Slashdot Mirror
DOE Launches Nuclear Waste Disposal Initiative (energy.gov)
mdsolar writes: The Department of Energy is formally launching its initiative aimed at establishing a disposal site for spent nuclear fuel. The department said Monday that it is accepting input on the disposal plan, which centers on finding at least one place to store spent fuel, with the consent of the local community. Officials are also planning forums throughout 2016 to inform a more concrete plan for establishing a disposal site. It's a key step toward rolling out what the Obama administration thinks is the best way forward for nuclear waste disposal. It stands in stark contrast to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, which was designated by Congress to be the country's main waste site, but which the Obama administration canceled amid strong local and state opposition to it.
Since Colossus isn't in service anymore, how about using its location?
The place we learned the term NIMBY.... "Not In My Back Yard"
Except that this time, it's Obama's idea?
I know it's fun to blame everything on Obama but the cancellation of the Yucca Mtn project was caused by the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed on April 14, 2011.
Approved by Congress, Cancelled by Congress.
So how much of the "waste" is just spent fuel that can be reprocessed vs irradiated materials and other construction trash and whatnot? The spent fuel could quickly turn into valuable commodity if we had a nuclear power renaissance in this nation. Right?
Life is not for the lazy.
There is no way they will find another site as safe or with less special interests to contend with.
This just political talk with chance of real action.
Yucca Mountain cost more than $96B dollars so far. I just read an article stating that the spent nuclear fuel is fine where it is, cooling in the ponds local to the reactors. So which is it? Do we need to spend another $96B, or more, and then not use that facility too? Is shipping nuclear waste to some repository far away safe and cost effective?
Closing that place - it was a total lie and waste of money lining contractors pockets.
Good luck with that... with a subject like this there will not be consent. There will always be a certain percentage of the population that just does not want a nuclear waste storage in the neighborhood, regardless of the benefits.
And that is without considering the naysayers who will object to anything nuclear, anywhere, because of principle objections against nuclear energy.
Fine with me, I used to work at a nuclear site so it would not be any different.
from the ./ summary:
from the Wall Street Journal:
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
While filled with engineering problems why not locate some locations at the bottom on the ocean where tectonic plates merge. The drilling caves in the subduction zone seems like a long term method to bury nuke waste but with a long term process to return it into the earth's mantle.
The intense pressures and salt water issues coupled with trying to entomb waste for a slow-mo roller-coaster ride to The Core is a challenge, but so it trying ot make believe that all this waste is manageable in the first place.
Where's that thorium reactor when you need it?
One of the criteria for a storage facility is that it be stable for thousands of years. Mountains are mostly created at the unstable boundary between colliding tectonic plates.
So why are mountains considered a good place to store high-level nuclear waste?
Yucca had support when it was proposed. It had support when it was being built. When they did not pay off all the people who had a lever to cancel it, THEN it became unpopular. A lot of the Billions spent, were to grease locals. When Harry wanted too much grease, the wheels stopped. Yucca mountain was chosen because it is as good a place as you can find in the USA to put this stuff.
There is no place else that is going to have better stability and other attributes than Yucca. This is just an excuse to pay more "Consultants" and locals for political favors.
DHI Group, the parent of Slashdot, is based in NY, a state with 6 operating nuclear reactors at 4 sites. So your basement is now on this list! HAHAHAHHAHA
The first facility is supposed to deal with waste from decommissioned plants. California will have a bunch, including Humboldt Bay, where sea level rise will inundated the current storage scheme. California seems like the best place for the first nuclear waste dump.
Isn't referring to "spent nuclear fuel" (at least in the US) analogous to using a $100 bill to buy a soda at a gas station and then discarding the change as "spent"?
They come up with the policy, make them live with it.
It actually is a fine idea. Perhaps not in their basements, but in a pro-nuclear town where the whole town would be 'hot', and the residents would celebrate their contribution to solving our 'energy crisis' with what is in their opinion the best solution.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Put it, say, on the far side of the moon.
We should use the facility that has been built, instead of letting one lone-wolf senator prevent that from happening. Yes, a national repository would be much, much safer than the status quo.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 was passed to create a national program to dispose of nuclear fuel safely. The bill arranged for utility companies to pay for the development of such a site, which technically was a fee payed for by customers, not taxpayers (though that's really not much of a difference). Congress in 1987 decided that Yucca Mountain was the site to use, and all that money was collected and spent to build the site.
