Water re-emits light in the blue wavelengths when in an intense radiation field (beta or gamma radiation that is). Thus all those pretty pool reactor pictures of the glowing blue box under 50 feet of water. That is probably where the myth came from.
An interesing related note, the three japanese workers who caused a criticality accident a couple of years ago at a fuel processing facility in japan saw a blue flash and glow when the criticality initiated. This blue flash and glow was not from the material but rather the production of light from the water in the aqeuous humor inside their eyeballs while exposed to intense gamma radiation.
The Army had a 3MW portable (several semi-trailers and some intense assembly time) power plant in the late 50's. It was intended for remote bases such as airfields, hospitals etc in very remote wilderness. It worked just fine for 4 years of testing. It was never deployed because a portable and effective containmant wasn't practical, and the core was so small there were severe nuclear reactivity control issues.
Two corrections, it wasn't thermonuclear - it was simply nuclear, and these aren't grunts we are talking about, it was run by highly trained operators of the same caliber as the ones manning Naval plants today and then.
I guess we are just going to disagree on some issues, and that's fine with me. Discussion and intelligent debate is always good.
" and I think it's extremely irresponsible of the DOE to have not even considered, let alone study, other sites."
I'm afraid I have to agree 100% here. However, I don't lay the blame at DOE's door. I'm sure they would like to have been free to pick the most qualified site from an engineering perspective. However, Congress decided otherwise. Specifically powerful Senators with reelection NIMBY thoughts running around in their heads. What a shame.
One other quick comment, if the connections between the pillars and the undersides of the bridges had been of sufficient strength, the roadbed would have never left contact with the pillar and that punch through damage would have never happend. Believe me or not I guess.
I can only reply to you with what I am familiar with, I work at San Onofre, and I am familiar with the seismic engineering in place here.
It's overly simplistic to say horzontal movement and Richter scale number are the only things designed against.
A properly qualified seismic design is against the g forces (horizontal and vertical)at the location of the structure.
What this means is, you have to do very thorough geological studies in the region of the structure in order to understand how it will transmit energy to where you have your design. I.e., where are the nearest active faults, what is the largest rupture that could be generated from that fault, what subsurface structures are between your building and the fault. Once you have all this data (and some other stuff too) you can calculate within a specified degree of statistical certainty what the maximum g-force at your structure location will be for specified amount of time, say 100,000 years. You can then use this to generate design criteria. With the proper amount of engineering conservatism, you can design a structure to withstand any significant earthquake to be expected in the lifetime of humanity. It's all a matter of cost. You can design in the strength needed to withstand the g-forces from a 8.0M earthquake anywhere, but why waste the money to do that if nothing more than a 6.5M earthquake can be expected to occur in the next 250,000 years?
I agree that strorage is not a permanent solution. It's the next best thing, put this stuff in a centrally guarded location. Easily retreivable for later use (or a permanent solution). It's definitely safer than leaving it at 70 odd separate storage locations across the U.S.
One last comment on the bridges here in SoCal, It was the support pillar connections to the underside of the bridges that was the weak spot. And the secondary (but almost as bad) problem was the structural strength of the pillars' concrete. Once the existing pillars were wrapped in high tensile strength steel cylinders, and the connections to the underside of the bridges were beefed up, that basically took care of the problem.
Why do you think nuclear energy has such a reputation for being cheap? It's because all the overhead of disposal/storage comes out of your tax dollars rather than showing up on your electric bill.
Exactly backwards.
All nuclear utilities have been required to tack on 0.1 mil per kW/hr for disposal, storage and site remediation costs since the beginning. That is part of the problem. DOE has spent 6.8 billion of the ~20 billion collected through rates and still no repository is ready. No tax money is involved at all.
By reducing the future need to produce more of this stuff, and hopefully giving us some breathing room to deal with what we already have. Additionally, oil, coal and nuclear energy are all non-renewable sources, and the sooner we ween ourselves from them the better off we will be in the long run.
Nuclear is by far our least environmentally damaging electric generation technology. And if the original AEC plan had actually been followed, we would be awash in MOX fuel assemblies and the makings of assemblies. No, nuclear is not renewable, but for all practical purposes with spent fuel reprocessing it might as well be.
And your answer still doesn't address what we do with the 40,000 tons of spent fuel we have now.
Also, do you realize that oil constitutes less than 1% of electric production? It's nearly all coal and natural gas now, and has been for years. I wish people would stop referring to it with electricity production. Oil is going to gasoline for SUVs etc... thats about it.
