Heavy ion colliders are built to much higher energy than this would require. Your sense of scale may be off. And, keeping a lid on the rate of transmutation keeps away from a meltdown. Seems like 30 years in better than 100,000 years.
Coal ash has the same uranium concentration as dirt. And neither have associated fission products unless the dirt has been contaminated by the Chernobyl accident or something like that. You can call natural uranium nuclear waste, but since we don't allow reprocessing of nuclear waste, you are stuck with CANDU reactors if you want to use it as fuel. I think you are being silly. Coal use actually reduces radiation exposure through dilution of carbon-14 in our diet. Not a good reason to burn coal of course.
You've made an error there. http://www.engineering.com/Ele... But why must we run the accelerator when the sun isn't shining? Low cost solar power takes the edge off this.
That is precisely what I am suggesting. Your proposal still risks meltdown while the accelerator controlled system may avoid that. But it does not get all the fission products. For those, further fission through proton collision will do the trick. And yes, that costs energy. Notice we are not looking at neutron cross sections here. Heck, we could accelerate the fission products themselves and have them as both bullet and target. There's a smashing solution to the nuclear waste problem.
Nuclear power is on the way out. It just can't get costs down and alternatives are getting cheaper and they will remain cheaper. The money to deal with the waste needs to be stockpiled now while there is still some revenue to tap. Just the opposite is happening however.
Yes, nuclear power was a mistake that must be paid for. Luckily, much cheaper energy will be available to do the repayment than was generated originally and it will continue to be available after the clean up job is done for fun things like space catapults, another kind of accelerator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Stop burning coal today and aside from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the ecosystem will have forgotten the effects. That is not the case with Chernobyl or Fukushima or the nuclear waste releases the NRC is promoting with this new rule.
An accelerator can disrupt the fission products directly. You are thinking of the transuranics with your spallation target. http://large.stanford.edu/cour... But, the fission products can themselves be proton targets and be disrupted right down to hydrogen.
I understand that you have a strange love for nuclear power. But for those of us who see it realistically, your love of power is a classic of mythology which always ends badly. Nuclear power has its place in naval propulsion, but in a civilian context it is a very poor choice. It is time to clean up your mess.
No, avoid transportation, do it on site. There are a number of possible crowbar approaches. The accelerator driven sub-critical reactor gets the transuranics and laser induced gamma rays may transmute some fission products, but ultimately the sledgehammer approach may be needed. Everything has a large proton cross section at high energy so the radioactive fission products may be disrupted into light elements. In the limit, a high energy proton beam can convert everything to hydrogen, which is not radioactive. Since renewable will be making energy abundant and cheap, getting this done in under sixty years seem feasible.
The DoE is responsible for dealing with the nuclear waste. The NRC is responsible for nuclear safety. This regulation indicates that they do not want to do their part of the job. A freeze on new plants should remain in place until DoE gets its act together. This claim that indefinite storage of nuclear waste out in the open is safe is obviously wrong. Now that the NRC has made it, then all their claims to be pursuing nuclear safety are suspect as well. The NRC is out to promote nuclear power at any cost including subjecting the public to nuclear hazards.
Precisely, and Hansen has not looked at the way the poor economics of nuclear power take away opportunities to cut emissions faster and more completely.
Did the right thing to pull the plug on Yucca. Fabrication of data pretty much made proceeding impossible. He was handing out license extensions like candy and won't be missed on that account, but I think he would not have pulled this bozo move. Indefinite above ground storage in flood plains? What can they be thinking?
Nuclear power has too high an opportunity cost and so slows climate response in addition to laying these booby traps all over the place. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-C...
Even the 60 year time frame is subject to risk that civil unrest in the environs of the waste would breach security. In the indefinite time frame, that becomes a dead certainty.
A portable accelerator could transmute the waste at each reactor site. The places are already well connected to the grid so bringing power to transmute the waste to stable isotopes would not be a problem. Just think of nuclear power as something that must be repaid.
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Heavy ion colliders are built to much higher energy than this would require. Your sense of scale may be off. And, keeping a lid on the rate of transmutation keeps away from a meltdown. Seems like 30 years in better than 100,000 years.
