means the least agile generators (who are also the cheapest) get the short end.

Government guarantee's for private investment is broken by design, if your going to subsidize rewards they might as well do it themselves as gov capital is cheaper. To do otherwise just pushes business to game the system.

Their plan fails at rapidly increasing the standard of living of a massive amount of the worlds population. To do so we need a LOT of cheap energy production, it's not enough to keep the status quo the third world needs to come up while we keep growth in the first.

Re:What about the cost for enrichment waste?

[silas_moeckel]

Your thinking that the 3rd world wont gain in their living standard (it has to happen) the system has to account for it. China has huge amounts of foreign debt and will not sit idly by and accept import taxes, if they refuse to roll that over that is a world wide economic crisis. This is pretty much the stick approach.

Current fission has issues related to proliferation, those are fixable issues. The key is making a cheap reliable and safe baseload electric generation that is agile.

Insurance?

[Errol backfiring]

Given that nuclear energy producers are not required to have an insurance against nuclear disasters (at least on this side of the Pond), is insurance included or is it as usual "delegated" to society? The calculator itself refuses to run without cross-site scripting attacks from Google, so I could not check.

If it serves as a "basis for discussion", you can bet it serves a political rather than a technical purpose.

Re:Insurance?

[Rei]

You can see the parameters, the cost of Price-Anderson covering them in the event of a catastrophic accident beyond the minimums is not covered.

Also, people should be careful not to confuse the prices on the calculator with the price of electricity that they pay. Power plant generation costs and consumer purchase rates are not the same thing. Industrial rates are at least closer to generation costs, but even they add a couple cents per kWh to the cost.

Re:Insurance?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Given that nuclear energy producers are not required to have an insurance against nuclear disasters (at least on this side of the Pond)

Neither does hydro dams. Most dams are "insured by the government", i.e. there is no insurance, just like for nuclear. And that doesn't seem to stop anyone from extolling the virtues of hydro electricity even in the face of a very long list of dam failures. You know, a billion here and a billion there, it adds up....

Re:Insurance?

[Rei]

First off, who's extolling the virtues of hydroelectric dams? Dams usually fall on environmentalists' hate lists at around the same place as coal, give or take a few slots.

Extolling the virtues of wind or solar, yeah. But you better believe a wind farm operator will be sued if a turbine falls on someone's house, or a solar thermal plant if their mirrors misalign and blind a pilot. And for that matter, you better believe that a hydroelectric dam operator will be sued if their dam breaks (at least in the first world). And most companies willingly insure their large projects as a hedge against risk.

The aspect of Price-Anderson that people complain about is that the US government foots the bill for the vast majority of costs in the event of a catastrophic accident. The power plant operators only need to insure enough to foot the bill to insure against minor accidents, something most operators would want to do anyway to protect themselves. Many people find the capped liability to be a highly distorting influence on the market, socializing the risks while keeping the profits private.

Re:Insurance?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

First off, who's extolling the virtues of hydroelectric dams?

Quite a few of us how have them, yes and that includes "environmentalists". Sure, they're not without their problems, environmentally, but they have a quite a few upsides as well.

The aspect of Price-Anderson that people complain about is that the US government foots the bill for the vast majority of costs in the event of a catastrophic accident.

Sure, but what I was pointing out (in a roundabout way), is that the same is effectively true of any large scale infrastructure system, especially when it comes to power generation on a massive scale. Doesn't matter if the cost comes from a hydro electric dam that fails, or a coal ash slurry dam failure, or a major oil spill, or indeed a release of radio nucleotides.

If that much money is at stake there are many ways for those that earn money off of the business to protect themselves from damage. Bankruptcy is always cheaper than insurance. Especially when there is no data for the insurance industry to go on (as is the case with large scale catastrophes).

So, it doesn't matter if the nuclear industry doesn't have insurance, since many/most other human endeavours on that scale doesn't either. And even if they did, it wouldn't cover the actual cost anyway, you'd just look at years and years of litigation and ass covering, with very little hard cash in the end to show for it. (To wit the Exxon Valdes spill and the legal aftermath. It didn't seem to hurt Exxon nearly as much as it did Prince William sound.

If you want to construe that as an argument for making these types of endeavours government owned and operated, go ahead, I think that could be argued.

Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[geogob]

A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased? I doubt it looking at the selected metrics.

First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.

More importantly, the "tool" seems to cover only construction costs. Nowhere are decommissioning costs included, which are order of magnitude over the construction costs. Experience has shown both in the US and elsewhere, that these costs have been (willingly or not) underestimated by order of magnitude by the industry. The lack of transparency help a large boom of the industry 30 years ago, but the lack of long term sight is kicking back in full force. Sad of an industry, which should secure waste thousands if not millions of years.

Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs. Worse, I believe its the hiding of the real costs (and risks) that made this industry stagnate and sent it towards its death (lets be honest, Atomic industry is really dying). This tools seems only to continue this long tradition.

It's a lung cancer patient dying with a cigarette in the hand.

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[AmiMoJo]

The tool also fails to include the cost of insurance, both to the operator and the government. The government's costs are practically impossible to calculate, as it has almost unlimited liability.

The cost of equipment failure is ignored as well. Around 1.3% of all civilian reactors have failed catastrophically, but vastly more equipment has failed safely and either been abandoned or needed expensive repairs. Storage and reprocessing systems are included. Maintenance costs tend to be rather high because the equipment gets contaminated and can't safely be worked on by human beings.

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[GuB-42]

First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.

Long term storage is not that big of a problem. It's only a matter of converting all that waste into rock (aka vitrification) and dumping it into a hole drilled into rock. As long as there are no waterways, rocks can stay stable for thousands or even millions of years. There are fossils to prove it.
Direct exposure from these sites would be negligible compared to natural background radiation. Water contamination would be more problematic (not catastrophic though), that's why it is important to chose the site wisely and have a few layers of safety (such as corrosion-proof containers).

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[Anonymous Coward]

A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased?

What you think it would be better that someone who has no understanding of the problem wrote the tool instead. Everyone has biases and that isn't a reason to not listen to what they are saying. Maybe what they say needs interpretation, but so what

First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated.

You do realise that the slides below the calculation allow you to tweak these costs. So what you are saying is that the "default" value is an underestimate.

BTW, the default value of 30 years of exploitation is clearly an underestimate as the reactor average lifetime is currently over 40 years, so the bias you are accusing the developpers of this tool of seems to swing both ways.

Now consider le storage projet in Bures FRANCE that is under construction for an estimated cost between 15 and 35 billion euros with 80,000 m3 of storage of which 10,000 m3 is for high-activity waste. Imputing the entire project cost to the storage of HA waste thats or 1.5 to 3.5 m€/m3. The calculation of the metric used in the calculator is then a simple calculation, I'll use the most conservative of all of the values in this calculation

Assumed Values
Burnup of uranium 33 GWd/t (Gigawatt days per tonne) or 792E6 kWe-hr per tonne
Density of Uranium 18.95 grammes/cm3 ou 1.895 tonnes per cubic meter
Cost of storing 1 cubic meter of HA 3.5 m€/m3

Calculated values
Burnup of uranium per cubic meter = 792E6 * 1.895 kWe-hr/m3 = 1.5E9 kWe-hr/m3
Geological storage cost = 3.5E6 / 1.5E9 = 0.002333 € / kWe-hr

So the storage costs are very minor relative to the price per kW/hr representing significantly less than 1% of the kW/hr price. So even major increasing in this price will not have a major impact in the cost of generating electricity. If you moved the slider for the geological costs in the simulator you would have seen that this is the case. So please before accusing other of bias. Do your calculations

D.

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[StanBerka]

Your approach is self deluding. Not much different than burrying a dead mouse or a dead cat in your garden. And then the next owner of the property has a nice surprise. Only the surprise is many orders of magnitude larger. Unless you shoot the waste into a star (and do it safely), there is no safe place for it. OK, you could say I exaggerate. Well, not really. How do you know a place safe today, is still safe in 50 years? And if someone decides to build a space terminal like X-Space build one recently in a desolate area, someone not knowing that 100 years earlier some cosmic jerks burried highly radioactive wastes there?

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[foreverdisillusioned]

First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.

Please. Just use the bin Laden solution. Once you have too much to store on-site just drop it in the Marianas trench. Problem fucking solved. Virtually impossible to locate (assuming coordinates are kept secret) and virtually impossible to retrieve even if you do know where it is. If any of it does ultimately dissolve in the seawater somehow, it would be utterly negligible compared to what coal power is doing to the ocean right now. Also, I'm curious about what isotopes we're producing in enough quantity that it would still be dangerous enough to worry about after 100k years. (And if there is such an isotope, why can't just we transmute it to something a little less stable first?)

Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs.

The problem is the costs are done from some kind of utopian or hyper-paranoid point of view, instead of an opportunity cost vs. other forms of power generation. If we used a "cost of human life" approach where we look at the actual lives lost in actuarial terms, nuclear is far and away the cheapest. It's only when we look at the costs associated with senselessly pandering to anti-nuclear fears that it becomes pricey.

I will concede that reactors obviously need to have updated failsafes, as Fukushima painfully illustrated. However, I have yet to hear a newscaster or 'expert' mention Deepwater Horizon (or all of that mercury messing up our delicious tuna) in the same sentence as the Fukushima disaster.

