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.
What could be safer than an artificially maintained pool of water filled with highly radioactive spent fuel rods?
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.
I was getting worried I'd have to do without my weekly dose of antinuclear FUD. mdsolar to the rescue yet again!
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.
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?
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
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 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.
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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