I don't understand why Yucca Mountain even needs to be a permanent storage solution. At least storing our nuclear fuel in one location is magnitudes safer than storing it at hundreds of nuclear power facilities throughout the country. Because we all know how safe coastal power plants are, and there's no worry about rivers ever flooding them either. The only reason why we aren't in a panic about Yucca Mountain being shut down is because we haven't had an accident yet. But just getting lucky should be no basis of national policy.
Well, don't have a basement, what with the house being below sea-level and all that, but otherwise, no problem. I used to work at a nuclear plant, and don't have the rabid terror of the word "nuclear" that so many people have.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Just out of curiousity, did you know that each of the biggest three coal mining disasters has produced an order of magnitude more deaths than all of the nuclear accidents (including Chernobyl and Fukushima) combined?
And that routine coal mining deaths are a bigger killer in the 20th century than nuclear power, even if you define "nuclear power" in such a way as to include the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Enough problems with pesticides as it is...
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
If the government pays me to dispose of it on my property and it's sealed up in those nice glass kegs, why not?
4. you have lots of weapon's grade plutonium.
This is actually the problem with the fast breeder program is that it works by converting Uranium-238 into highly fissionable Plutonium-239. This means that you need lots of Plutonium reactors to burn the fuel but this poses a security risk because the Plutonium fuel is relatively easy to convert into a nuclear weapon unlike most uranium fuel which nowadays is not weapons grade and so cannot be used to build a nuclear device.
So while there may be some efficiencies with recycling the fuel the security concerns, especially in this day and age, perhaps out weigh any benefit.
Because your basement is where you keep your cows.
Just put it somewhere in coal country. You don't even need to dig, just pour it right into the local wells. The locals won't mind, they will fiercely defend you so long as you employ them to do it.
or launch it in to the sun.
Nature made the stuff, nature can have it back.
Mmmm hot cow basement sex.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...
Bury it in a subduction zone and let the mantle swallow it?
Keep Yucca mtn.
Instead, develop the Gen IV reactors and burn up the majority of the nuke waste. 95% of it can be used up. Right now, we have around 100,000 TONNES of this. By simply using safely in a gen IV reactor, we will have less than 5000 tonnes which will be safe within 200 years. As such, Nevada should not grip about this. Yucca mountain can hold that amount of waste easily, esp. if we vitrify it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If we spent 1-2B, we could have several new fission reactors that would burn up 95% of the waste. In addition, it would allow the power companies to replace the old reactors, with a larger set of smaller reactors that can not fail. In addition, the power companies could make money while providing the 24x7 power addition that is needed to supplement AE and replace all of the coal plants quickly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Imagine a whole community of people!
Amazing, wonderful people! I can see them now.
Welcome to TBA, where the proud stewards of America's spent nuclear fuel keep watch over the future.
Amazingly, these people understand the principles of ionizing radiation, the log scale, the inverse square law, how half-life directly and inversely proportional to danger for a given mass of material. They are aware of the relatively small mass and storage volume that decayed spent nuclear fuel uses. They know that once spent fuel has been cooling in a pool beside a reactor for ten years it is no longer temperature-hot and the only immediate challenge it presents is to safely handle it, shield it, transport it and choose a dry cask method and suitable underground storage area with several layers of containment where it can be monitored properly.
And they watch over it in a place that is the best place that ever could be, because it really exists! Because these people are practical and know how to calculate risk. They do not consult a political oracle, they hire real engineers. They know what they are doing is noble and just, even heroic --- considering the danger posed by the ignorant. They build a place that simple yet supple, perhaps several circular concrete silos several hundred feet deep, with a nested interior section of blast-proof partitioned sections, made from the same concrete we use to build nuclear plants.
No one time unicorn-fart storage solution that is waranteed to last 10,000 years by a corporation that may be dead in 50. A place where folks watch over the old waste and in their spare time, help devise ways to finally use it.
Too many would see spent fuel buried in deep salt domes to become entombed in geologically stable formations that could keep it for as much as 100 million years, though it becomes inaccessible to us because they want to just walk away from this unsolved problem and they wish you would too.. The people of TBA are dismayed by this mindset. They know (because they love science, modern civilization and especially humankind) that there is no real nuclear waste here, only unburnt fuel, and this 'waste' still contains ~99% if its energy. It would be a waste to bury it out of reach.