Coal ash has the same uranium concentration as dirt. And neither have associated fission products unless the dirt has been contaminated by the Chernobyl accident or something like that. You can call natural uranium nuclear waste, but since we don't allow reprocessing of nuclear waste, you are stuck with CANDU reactors if you want to use it as fuel. I think you are being silly. Coal use actually reduces radiation exposure through dilution of carbon-14 in our diet. Not a good reason to burn coal of course.
OK maybe he is just not clear that leaving it alone means ending our use of fossil fuel. Sounded like he expected that to end when we do.
So unmined uranium is nuclear waste?
And yet it works. http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r... Perhaps this a forest and trees issue for you.
You've made an error there. http://www.engineering.com/Ele... But why must we run the accelerator when the sun isn't shining? Low cost solar power takes the edge off this.
That is precisely what I am suggesting. Your proposal still risks meltdown while the accelerator controlled system may avoid that. But it does not get all the fission products. For those, further fission through proton collision will do the trick. And yes, that costs energy. Notice we are not looking at neutron cross sections here. Heck, we could accelerate the fission products themselves and have them as both bullet and target. There's a smashing solution to the nuclear waste problem.
You claim uranium is nuclear waste?
Nuclear power is on the way out. It just can't get costs down and alternatives are getting cheaper and they will remain cheaper. The money to deal with the waste needs to be stockpiled now while there is still some revenue to tap. Just the opposite is happening however.
Nuke nuts are blinded by their strange love for nuclear power so they end up saying a lot of ridiculous things. That was one of them.
Yes, nuclear power was a mistake that must be paid for. Luckily, much cheaper energy will be available to do the repayment than was generated originally and it will continue to be available after the clean up job is done for fun things like space catapults, another kind of accelerator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Stop burning coal today and aside from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the ecosystem will have forgotten the effects. That is not the case with Chernobyl or Fukushima or the nuclear waste releases the NRC is promoting with this new rule.
An accelerator can disrupt the fission products directly. You are thinking of the transuranics with your spallation target. http://large.stanford.edu/cour... But, the fission products can themselves be proton targets and be disrupted right down to hydrogen.
I understand that you have a strange love for nuclear power. But for those of us who see it realistically, your love of power is a classic of mythology which always ends badly. Nuclear power has its place in naval propulsion, but in a civilian context it is a very poor choice. It is time to clean up your mess.
No, avoid transportation, do it on site. There are a number of possible crowbar approaches. The accelerator driven sub-critical reactor gets the transuranics and laser induced gamma rays may transmute some fission products, but ultimately the sledgehammer approach may be needed. Everything has a large proton cross section at high energy so the radioactive fission products may be disrupted into light elements. In the limit, a high energy proton beam can convert everything to hydrogen, which is not radioactive. Since renewable will be making energy abundant and cheap, getting this done in under sixty years seem feasible.
The DoE is responsible for dealing with the nuclear waste. The NRC is responsible for nuclear safety. This regulation indicates that they do not want to do their part of the job. A freeze on new plants should remain in place until DoE gets its act together. This claim that indefinite storage of nuclear waste out in the open is safe is obviously wrong. Now that the NRC has made it, then all their claims to be pursuing nuclear safety are suspect as well. The NRC is out to promote nuclear power at any cost including subjecting the public to nuclear hazards.
Precisely, and Hansen has not looked at the way the poor economics of nuclear power take away opportunities to cut emissions faster and more completely.
Coal produces zero nuclear waste.
Nuclear power over promises and under delivers so it mostly trips itself up. http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
That seems to be a mistaken view. Not much storage is needed. http://www.engineering.com/Ele...
Did the right thing to pull the plug on Yucca. Fabrication of data pretty much made proceeding impossible. He was handing out license extensions like candy and won't be missed on that account, but I think he would not have pulled this bozo move. Indefinite above ground storage in flood plains? What can they be thinking?
How ironic that this dodge is an expedient to try to license new plants.
Nuclear power has too high an opportunity cost and so slows climate response in addition to laying these booby traps all over the place. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-C...
Reactors cause accidents. Accelerators won't. It is expensive because of all the prior improper risk taking.
Even the 60 year time frame is subject to risk that civil unrest in the environs of the waste would breach security. In the indefinite time frame, that becomes a dead certainty.
A portable accelerator could transmute the waste at each reactor site. The places are already well connected to the grid so bringing power to transmute the waste to stable isotopes would not be a problem. Just think of nuclear power as something that must be repaid.