Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Say Nuclear Fuel Pools Pose Safety, Health Risks (nbcnews.com)
mdsolar quotes a report from NBC News: Ninety-six aboveground, aquamarine pools around the country that hold the nuclear industry's spent reactor fuel may not be as safe as U.S. regulators and the nuclear industry have publicly asserted, a study released May 20 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine warned. Citing a little-noticed study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the academies said that if an accident or an act of terrorism at a densely-filled pool caused a leak that drains the water away from the rods, a cataclysmic release of long-lasting radiation could force the extended evacuation of nearly 3.5 million people from territory larger than the state of New Jersey. It could also cause thousands of cancer deaths from excess radiation exposure, and as much as $700 billion dollars in costs to the national economy. The report is the second and final study of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant, which was pummeled from a tsunami on March 11, 2011. The authors suggest the U.S. examine the benefits of withdrawing the spent fuel rods from the pools and storing them instead in dry casks aboveground in an effort to avoid possible catastrophes. The idea is nothing new, but it's been opposed by the industry because it could cost as much as $4 billion. The latest report contradicts parts of a study by Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff released two years after the Fukushima incident. The NRC staff in its 2014 study said a major earthquake could be expected to strike an area where spent fuel is stored in a pool once in 10 million years or less, and even then, "spent fuel pools are likely to withstand severe earthquakes without leaking."
This is what happens when you don't build the Yucca Mountain (or equivalent) long-term waste-storage facility. The waste just sits somewhere else, even more vulnerable and more at risk of damaging the environment in both the short and long term.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Seriously, this isn't news. Besides, it's not that big of an issue.
Yes, spent fuel rods are radioactive waste. However, there are two obvious problems with the article.
1) Simply store the waste in a permanent disposal location, such as burying it at Yucca Mountain. It's extremely unlikely to leak there, nor is there much of a risk in transporting the waste if reasonable safety measures are employed. The environmental hazards are way overstated and significant release of radioactive isotopes is very unlikely during transport or disposal.
2) The article cites the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, but that wouldn't have happened if power hadn't been lost to the pumps circulating water to cool the reactor and keep the spent fuel rods underwater. Obviously, if you don't keep the spent fuel rods underwater, you're not providing shielding from radiation and you're letting them heat up. The failure was not the storage of spent fuel rods but that the pumps failed. This lesson has been learned and steps have been taken to ensure such an incident doesn't happen again.
This is fear mongering, which is pretty typical of mdsolar. I don't understand why the editors continue to post his crap.
I've heard for many years that scientists will come up for a use for spent nuclear fuel.
So far it looks like the only benefit from spent fuel is to fund preparations for a newer storage site.
Two things occur to me:
1. While those odds are high, how do they compare to winning the super lottery, which someone always wins.
2. Nuke fans talk about the high costs of solar and wind power, which continue to drop, but in the comparisons don't include costs of what to do with waste from nuclear for the thousands of years it's still a threat.
and throw them into the Sun.
What could be safer than an artificially maintained pool of water filled with highly radioactive spent fuel rods?
Yucca Mtn. was never a possible solution. Maybe it could work, if it were possible to safely transport nuclear fuel from all over the country (and that is not clear). Maybe it was real enough to those that conceived and designed it. But it was never actually going to be built. It was and is and will remain a political fiction. I wish slashdotters would stop holding it up like some kind of nuclear magical healing caduceus. It was an idea to show that politicians were doing something even when they weren't. It is bogus. It remains bogus.
I was getting worried I'd have to do without my weekly dose of antinuclear FUD. mdsolar to the rescue yet again!
This is about overloading spent fuel pools. "The NAS report clearly found fault with NRC’s approach to protecting spent fuel pools from severe accidents and terrorist attacks, and largely confirmed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) longstanding concerns about the agency’s inadequate response to the danger of spent fuel pool fires. Significantly, the report criticized the regulatory analysis the NRC used to justify rejecting a proposal to expeditiously transfer spent fuel from pools to dry casks."
I know I openly criticise people for failing to RTFS, but I got to mdsolar and just figured I know the answer to whatever alarmist bullshit he posted today.
Hey everyone, you're going to be alright, whatever weird scenario he's "researched" this time.
Can we stop giving credibility to studies that show weasel words can be used to dupe the public?
The committee that carried out the study and authored the Phase 2 report found that spent fuel storage facilities -- both spent fuel pools used to store fuel under water and casks used to dry-store fuel -- at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant maintained their containment functions during and after the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.
and
The committee recommended that the USNRC perform a spent fuel storage risk assessment that addresses both accident and sabotage risks for both pool and dry cask storage. USNRC staff informed the committee that it is already thinking about how to expand its risk assessment methodologies to include sabotage risks.
Not exactly a doomsday scenario. Seems reasonable to do more risk assessments but it's not like they are yelling "Danger Danger Will Robinson..."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The one country in the world that had experienced nuclear devastation, with one of the most technologically advanced cultures in the world, couldn't get it right. This was not the bureaucratically hide bound Soviet Union, where technical expertise coexisted with a struggling backwards economic system, this was the home of the bullet train that always ran on time and they still couldn't get it right.