Too many imagine spent fuel hiding in deep caves, such as mines, the kind you need to drive trucks into then take a lift down into the bowels of the Earth. The deeper the better. These caves are always out there somewhere else. Why do they want this? Because they haven't thought it over --- and just maybe --- some of them are secretly hoping that disaster will strike. They'd like to convince you that really deep is safe and not-so-deep is dangerous even though it is actually the reverse, if you are unafraid to consider ALL the angles. Sooner or later some terrorist is going to blow something up. They always do. And among these potential terrorists, perhaps the ones you should be most concerned about, are the people who'd rather we just walked away from this problem. An explosion in one storage silo of many would be a contained mess but it would just be an expensive and time-consuming cleanup operation. But a single explosion that caps off and collapses a deep cave system, our one and only, ending all waste storage in this single point of failure design --- well gwarsh, who'da thunk it?
The people of TBA are aware that blowing things up makes a mess. But they also know enough physics to laugh at those Arne Gunderson doom scenarios where everything is inexplicably burning and criticality and nuclear explosions arise spontaneously from LEU pools and spent fuel is somehow like an atomic bomb and when disaster strikes everyone should run far away and wait for Denver to kill them dead, because eating that fish certainly won't.
In fact, the children of TBA are told bedtime stories that make fun of people who believe all this radiation-fear stuff. On Halloween they dress up as fuel casks, which can store a lot of candy. The school curriculum must teach
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Not in my backyard may keep any repository from becoming a reality.
The need is great and while this part of Nevada has issues they are less troubling
than other choices.
Area 51 is not a good choice. The visitors that come and go in the middle of the night might
visit another location.
The single largest risk is water and high desert is a good place to avoid or manage water.
Large volume low level waste might qualify for canyon fill (land fill) can be paved over and sealed with concrete after limiting groundwater and
springs. Evaporative concentration of liquid waste can be implemented by taking advantage of the large dT from day
to night as well as surface vs. subsurface dT.
The rock is easy to tunnel when compared to other materials.
Physical security is facilitated by the remote location.
Housing for staff can be eliminated on site and built at the end of faster than normal rail on standard but heavyweight freight rail
also needed for deliveries. Many commute an hour or more each way to work in DC, LA, SF... A fast 80 mph train
allows a 100 mile stand off for security.
Job security... this problem is not going away. Any investment will have a life.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
The perfect location.
It's already experience the pilot storage test with great success and no one is left to complain.
Yes, I'm aware of all that. I'm also aware of the fact that nuclear waste is cumulative, and the more nuclear power we use, the more this will be a problem. I don't recall saying that coal was any better. Personally, I am in favor of not using so much energy. Not that I seem to be able to do it, when it's so cheap to buy.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products. Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash, you *need* granite for a serious facility. The proposed Swedish facility is better designed than Yucca and is a good template for the U.S to use when it finds a suitable granite mountain, like the Rocky mountains, for example.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
4. you have lots of weapon's grade plutonium. [...] So while there may be some efficiencies with recycling the fuel the security concerns, especially in this day and age, perhaps out weigh any benefit.
This was Jimmy Carter's argument... and why he signed the executive order.
It did not stop South Africa, Pakistan, and North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons.
It is an ineffective measure, and not worth the cost of having to let nuclear waste pile up just so it doesn't end up being reprocessed.
Let's store it in Syria.
I want nuclear waste stored under the beds of those who profited from making this crap. But this a short term solution - what to do after they die?
I don't know the details of Yucca, nor do I care (I'm not an American and don't see any need to go to America to steal their money), but I'll take your word for it that it's a crap site. Worst of the worst.
What you want from a waste storage facility is low permeability of the ground to water viz, for a set bit of geometry and pressure difference, you only get a low flow of water through the unit you're considering. Granites can be low permeability - if they're not fractured or heavily corroded. And if they are fractured or corroded, they can have high-enough permeability to be profitable as oil reservoirs. I've worked on evaluating exactly such fields. However many other rock types can also be low permeability. In particular, claystone sediments can have very low permeability AND have the additional advantage of a high Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC), which means that ions in the small amount of water that does move through them have a tendency to absorb onto the surfaces and interior of clay minerals, which immobilises them. An additional benefit of clays, in general, over granites is that if you develop a fracture in a clay then very frequently the movement on the fracture generates a filling of finely-ground clay ... which still has a low permeability.
I note that the description of the FINNISH waste repository has the repository being dug into granite, but the waste being buried in (bentonite) clay within the segments of the mine.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
What you want from a waste storage facility is low permeability of the ground to water viz, for a set bit of geometry and pressure difference, you only get a low flow of water through the unit you're considering. Granites can be low permeability - if they're not fractured or heavily corroded.