Ok, 2.5M earthquakes are not significant. If you know the geology, you can engineer up front to handle it. And even if there was a 9.0M earthquake, what happens? The tunnel collapses, burying this stuff. The water table is a couple of thousand feet below the repository. Give me a break!
And here following is an excerpt (note the bold text):
Sec. 10172a. Siting a second repository
(a) Congressional action required
The Secretary may not conduct site-specific activities with respect to a second repository unless Congress has specifically authorized and appropriated funds for such activities.
(b) Report
The Secretary shall report to the President and to Congress on or after January 1, 2007, but not later than January 1, 2010, on the need for a second repository.
(c) Termination of granite research
Not later than 6 months after December 22, 1987, the Secretary shall phase out in an orderly manner funding for all research programs in existence on December 22, 1987, designed to evaluate the suitability of crystalline rock as a potential repository host medium.
(d) Additional siting criteria
In the event that the Secretary at any time after December 22, 1987, considers any sites in crystalline rock for characterization or selection as a repository, the Secretary shall consider (as a supplement to the siting guidelines under section 10132 of this title) such potentially disqualifying factors as -
(1) seasonal increases in population;
(2) proximity to public drinking water supplies, including those of metropolitan areas; and
(3) the impact that characterization or siting decisions would have on lands owned or placed in trust by the United States for Indian tribes.
Tell me about it. Check my profile. I reply to 15 FUD posts here, and before I hit submit on the last one, there are thirty new FUD replies.
Exhausting.
Do these people have medical doctors they trust? Do they trust the engineers who designed their cars? Airplanes? Trains? Do they trust anyone with any kind of engineering? How about if someone came to them and said Linux sucks because (insert FUD here)? Especially if that person was not a programmer or software engineer??
It comes down to this, ignorance breeds fear and distrust.
Plus some people want to make a name for themselves by scaring other more ignorant people.
I'm pretty sure the Pu effect on the body was as a chemical heavy metal poison. And extremely toxic. It was not a (short term) carcinogenic.
In other words, you would die within a few days or weeks of heavy metal poisoning, way before the year(s) needed to develop cancer.
This was discovered during the manhattan project, if you inhaled/ingested/injected Pu (accidentally of course) it would very quickly enter your bloodstream and chemically poison you. In fact if I remember correctly, first aid for a Pu sliver in your hand was rapid amputation of the limb. Ouch.
Well, we could leave it where it is, possibly even *gasp* make the producers of that waste build better on-site storage facilities and pay for it themselves. At least that limits the scope of potential disaster to a few Three Mile Islands rather than a Chernobyl.
We (the electric consuming public) have already paid for it's disposal. Saying have the producers pay for it (again) is unrealistic.
Or we could do what the French already do and burn it in breeder reactors, the waste from which has a half-life of only 30 years.
Agree 100%. This was the actual original plan put forward 35 years ago from the AEC. Reprocessing tech was invented here in the US 40 years ago, and has been improved since.
Or the Feds could reinstate the tax incentives put in place under Carter for developement and deployment of true renewable and polution-free energy sources, as opposed to an "energy plan" that focuses on filing the pockets of oil and coal companies.
And this solves that 40,000 tons of spent fuel problem how?
Or we could find a site that isn't in the middle of one of the most geologically active regions of the country. There are a few in Texas that have been mentioned in other posts.
Agree about finding a site based on science. Disagree on the seismic FUD. BTW, the northeastern US has an awesome granite shield. So besides Texas (which I agree with you BTW), I think there are lots of places that would work as well or better than YM.
A few corrections... (ignoring the many spelling corrections - are you 16 years old or something?)
The original plan put forward by the AEC was for several nuclear chemical processing plants to reprocess spent reactor fuel into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel to be reburned in the (couple of hundred) nuclear power stations. The waste products would end up passing through several power core cycles before finally being removed for burial. At that point they would be hazardous for about fifty (50) years. This process actually makes more fissionable material than it burns.
This technology exists right now. It is not new or unfinished. But because of political concerns rather than scientific/engineering ones, it has been stalled for at leat 25 years. So we are still using the "once through" cycle method.
And the 400F figure is an upper analysis boundary for safety testing. The actual number will be far less, probably less than 150F. Who cares if some rock 1000 feet underground gets heated from 85F to 150F ? It just will not matter.
It's designed to allow the DoD and DoE to learn more about disposing of transuranic wastes from US atomic weapons programs, and from military reactor cores, not from commercial power plant waste. It's only a small fraction of the size of the Yucca Mountain facility.