So when a bunch of really smart people point out a serious problem that the nuclear establishment (called the "nuclear village" in Japan) say is impossible, it's time to take it seriously. That is exactly what happened in Japan when it was pointed out that a much larger tsunami could over run the Fukushima power station. The industry made a decision based on their pocketbooks, the pretend regulators agreed, and the time bomb started ticking. So this class of failure has happened before.
Arguing that the article is tainted because it is somehow associated with the solar power field is a paranoid delusion. If you can't criticize the findings on their technical merits then you are the ones engaged in propaganda arguments. As the Russians and Japanese have already found out, nuclear materials go critical based on laws of physics and do not respond to overly optimistic planning documents. When things go bad because of an unplanned critical mass it gets very ugly very fast and there is little to be done to stop it.
Why is Snark Required?
As a nuclear physicist: Yes, that's true. But if you reprocessed the fuel rods instead of treating them as waste, they wouldn't be sitting in a pool being radioactive.
No matter how good the technology, it's run by people and they lie, don't tell the whole truth and cut corners to save money.
Anyone else notice that every article that BeauHD posts is either clickbait and/or meant to inspire rage/anger?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
As a nuclear physicist: Yes, that's true. But if you reprocessed the fuel rods instead of treating them as waste, they wouldn't be sitting in a pool being radioactive.
As a hoomin bean, then we'd be talking about the safety, security and health risks of reprocessing.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This is why we moved out of Paducah, Kentucky.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.1027624,-88.810739,25m/data=!3m1!1e3
Radioactive waste is being stored all over the country.
Not a *nuclear* physicist, but my general rule of thumb is that anything radioactive enough to be dangerous is radioactive enough to be useful.
This exemplifies the problem we are having with those folks in Washington DC who are so beholden to the uranium industry that understanding the re-processing of the uranium waste for use in a Liquid Sodium (Thorium) reactor seems to be beyond them. There are teams at Loyola in Chicago and at MIT working out those issues. All they need is some people like Bill Gates to help with these clean-up efforts and get 80-years of relatively low cost (uranium clean-up and forever storage costs are astronomical) and let their own nuclear project ride until that is done. Henry Keuljesatlinkedin.
As a hoomin bean, then we'd be talking about the safety, security and health risks of reprocessing.
It's arguably safer than pools because you separate the fissionable and fissile material (low radioactive risk) from the fission products and non-fuel assembly hardware (high radioactive risk).
You remove the possibility of a criticality excursion and you consolidate the part of the used fuel that makes it difficult to handle.
forever. They were meant to be temporary storage for the used fuel rods. The used fuel rods were then supposed to be transported to a processing plant where plutonium and U235 would be extracted. The leftover waste was to be encased in a long lasting container and shipped to long term storage. That was never done. Now we are stuck with large amount of used fuel rods in storage. Those who advocate for nuclear power need to make sure that the end of the used fuel rod cycle is put in place.
Scientists pose Safety and Health risks.
Kinda like cloud computing and IoT?
Seriously, burying this makes little sense, which is why Yucca mtn was stopped.
So, if we spend a couple of billion NOW, we can have multiple reactors that are designed to burn this up and leave us with minor amounts of radioactive material that will be safe within 200 years.
The fact that we have NOT solve this is because the dems are as anti-science as the GOP.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
>> conflict minerals?
Birds. When their flight paths conflict with wind turbines or solar concentrators, birds are converted back into their base elements (through incineration or mechanical separation).
we've been cutting funding to infrastructure since the Clinton (Bill) era. I'm a NIMBY too. I'll be a NIMBY until you can get the average joe to stop voting against necessary investments in the name of "Small" gov't and Freedom. Look at Flint, Mi and how something as critical as a city's water supply was handled. You wanna drop nuclear waste near me, stored and maintained by the lowest bidder with the highest profit margin? Of course I don't want that.
Change our politics if you want nuclear to work. Otherwise I'll continue hoping that some other poor sods get stuck with the inevitable disaster. Yeah, that's messed up, but I don't know what else to do about it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This was obviously a story in the scientific journal DUH!
Load it all on a rocket, fire off into space, into the Sun. GG.
Sure it sounds like what Feynman said, but its true. Dig a hole. Not 3 feet, not 30 feet, not 300 feet, but 3000 meters (about 10,000 feet). You hit real hard rock. You can go about 1000 feet across in at least Then run your storage facility. Actually you could run the power plant from down there too. What happens when you have an accident? Get everyone out, fill it in, drill a hole within 200 feet of the old nuclear stockpile, pipe the waste heat into an above ground turbine, make power. Worry: it could last 1000 or more years. Solution: make power for 1000 or more years. Digging the hole is expensive, but not having to clean up the biosphere is a good thing. No one gets radiation poisoning. No accidental animal/bird/bio problems possible. Get a salt water cavern. Put the water in it. The cavern can be made of solid marble. Do the "set it and forget it" thing. Make it so that if you built it, and then something happened and it was lost to history for 10,000 years and there was no human intervention, nothing bad would happen. How hard is this? Do it once, do it properly. No further actions required. If its hazardous in the biosphere, then take it out of the biosphere. Seriously. If you plan for a 30 year life cycle, then your plant lasts 30 years. If you plan for a 300 year life cycle, then your plant lasts 300 years. There are many businesses that have lasted 300 years or more (breweries, retailers, etc.). There are Roman columns that have lasted 2000 years (Roman cement has a more 3 dimensional chemical makeup and lasts longer than Portland cement). So make the power plant last at least 300 years.