Thanks for those details. I see what you mean about fracturing however it's really interesting what you say about the corrosion of the granite. What corrodes it? Does the granite become a porous structure?
I note that the description of the FINNISH waste repository has the repository being dug into granite, but the waste being buried in (bentonite) clay within the segments of the mine.
Exactly, I read about that bit too. IIRC, the way the bentonite clay clumps and holds the water in place was why it was selected. Is the un-fractured low permeable granite selected for if the water is also under pressure?
I'd welcome any specific expertise in geology you have on the subject RockDoctor! (great pseudonym btw)
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Intense weathering can reduce granite to essentially a powder of (bleached) micas and quartz grains in a mush of kaolinite clays. In tropical soils, this may take millions of years, but following the chemists rule of thumb (10degC increases in temperature doubles reaction rates) and the fact that many granites generate large fluxes of hot (300-500degC) water as they cool, you won't be surprised to learn that many granites in their natural state do have significant permeability due to corrosion that was implicit in their intrusion. (The same is often true of basalts - you really need to get the volatiles away from a magma really quickly if you want nice fresh crystals. And you need to cool the rock pretty damned quick.) The process is variable on a scale from millimetres to kilometres. You can see a corroded part of a grain next to an uncorroded part in a 200x microscope field of view, and you can (I've helped people do this) map corrosion fronts over kilometres of mountainside. That's typical of geology. Nothing is pure, and nothing remains the same for more than a few inches.
In some cases, yes, the granite can be left with such a porous structure that it can host hydrocarbons (there are a number of Vietnamese discoveries which were undergoing evaluation the last time I worked for that client, and they were a popular topic of discussion in the late 200x's industry journals, so I'm sure other people than that client had discoveries).
On the scale of the human body, unfractured granite is pretty rare. Even in the local granite quarries, the quarrymen have quite a struggle to find an unfractured block of more than 2m by 2m by 2m. Fine joints caused by differential cooling stresses are typically on a spacing of a metre or so.
That is exactly why the Finnish design (and others, including the UK's repeatedly shelved designs to put repositories into impermeable sandstone-mudstone sequences) includes the primary containment (sealing the waste into fine-grained, low permeability concrete), the secondary containment (stainless steel drums into which the concrete-waste was was poured), the tertiary containment (bentonite or other clay tamped around the drums) AND the quaternary containment - drilling holes into granite, then blowing bigger holes in it with drills and explosives.
The very process of making a big enough hole to put your blocks of primary, secondary and tertiary containment will make permeability in your quaternary containment. These are not engineered materials you're making holes in, they are variable natural materials.
The engineering and geology of waste repositories isn't particularly difficult. The difficult thing is the politics, and in particular, being sure that the politicians will continue to pay appropriate funds to maintain the quality of the containment system. Which is why I have for decades posited that the ideal place for the UK's HLW waste is in the London Clay (a thick, low permeability claystone), with the entrance through the Houses of Parliament. Specifically so that the first people to die knee-deep in radioactive green slime will be politicians. Our Parliament has been stable in this approximate location for about 20 half-lives of Caesium 137, so if it stays there for a similar time, the radiation will have become a much less severe problem.
I believe that America (and Sweden, and Finland) have also encountered political problems with their various waste repositories. I'm not familiar enough with the geology of the eastern edges of the Appalachians (includes Washington DC) to suggest a good location near there. Sorry, you may need to move your capitol in order to put the fear of death into your politicians.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Which is why I have for decades posited that the ideal place for the UK's HLW waste is in the London Clay (a thick, low permeability claystone), with the entrance through the Houses of Parliament.
Genius!
I believe that America (and Sweden, and Finland) have also encountered political problems with their various waste repositories.
Can I presume from your pseudonym that you are a professional geologist RockDoctor? Have you seen this article from an Australian science show? Dr Birch's research seems to be cited a few times, it may interest you as it looks like it may lead to an interesting way to solve this waste issue.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
[Reads AU link] Flash - have to read the transcript.Narrator describes "gossan", Briefly
Since the 1600s, people (who would now be called geologists) have been describing how the effects of near-surface weathering can concentrate (or disperse) ore deposits, and how miners should be aware of this. Uranium is a resistate, generally - an ore body of 0.2% might be 0.3% in the near-surface weathered deposits. That's enough to make the difference between viable and non-viable.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"