And what about going in the other direction and figuring out how to harness the crazy excess power that nuclear offers? Thermal electrolysis of hydrogen in breeder reactors on a megaproject scale (with an embrittlement-proof pipeline) would completely revolutionize the economy whilst at the same time putting a huge dent in global warming.

I've no doubt the authors here have an agenda to push, but I've also no doubt that the truth lies much closer to their propaganda than it does to the hysteria that dominates all mainstream discussions on nuclear power.

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[QuantumPion]

A "tool" to understand costs of nuclear energy production from the "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". Could this tool be any more biased? I doubt it looking at the selected metrics.

Yes, it could be more biased. It could have been written by someone with no technical knowledge and a political agenda, like mdsolar.

First the costs for long term securing spent fuel are grossly underestimated. After all, can we really estimate the cost of securing spent fuel for over 100'000 years? It's a bit of a philosophical question, but point is - it can't really be estimated.

Yes, it can and has been estimated, by the nuclear industry and the department of energy.

More importantly, the "tool" seems to cover only construction costs. Nowhere are decommissioning costs included, which are order of magnitude over the construction costs. Experience has shown both in the US and elsewhere, that these costs have been (willingly or not) underestimated by order of magnitude by the industry.

This is just flat out wrong. Decommissioning costs are in the hundreds of million dollars, construction costs are in the billions. And they are included, by law, in the construction costs.

The lack of transparency help a large boom of the industry 30 years ago, but the lack of long term sight is kicking back in full force. Sad of an industry, which should secure waste thousands if not millions of years.

Let me be clear on my sight. I am actually in favour of sensible use and development of nuclear energy. But this cannot be done without transparency, hiding the real costs. Worse, I believe its the hiding of the real costs (and risks) that made this industry stagnate and sent it towards its death (lets be honest, Atomic industry is really dying). This tools seems only to continue this long tradition.

It's a lung cancer patient dying with a cigarette in the hand.

Just because you are not aware of how all the costs are calculated and accounted for in practice in the industry does not mean no one does, or that they are not accounted for at all. The only thing killing the nuclear industry these days is the natural gas business, but that is not permanent, it's due to huge supply increases with lack of transportation ability and slow demand shift. While gas is the best option today, power companies still want to build and maintain a nuclear fleet to have a diversity of energy source and not put their eggs all in one basket.

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[AmiMoJo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

If you simply add up the number of reactors that failed at Chernobyl and Fukushima, compared to total number ever built for civilian power production, you arrive at the 1.3% figure. If you include other serious events that resulted in the loss of the reactor or a significant release of radioactive material the number is much higher.

Re:Let me put my skepticism hat on...

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Nope. Tjernobyl had one count 'em, one reactor blow up (no 4). The other three reactors continued to operate for years after the catastrophic loss of no 4. Now, Fukushima had almost complete meltdown of one reactor, and partial meltdown of two more (but then again, TMI had a more severe meltdown than most of those, to no ill effect). However, these all happened from the same proximate cause, there was no chain reaction or anything of that nature, so counting reactors is a fools game anyway. If Fukushima had had fewer larger reactors, then it wouldn't have been as serious an accident according to you? Or if it had had ten with five melting (instead of three of six) it would have been a more serious accident? Patent nonsense.

What other type of machine has a 1.3% catastrophic failure rate, resulting in billions of Euros of damage each time

So this is why your analysis is basically flawed. If you want to compare then you need a unit of measurement that makes that comparison invariant of e.g. "how many reactors", and for example takes size into account. What you're doing is akin to counting the number of oil spills rather than the severity.

In power generation it's customary to compare given the amount of energy produced. Sure, a nuclear accident is bad, but we get tons of energy from it. It's like air travel safety, sure, one plane crash is bad, but you get to go a long way, quickly and cheaply, so compared to the options all of a sudden flying doesn't look that bad anymore. Now, answering your question, "What do we do in energy production that's as dangerous as nuclear". The answer is, perhaps surprisingly "everything else". Dams in particular are a large scale killer like no other... Many, many, many, more people have died en masse per kWh due to dam failure than anything else, but in total of course it's dwarfed by coal. Even wind and solar is more dangerous than nuclear, and that's a conservative estimate. Just google "death per kilowatthour", and you'll find no lack of sources to list the actual numbers. Coal is easily a factor of thousand more dangerous than nuclear, and guess what, they don't even pay for their damage, let alone insure against it.

Thorium

[JudeanPeople'sFront]

FRIST!! Apparently nobody mentioned it yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The Thorium Reactor operates at almost 100% fuel consumption. And some of the waste materials are used for cancer treatment, space batteries, etc. Current technologies use about 1% of the nuclear fuel. Not only that, but LFTR can use the already accumulated spent nuclear fuel, mixed with the Thorium, to produce energy and reduce the accumulated nuclear waste.