USSR/Russia: They picked up the Kursk, but I seem to remember they have lost 5 - 8 nuclear subs over the years.
So I would guess about ten nuclear cores.
And how much spent resin has been dumped into the oceans over the years? Not enough to really matter is my guess. But I'm glad no one is doing that anymore.
Well you can thank your friendly democratic senators from the northeastern states (especially Vermont and Maine) for ten years ago ramrodding a law though making it illegal to consider a repository in granite bedrock (actually the preferred medium for a number of reasons). Thus removing a big chunk of the US from consideration. Where is the criticism of that "scientific" decision?
Oh, I see, it's only republicans that can make politically motivated "scientific" decisions. Silly of me.
"You can't have water in a breeder reactor since it is a moderator."
Sure you can. You just need to re-work your neutron flux for your design. It won't be as efficient as a NAK reactor or other designs not using water, but it'll work. Plus you can use more "normal" materials.
Breeder reactors that are designed to maximise Pu production from U-238 can operate at the same temp and pressure other plants have, they will have a much higher neutron flux though.
"In the 1970's someone realized that the Plutonium-239 was also useful as bomb-making material. They decided that the risk of some of this being diverted to some third-world country which wanted a nuclear bomb was too high to take and so President Carter canceled the research project."
Which has ben shown then and now to be totally specious line of reasoning. The technology and cost to take a mixed oxide fuel (MOX) bundle and pull out the Pu to use to make a bomb would require the resources boyond the reach of almost all nations. But the main problem was that the neutron flux of commercial power reactor cores is "wrong" for breeding the Pu isotope most easily used to make a bomb. You need a different (and harder to maintain) neutron flux to get good bomb making Pu. MOX fuel from commercial reactor cores wouldn't work as a source of bomb making Pu.
Only a few commercial plants in the US could be modified (such as the CE System 80 designs) to achieve the higher flux values to breed good useful quantities of MOX. It would be prohibitively expensive to convert the design of the rest. Even to use the resulting MOX bundles will require some design changes for most US plants.
Next generation plants could easily have this ability designed in.
Fragile? You obviously have never seen one of these things. They are most decidedly NOT fragile. The damn things could probably withstand a drop from many thousands of feet in the air.
You would have about a snowballs chance in hell of raising the temp of the ocean a billionth of a degree. Just think how big the ocean and the earth really is. Now think about how much heat just the Hawaiian hotspot put's into the water.....80,000 tons of more than 10 year old waste (after ten years the heat output is about 1/10000 of the heat when first discharged from the core) is not going to put out enough heat to do anything to the ocean by comparison.
Check your facts please. They have spent about 8.1 billion on research/design/construction/site characterization and testing of various storage strategies there.
The 400F figure in the article is a worst case number for design verification purposes, with brand new very hot waste (and a lot of it) all stored together. The actual temperatures will be way lower, say 150F or less. Not enough to make power generation worthhile. But it's a nice thought anyway.
I'm all for just compensation for the state of Nevada for taking on this burden for the good of the whole country. Other states have been compensated when they were forced to accept federal projects that did them no good at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Water re-emits light in the blue wavelengths when in an intense radiation field (beta or gamma radiation that is). Thus all those pretty pool reactor pictures of the glowing blue box under 50 feet of water. That is probably where the myth came from.
An interesing related note, the three japanese workers who caused a criticality accident a couple of years ago at a fuel processing facility in japan saw a blue flash and glow when the criticality initiated. This blue flash and glow was not from the material but rather the production of light from the water in the aqeuous humor inside their eyeballs while exposed to intense gamma radiation.
Fascinatingly creepy no?
The Army had a 3MW portable (several semi-trailers and some intense assembly time) power plant in the late 50's. It was intended for remote bases such as airfields, hospitals etc in very remote wilderness. It worked just fine for 4 years of testing. It was never deployed because a portable and effective containmant wasn't practical, and the core was so small there were severe nuclear reactivity control issues.
Two corrections, it wasn't thermonuclear - it was simply nuclear, and these aren't grunts we are talking about, it was run by highly trained operators of the same caliber as the ones manning Naval plants today and then.
Anybody else see the parallel to the Matrix universe?
I guess we are just going to disagree on some issues, and that's fine with me. Discussion and intelligent debate is always good.
" and I think it's extremely irresponsible of the DOE to have not even considered, let alone study, other sites."
