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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."

36 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. This is what happens... by FooAtWFU · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:This is what happens... by PvtVoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly. Thanks to the tireless efforts of NIMBYs and anti-nuke environmental activists, we are storing spent waste in absolutely the most dangerous possible way. The only silver lining to not having this stuff buried in Yucca Mountain is that we might finally get off our asses and start building fast burner reactors, and we can burn all the waste for power. We would get rid of all that nasty waste and replace it with far smaller amounts of waste with a much shorter half-life, and we would reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.

      Nah. Who am I kidding? We'll just let it sit there until there's a huge accident, and then blame science.

    2. Re:This is what happens... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Informative

      But you still need spent fuel pools. You can't just dump fresh waste into a mountain.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:This is what happens... by PvtVoid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But you still need spent fuel pools. You can't just dump fresh waste into a mountain.

      Nobody is contending otherwise. The issue is using them for long-term fuel storage in close proximity to heavily populated areas.

    4. Re:This is what happens... by dbIII · · Score: 2

      and we can burn all the waste for power

      ALL the radioactive waste?

      then blame science

      How about learning some science. The Harford website will help.

      Seriously guys - it's people living in a fantasy world like the above poster that cause things like the waste being left in ponds instead of reprocessed and the remainder stored safely.

    5. Re:This is what happens... by PvtVoid · · Score: 2, Informative

      Seriously guys - it's people living in a fantasy world like the above poster that cause things like the waste being left in ponds instead of reprocessed and the remainder stored safely.

      No, you learn some science.

      I was speaking specifically of fast burner, or fast neutron reactors which are fuel reprocessing. The result of this reprocessing is short half-life isotopes that are far less of a long-term problem than existing waste.

    6. Re:This is what happens... by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      This is also what happens when people do studies with an outcome in mind, and don't understand the risks to begin with. They claim the NRC failed to include security risks in their recent rulings, but they failed to mention that the NRC has fully considered those risks elsewhere, so they didn't need to be included. That one oversight is a demonstration of incompetence in understanding the regulatory structure. They also completely fail to state a credible path for such a terror attack to be successful.

      They claim that a fuel pool accident will cause widespread evacuations. In fact, even in a major fuel pool accident that should be unnecessary. The wording in the report says 'might', because they don't have enough of a case to say 'will' or even 'is likely to'. They fail to recognize that most of the older fuel rods are not a threat, and the more recent rods are the concern, and those are manageable with simple measures. They don't even state the post accident measures that are available, nor even acknowledge they exist.

      And as usual, the underlying basis is a completely skewed misperception of radiation risk. They are doing more damage creating fear than fixing an imagined disaster. Every one of them should spend a little time learning what we know now. Here is a great start;

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    7. Re:This is what happens... by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Just to be clear, this study was done by reporters. "The Center for Public Integrity" is a news organization in Washington, D.C

      In no way are they qualified to do this type of study. They basically are just interviewing people and cherry picking the stuff they think will scare you.

    8. Re:This is what happens... by TheRealHocusLocus · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      You're right, but I also feel this approach is ultimately wrong, as in 'was never a good solution'. Why do we have nuclear waste that will not be walk away safe for a hundred thousand years... instead of a smaller volume of waste that would be walk-away safe in a few hundred?

      Because the we broke the promises we had made to help solve the problem. First by halting reprocessing in the United States, then failing to find off-plant storage, then ultimately shutting down the last fast neutron reactor, having never even begun to use this technology to render waste into electricity and a much smaller volume of short-lived actinides. In short, left the job unfinished.

      We live in a world where mean people people love to blow things up, unfortunately. This means even Yucca Mountain is a bad idea. For once you create any single point of failure, such as collapsing its entrance, the meanest people steer history and paralyze the waste storage process indefinitely. Contrast that 'bury deep and forget it' approach to a number of well-constructed but shallower storage areas, where even a worst case scenario leaves the waste remains accessible for cleanup and re-use or subsequent processing. I'd even be wary of people who push 'bury and forget it' solutions, for deep down they are counting on this disaster to happen, and they know some day someone will make it happen.

      Consider the hypothetical town of TBA who welcomes the safe storage of nuclear waste and ask yourself, what kind of future would you rather?