Re:Thorium

[nojayuk]

Some uranium (U-233, U-235) and plutonium (Pu-239, Pu-241) isotopes are fissile. Thorium is not fissile and cannot sustain a fission reaction by itself. Th-232 can be bred up into U-233 which is fissile in theoretical LFTRs and the like but at that point the reactor is fissioning uranium to produce energy and neutrons for breeding more useless thorium into uranium.

U-233 produced in thorium breeder reactors can be extracted and used to make nuclear weapons with some work, the uranium and plutonium in conventional power reactor fuel would take a lot more effort to weaponise which is why all nuclear weapons states have used specialised breeder reactors and mil-spec uranium enrichment lines to produce high-purity material for their nuclear weapons.

Re:Thorium

[delt0r]

No it doesn't ... Oh jeze another Thorium is like perfect safe clean not really nuclear nuclear.

First of all it produces the *same* waste as any other properly managed reprocessing cycling with breading. Yep you get similar results with Uranium.

Second, your burning U233 and so you get the same decay heat, the same "turn it off" issues. Sure LFR address some of this. But that has *nothing* to do with Thorium. So no its not 100% can't possibly release radioactive materials.

Thirdly it is *not* proven tech and would be a 20+year project to probably validate and commercialise it. And that is optimistic. It has never been show to be able to have a breading ratio of 1. In suti reprocessing has not been demonstrated. And some of the corrosion issues and proposed solutions have not been fully addressed. A 10MW reactor that has decommissioning issues has not shown *any* of the claimed Thorium magic.

Re:Yes. What about them?

[Viol8]

Beached whale? Tell that to France thats been using it safely for the last 50 years for the majority of their electrical power.

Re:Yes. What about them?

[Pseudonym]

France can get away with this because disposal of spent fuel is, for the most part, someone else's problem.

France does recycle a lot; something like 15-20% of its fuel is from recycling. Most of it, however, is imported from places like Canada, Niger, and Australia. Under the non-proliferation treaty, it's the responsibility of the country of origin to dispose of the waste that came from its fuel.

So yeah, I'll bet France loves nuclear power. They don't have to deal with most of the long-term (i.e. 100,000+ years) consequences.

Re:Yes. What about them?

[nojayuk]

France imports yellowcake (refined U3O8 uranium oxide powder) and turns it into fuel (enriched UO2 uranium oxide pellets), burns it and reprocesses its spent fuel to make more fresh fuel. The small amount of resulting waste is vitrified and is currently stored above ground until the time there's enough of it to be worth putting in an underground repository which will be built in France, not Australia.

Where you get the weird idea that the countries selling uranium are required to accept and dispose of other people's spent fuel I don't know. In some cases spent fuel from other countries has been recycled by nations with the capacity to do so -- the UK, for example has processed spent Magnox fuel from Japan, turning it into fresh fuel rods which were shipped back to Japan. The deal involved the resulting vitrified waste also being returned to Japan in separate shipments. Japan's last Magnox reactor was decommissioned a few years back and the shipments of spent fuel, recycled fuel and vitrified waste have now come to an end.

Russia's Rosatom is offering some countries like Jordan and Vietnam a turnkey nuclear power capability where they supply fresh fuel and take away the spent fuel at each refuelling meaning the host country does not need to build its own waste disposal and processing facility.

Waste?

[MrL0G1C]

How France is [not yet] disposing of its nuclear waste - BBC News

Despite advanced schemes in Finland, not a single country worldwide has an operational underground repository.

50+ years of nuclear and still no waste storage.

Re:Yes. What about them?

[nojayuk]

That's... odd. Australia doesn't have any nuclear power reactors. It burns coal for a lot of its power requirements and exports a shitload more to other countries who do the same. Of course it doesn't take back all the CO2 emitted by the foreign power stations when they burn that coal...

A quick Giggle shows that Australia has sent spent fuel from at least one of its research reactors, HIFAR to France for reprocessing. The waste from that reprocessing operation would normally be returned to Australia after being vtirified.

HIFAR (it's shut down and now being decommissioned) was small with only 7kg of fuel compared to the hundred tonnes plus of fuel oxide in a typical power reactor of today. The problem seems to have been that initially HIFAR was fuelled with highly-enriched uranium which was a proliferation danger hence the desire to reprocess the spent fuel. Most research reactors of this type around the world (such as HIFAR's replacement, OPAL) have been now reconfigured to use low-enriched uranium which poses less of a proliferation threat and in such cases long-term storage on site of spent fuel is probably more appropriate and cheaper.

Re:Yes. What about them?

[Cyberax]

So? If people still have a modern-ish civilization in 10000 years then they will be able to detect the contamination. If humankind devolves into barbarians riding with ISIS flags, then they will be endangered by lots of other industrial byproducts. Remember, plutonium decays but arsenic is for forever!