I'm afraid I have to agree 100% here. However, I don't lay the blame at DOE's door. I'm sure they would like to have been free to pick the most qualified site from an engineering perspective. However, Congress decided otherwise. Specifically powerful Senators with reelection NIMBY thoughts running around in their heads. What a shame.
One other quick comment, if the connections between the pillars and the undersides of the bridges had been of sufficient strength, the roadbed would have never left contact with the pillar and that punch through damage would have never happend. Believe me or not I guess.
I can only reply to you with what I am familiar with, I work at San Onofre, and I am familiar with the seismic engineering in place here.
It's overly simplistic to say horzontal movement and Richter scale number are the only things designed against.
A properly qualified seismic design is against the g forces (horizontal and vertical)at the location of the structure.
What this means is, you have to do very thorough geological studies in the region of the structure in order to understand how it will transmit energy to where you have your design. I.e., where are the nearest active faults, what is the largest rupture that could be generated from that fault, what subsurface structures are between your building and the fault. Once you have all this data (and some other stuff too) you can calculate within a specified degree of statistical certainty what the maximum g-force at your structure location will be for specified amount of time, say 100,000 years. You can then use this to generate design criteria. With the proper amount of engineering conservatism, you can design a structure to withstand any significant earthquake to be expected in the lifetime of humanity. It's all a matter of cost. You can design in the strength needed to withstand the g-forces from a 8.0M earthquake anywhere, but why waste the money to do that if nothing more than a 6.5M earthquake can be expected to occur in the next 250,000 years?
I agree that strorage is not a permanent solution. It's the next best thing, put this stuff in a centrally guarded location. Easily retreivable for later use (or a permanent solution). It's definitely safer than leaving it at 70 odd separate storage locations across the U.S.
One last comment on the bridges here in SoCal, It was the support pillar connections to the underside of the bridges that was the weak spot. And the secondary (but almost as bad) problem was the structural strength of the pillars' concrete. Once the existing pillars were wrapped in high tensile strength steel cylinders, and the connections to the underside of the bridges were beefed up, that basically took care of the problem.
Why do you think nuclear energy has such a reputation for being cheap? It's because all the overhead of disposal/storage comes out of your tax dollars rather than showing up on your electric bill.
Exactly backwards.
All nuclear utilities have been required to tack on 0.1 mil per kW/hr for disposal, storage and site remediation costs since the beginning. That is part of the problem. DOE has spent 6.8 billion of the ~20 billion collected through rates and still no repository is ready. No tax money is involved at all.
By reducing the future need to produce more of this stuff, and hopefully giving us some breathing room to deal with what we already have. Additionally, oil, coal and nuclear energy are all non-renewable sources, and the sooner we ween ourselves from them the better off we will be in the long run.
Nuclear is by far our least environmentally damaging electric generation technology. And if the original AEC plan had actually been followed, we would be awash in MOX fuel assemblies and the makings of assemblies. No, nuclear is not renewable, but for all practical purposes with spent fuel reprocessing it might as well be.
And your answer still doesn't address what we do with the 40,000 tons of spent fuel we have now.
Also, do you realize that oil constitutes less than 1% of electric production? It's nearly all coal and natural gas now, and has been for years. I wish people would stop referring to it with electricity production. Oil is going to gasoline for SUVs etc... thats about it.
Ok, 2.5M earthquakes are not significant. If you know the geology, you can engineer up front to handle it. And even if there was a 9.0M earthquake, what happens? The tunnel collapses, burying this stuff. The water table is a couple of thousand feet below the repository. Give me a break!
By no means do I think either party has a monopoly on corruption, stupidity, ignorance, or self-serving motivations.
I am a republican through analysis and logic, not inheritance, and I still have to agree with you on this one. Sigh.
As for the law, here is a link.
And here following is an excerpt (note the bold text):
Sec. 10172a. Siting a second repository
(a) Congressional action required
The Secretary may not conduct site-specific activities with respect to a second repository unless Congress has specifically authorized and appropriated funds for such activities.
(b) Report
The Secretary shall report to the President and to Congress on or after January 1, 2007, but not later than January 1, 2010, on the need for a second repository.
(c) Termination of granite research
Not later than 6 months after December 22, 1987, the Secretary shall phase out in an orderly manner funding for all research programs in existence on December 22, 1987, designed to evaluate the suitability of crystalline rock as a potential repository host medium.