      Must be a slow solar news day.

      --
      <blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
    9. Re:This is what happens... by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 3, Informative

      As isotopes of short half life break down, the radioactivity of each spent fuel rod goes down exponentially. The fuel pools at nuclear plants were all designed to hold spent rods for the year or so it takes for the hottest isotopes, like iodine, to cook off. The intention was to then move them to buffer storage, like Yucca Mountain, for eventual recycling into new fuel. Let's see if Trump can get the recycling plant built at Yucca, which would provide a lot of ongoing jobs, not just construction, for Nevadans.

    10. Re:This is what happens... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There is no perfect solution for storing nuclear waste, but for the next few decades, the pools are our best option from a technical perspective, and our only option from a political perspective. Despite the alarmism in TFA, the water cannot simply be "drained out" by, say, pulling a cork at the bottom of the pool. To drain a pool takes several days of pumping, which a terrorist would be unable to do. The water itself is not radioactive. Maintenance workers go into the pools with scuba equipment, and we know this is okay because Randall Monroe said it is safe.

      In the next few decades, we are likely to make a lot of progress in robots to handle radioactive materials much more inexpensively and more safely that we can do today. We are also likely to find uses for many of the isotopes, which will have economic value and no longer be considered "waste". A few decades hence, we will almost certainly be in a better position to make long term decisions about what to do with the spent fuel. In the meantime, the fuel rods are getting less and less radioactive every day.

    11. Re:This is what happens... by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But you still need spent fuel pools. You can't just dump fresh waste into a mountain.

      The fuel pools throughout Japan all withstood a major earthquake much larger than they were designed for with essentially no damage. IN addition to the huge earthquake, the pools at Fukushima also survived being hit by a tsunami, which they were not designed for, having all their safety systems disabled and severe hydrogen explosions in the building, yet still remained intact and kept the fuel safe.

      Yet some want to make these out to be some disaster just waiting to happen. Its very hard to even get one of these pools to leak significantly, much less lose all their water suddenly. They are extremely tough structures. The writers of the article are not privy to the security analysis and measures in place.

    12. Re:This is what happens... by dbIII · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I suggest you consider what released neutrons do to everything around them and you may be able to work out what low level waste is. If you have done high school level science it should be enough.

      I was speaking specifically of fast burner

      You wrote "all the waste", a depressing mistake since it shows you do not understand the topic at all. There is a lot more than fuel rods to deal with.

    13. Re:This is what happens... by MrKaos · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No, you learn some science.

      I was speaking specifically of fast burner

      You'll need to learn some politics too. Specifically the Integral Fast Reactor was a burner reactor prototyped in the US that showed promise with a burn up rate of 19%. It promised to replace coal and oil but Clinton shut it down and W.Bush funded its demolition in Sec 628 of the 2005 US Energy policy act. Oil and coal companies don't want something around that will replace their product, you see. To rub salt into the wound, the same act fund pilot programs to replicate some of IFR's hydrogen production functionality in Sec. 634 - as far as we know the funds haven't been accessed.

      Of course the issue with the burner technology you suggest, apart from using sodium as a coolant, is that these reactors will be insanely radioactive at the end of their service lifespan. The only proper way to deploy them would be to build them inside a mountain where the reactor could be disposed of in-situ to cool and they simply would not be economically viable unless you could make one with a service life that exceeds 100 years. You won't get that without a significant advancement in materials technology.

      I hoped burners would work too as it looked like promising technology for nuclear disarmament, however I'm afraid we are still a long way off.

      Thanks to the tireless efforts of NIMBYs and anti-nuke environmental activists, we are storing spent waste in absolutely the most dangerous possible way.

      You nukkers should stop blaming NIMBYs all the time because they have no political power in the placement of nuclear facilities. Yucca is not being used because it is about as effective at storing radio-isotopes as a sponge is to carry water. Hopefully some geologists here will chime in with some more details but getting the geology right for storing nuclear materials is very difficult in granite (the DOE's prefered choice) due to the way the rock fractures, let alone the pumice Yucca mountain is made of.