Just look at where the funding for ISIS comes from. Either from direct oil sales or from the oil sales of their Saudi financiers.
The anti-nuclear folks are agents of Wahabism.
Nuclear power has killed much less people than oil. Even if you normalize it in deaths/kWh.
Wake up, naive Anglos and Euros.
Let's call them Rand Corp and Saudi Oil Inc.
There is a deep-seated collusion between the Oil Terrorists and the U.S. & U.K military and elite.
They say most 9/11 pilots were Saudis. But they attacked Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia.
How f$cking corrupt is this ????
GWB would be a loser, had not his daddy (CIA boss then) convinced his Saudi friends to make the drinker GWB rich by selling him cheap oil.
They have also paid of scores of Euro elites (especially the former commies) and the Clintons.
Anglos and Euros are just a naive bunch of idiots whom the Arabs and similar people can parade around the circus with a nose ring inserted. They work themselves to death while the Arabs make five kids to replace the stupidos who do all the work.
There have been at least 10 times more people killed by oil per kWh than by nuclear.
You are just one of these whores the Saudis keep in the Euro and Anglo Sphere.
Meanwhile the Chinese build reactors at a pace never seen before.
And they even build them for the British who are by now a bunch of weaklings who cannot do any serious mechanical engineering any more. CHINA has to do it for these decadent f$ckers.
This is what happens when reprocessing is forbidden in the United States.
We don't need very large deep repositories. Reprocessing spent fuel generates power and reduces the amount of dangerous waste. Why don't we do it? Because of some hypothetical proliferation risk that turns out doesn't actually exist in those countries that do reprocess spent fuel.
And we shouldn't be dry-casking, because that makes it so much more difficult to extract and reprocess. God forbid we glassify the waste, spending orders of magnitude more money and effort than it would cost to reprocess fuel.
We figured out a way to reprocess "unusable" anthracite coal waste (culm) profitably. Likewise, the rest of the world has been reprocessing spent nuclear fuel for decades.
What's the Department of Energy's actual problem, here?
Kriston
Killed 100 times more people than Tshernobyl and Fukushima together.
Then they had two more oil wars and the Syrian war is also fuelled by the Wahabist Oil Money.
9/11 was funded by Wahabist Oil Money and it killed more people than Tshernobyl.
You lefties have whored yourself to the enemies of our civilization, because Marxism essentially is Devil Worshipping.
Patriots vote Trump (he blasted the oil brutes) while traitors vote Clinton. She is financed by them, like so many lefties.
You miss the main issue: Bribes. The Saudis shared the oil proceeds with the Clintons, the British Royals, the Bushes and apparently Merkel. And a boatload of communists who had zero qualifications but big egos.
The nuclear industry never threw around so many bribes.
That is why it lost out to the bribes and to the hysterically hyperbolic propaganda of the Saudis.
Euros and Americans are on average Dumb Suckers with serious scientific education (yes, no contradiction). They think everybody is as dumb as they are. So they are easy prey for the Saudis and also for the Chinese. These people know what Bribes, Lies and Deception can yield. And they use it without qualms on this Idiot Civilization of ours.
Every time someone in the nuclear establishment says that a particular kind of horrible worse case accident can't happen, there is a one word answer: Fukushima.
This. Also, part of the technique for the 'can't happen' brush-off is to quote enormous odds against. After the 2011 Japan earthquake/tsunami we heard first how such things were about one-in-a-thousand-years, now we're hearing The NRC staff in its 2014 study said a major earthquake could be expected to strike an area where spent fuel is stored in a pool once in 10 million years or less.
They have all omitted to mention the 1896 Sanriku earthquake and tsunami, which was practically as devastating as the 2011 event, and in the same general area, killing even more thousands of people. Maybe the experts would try to use the excuse that the magnitude in 1896 was just a little smaller than in 2011. But it certainly was in a similar league, and so the risk of such events causing that order of devastation in that area is more like once in 120 years, not 1000 or 10,000,000.
Ok, so that applies to a specific seismically active geographical area. But the unjustified brush-off merchants are mobile, and express their 'expert' views everywhere. So we need to beware so-called experts using brush-off statistics, and look carefully into their so-called facts.
-wb-
So we're hearing a lot of FUD about nuclear lately, but what about the costs, cancer risks, and other ramifications about non-bogeyman approaches? I mean, it's one thing to consider the worst possible scenario about nuclear, but what about the everyday consequences of using coal? Solar? Wind? Algae? Corn? There's less interest in vilifying those, because the consequences are a degree of separation removed from most people, so it's easy to vilify them.
There are many levels of waste and fuel can only be processed from a very small portion of that total, thus leaving a lot of waste that remains highly radioactive.
WTF? That "some" is that majority of all elements known!