      Yucca was selected because one of the representatives from Nevada didn't show up for the vote that placed it - nothing to do with science, it was placed inappropriately *because* of NIMBYism. There are probably more approriate sites in the US to choose from if science is applied to selecting one instead of politics. Once you do place it you are going to be building a lot of railways to move the spent fuel and NIMBYs and environmentalists have no control over investment funding for that.

      You nukkers should start to look at how the oil and coal industry affects the nuclear industry with their lobbying power instead of blaming environmentalists and NIMBYs who have very little influence. It's all there (and more) in the laws that govern the way the taxpayer and government interact with funding of all of the energy industries. A core component of the US 'New Deal' the PUCHA is repealed in the 2005 energy act (see Subtitle F—Repeal of PUHCA in the same act) so that oil and coal interests can access taxpayer funding via accessing provisions in Sec 638 of the same act. They were *exactly* the conditions that created the US depression in the first place only this time oil and coal are using the nuclear industry to access the taxpayer's rates instead of other utilities.

      "NIMBY" is a tired accusation that ignores how coal and oil interests are the main face of lobbying power that determines how these laws are shaped to distribute funding.

      --
      My ism, it's full of beliefs.
    14. Re:This is what happens... by dbIII · · Score: 2

      It promised to replace coal and oil but Clinton shut it down

      The even more annoying thing is he did it at least partly because Westinghouse and other parts of the nuclear lobby spent a lot of money convincing him to do so. Apparently they saw it as a threat to their business model because they had sunk money into Uranium and it used Thorium. While I think he should have told them to go fuck themselves because they themselves were using previous government nuclear research and should not stand in the way of others doing the same it played out the way it did - donor money won.
      Despite "winning" by shutting down the program they defamed the head of the IFR project and drove him out of the nuclear industry.

    15. Re:This is what happens... by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They basically are just interviewing people and cherry picking the stuff they think will scare you.

      That much was obvious when we saw who posted it to Slashdot.

    16. Re:This is what happens... by tigersha · · Score: 2

      Oh FFS, don't blame Jimmy Carter. He was a nuclear engineer in the navy, and actually did some work INSIDE a running nuclear reactor undergoing a meltdown. When Three Mile Island popped he was one of the experts on site.

      http://www.patheos.com/blogs/s...

      http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
    17. Re:This is what happens... by RockDoctor · · Score: 2

      No chance. Couldn't build pipelines without x raying the welds.

      ... for which you don't actually need radioactive sources, if you're talking about X-rays. What you do is build a high-voltage electricity generator (a few tens of kilovolts) and use it to accelerate electrons to collide with a metal target (copper, tungsten, it varies with need) whereupon an uncollimated beam of x-rays is produced. A guy called Roentgen started development in the 1880s ; they're quite a mature technology.

      Used as parts of sensors when drilling. Oil industry can't live without a radioisotope, here or there.

      Hmmm, speaking as an oilfield geologist, supervising the use of thse machines on a day-to-day basis, you clearly haven't heard of developments over the last decade or so. Because of the surface costs (clearing non-essential personnel from the area when handling sources) and the contingency costs (fishing for sources "lost in hole" along with drill strings can cost tens of millions of dollars per event ; also, in some countries, the truckload of soldiers to "escort" the sources to the site are basically a tax, which takes some days to pay), most logging companies have put substantial effort into developing source-less logging suites. Now, they are billed more expensively (it's "ecological", so you charge higher), and more importantly, their results are not directly comparable with wells (or the same well) logged with radioactive logs. So they've by no means taken over the industry. But they do exist and they're not new. 2003 was the first time I supervised a source-free logging job, which was being done as a freebie "technology demonstrator". It worked no worse than the conventional tools (which were paid to run as well).

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  2. What a surprise that mdsolar posted this shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:What a surprise that mdsolar posted this shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Seriously? Did you need to have fukushima to be aware that pumps shouldn't fail?

      Nuclear energy, if we use it at all, should never be in the hands of private companies.

    2. Re:What a surprise that mdsolar posted this shit by Zumbs · · Score: 2

      Simply store the waste in a permanent disposal location, such as burying it at Yucca Mountain

      If it's that simple, why isn't it being done?

      --
      The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
    3. Re:What a surprise that mdsolar posted this shit by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 2

      It is a shame that people believe all the hyperbolic journalistic crap written about the event. Its also nice to see there are at least a reasonable number of people that can spot that type of reporting.

      There are thousand of Japanese that, to this day, can not return to their homes which were damaged from the tsunami, and are well away for Fukushima. They simply can't just rebuild villages in a potential tsunami zone. Nobody cares about the real disaster. And yet a lot of people seem to believe all Japan's troubles lie in the Fukushima precinct. The greatest problem is ignorance and fear. Reporters think a radiological event is like what we see in the movies, and Joe public just eats that stuff up.

    4. Re:What a surprise that mdsolar posted this shit by dunkelfalke · · Score: 2

      https://news.vice.com/article/...
      http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
      http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

      Here you go. There is more if you actually bother to look it up.

      --
      "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
  3. What could be safer? by AndyKron · · Score: 2

    What could be safer than an artificially maintained pool of water filled with highly radioactive spent fuel rods?

  4. Re:Or... by sjames · · Score: 3, Informative

    We have a good use, but it is blocked by people hoping to create enough problems to kill nuclear power (A bit like chopping your feet off to make sure you don't get an ingrown toenail).

    We could reprocess it and end up with new fuel and a much smaller pile of waste that will be safe in 200-500 years.

  5. Finally by hackertourist · · Score: 3, Funny

    I was getting worried I'd have to do without my weekly dose of antinuclear FUD. mdsolar to the rescue yet again!

  6. mdsolar quotes by thegarbz · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:mdsolar quotes by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      This sceanrio wouldn't have been so alarming, but people like mdsolar didn't like the Yucca storage facility that would have solved this issue either. We spent $9 billion building it, only to shut it down.

  7. Key conclusion from the report by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 2

    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.
  8. One word answer by Required+Snark · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    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?
    1. Re:One word answer by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

      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.

      It always boils down to people. So much about Fukushima reeks of bad decisions at every level, from siting to accounting to management. And while hindsight is always 20/20, the combination of location, and insufficient seawall height made the accident almost inevitable. The only way it wasn't going to happen was if plate tectonics gave it a lucky break and no Tsunami happened during the reactor lifetime and decommissioning. Simple study shows those seawalls would be breached, and if the historical record isn't enough, the rubble patterns left by previous tsunami surely should. No doubt they saved money on lower seawalls.

      A huge amount of energy encased in a small volume, and humanity's inherent corruption and hubris makes for a bad combo.

      Just an example of this sort of whackadoodle crap - the US interstate system has rules that a fence be built along the highways to keep deer and other animals off the highways - good idea.

      But fencing thousands of miles on both sides is expensive. So they lowered the height of the fences - below the height that a deer can jump. And the highways are such that the fences tend to be near the tops of hills, or partway down. So the deer can jump in, but getting back out is a big problem.

      So we're treated to a shitload of carnage as bambi meets bumper. Coupled with the arrogance of some pro-nuc folks, and you have a difficult job to re-energize the nuc power industry.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    2. Re:One word answer by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      nuclear establishment ... there is a one word answer: Fukushima

      Everytime someone gives a one word answer to describe a fluid technology that has been changed, developed, and despite all pushback AGAINST making it safer has an excellent safety record i also have a one word answer: Idiot.

      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.

      Really? Because I cherry picked my results and published them too and everything came up as 100% safe. The article isn't tainted because it's associated with solar power, it's tainted because it's a fake study done by reporters who cherry picked answers to "prove" their pre-determined outcome.

  9. Re:Yucca Mountain was always vaporware. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    They transport nuclear fuel all the time, there are tractor trailer sized casks specifically designed for it. They are tested by burning them in jet fuel for over an hour, dropping them from helicopter, and slamming them into concrete walls at over 80 mph. It would be a time consuming task but transportation of nuclear fuel is not an issue. Storage is idiotic though, a vast majority of the "waste" that comes out of reactors is still perfectly good fuel, it needs to be reprocessed to remove the small amount of highly radioactive material.

    http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/diagram-typical-trans-cask-system-2.pdf
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1nvRBk4W3o

  10. As a nuclear physicist: Yes, that's true. But... by tlambert · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:As a nuclear physicist: Yes, that's true. But.. by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

    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.
  12. It's not just NIMBYs by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
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