(d) Additional siting criteria
In the event that the Secretary at any time after December 22, 1987, considers any sites in crystalline rock for characterization or selection as a repository, the Secretary shall consider (as a supplement to the siting guidelines under section 10132 of this title) such potentially disqualifying factors as -
(1) seasonal increases in population;
(2) proximity to public drinking water supplies, including those of metropolitan areas; and
(3) the impact that characterization or siting decisions would have on lands owned or placed in trust by the United States for Indian tribes.
Tell me about it. Check my profile. I reply to 15 FUD posts here, and before I hit submit on the last one, there are thirty new FUD replies.
Exhausting.
Do these people have medical doctors they trust? Do they trust the engineers who designed their cars? Airplanes? Trains? Do they trust anyone with any kind of engineering? How about if someone came to them and said Linux sucks because (insert FUD here)? Especially if that person was not a programmer or software engineer??
It comes down to this, ignorance breeds fear and distrust.
Plus some people want to make a name for themselves by scaring other more ignorant people.
I'm pretty sure the Pu effect on the body was as a chemical heavy metal poison. And extremely toxic. It was not a (short term) carcinogenic.
In other words, you would die within a few days or weeks of heavy metal poisoning, way before the year(s) needed to develop cancer.
This was discovered during the manhattan project, if you inhaled/ingested/injected Pu (accidentally of course) it would very quickly enter your bloodstream and chemically poison you. In fact if I remember correctly, first aid for a Pu sliver in your hand was rapid amputation of the limb. Ouch.
Well, we could leave it where it is, possibly even *gasp* make the producers of that waste build better on-site storage facilities and pay for it themselves. At least that limits the scope of potential disaster to a few Three Mile Islands rather than a Chernobyl.
We (the electric consuming public) have already paid for it's disposal. Saying have the producers pay for it (again) is unrealistic.
Or we could do what the French already do and burn it in breeder reactors, the waste from which has a half-life of only 30 years.
Agree 100%. This was the actual original plan put forward 35 years ago from the AEC. Reprocessing tech was invented here in the US 40 years ago, and has been improved since.
Or the Feds could reinstate the tax incentives put in place under Carter for developement and deployment of true renewable and polution-free energy sources, as opposed to an "energy plan" that focuses on filing the pockets of oil and coal companies.
And this solves that 40,000 tons of spent fuel problem how?
Or we could find a site that isn't in the middle of one of the most geologically active regions of the country. There are a few in Texas that have been mentioned in other posts.
Agree about finding a site based on science. Disagree on the seismic FUD. BTW, the northeastern US has an awesome granite shield. So besides Texas (which I agree with you BTW), I think there are lots of places that would work as well or better than YM.
A few corrections... (ignoring the many spelling corrections - are you 16 years old or something?)
The original plan put forward by the AEC was for several nuclear chemical processing plants to reprocess spent reactor fuel into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel to be reburned in the (couple of hundred) nuclear power stations. The waste products would end up passing through several power core cycles before finally being removed for burial. At that point they would be hazardous for about fifty (50) years. This process actually makes more fissionable material than it burns.
This technology exists right now. It is not new or unfinished. But because of political concerns rather than scientific/engineering ones, it has been stalled for at leat 25 years. So we are still using the "once through" cycle method.
And the 400F figure is an upper analysis boundary for safety testing. The actual number will be far less, probably less than 150F. Who cares if some rock 1000 feet underground gets heated from 85F to 150F ? It just will not matter.
And you have a better idea?
Don't give me that crap about "no more nukes"...
What do we do with the 40,000 tons of waste we have RIGHT NOW?
WIPP stands for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
It's designed to allow the DoD and DoE to learn more about disposing of transuranic wastes from US atomic weapons programs, and from military reactor cores, not from commercial power plant waste. It's only a small fraction of the size of the Yucca Mountain facility.
DAMMIT!!!
Where are my mod points when I need them.
This is the single most insightful comment in this ENTIRE article.
What a waste. (pardon the pun)
Hmm,
US: Thresher, Scorpion
USSR/Russia: They picked up the Kursk, but I seem to remember they have lost 5 - 8 nuclear subs over the years.
So I would guess about ten nuclear cores.
And how much spent resin has been dumped into the oceans over the years? Not enough to really matter is my guess. But I'm glad no one is doing that anymore.
"You don't have to put in a Uranium blanket to breed new (plutonium) fuel AFAIK"
True. But you do if you want to use existing core designs and save money.
Well you can thank your friendly democratic senators from the northeastern states (especially Vermont and Maine) for ten years ago ramrodding a law though making it illegal to consider a repository in granite bedrock (actually the preferred medium for a number of reasons). Thus removing a big chunk of the US from consideration. Where is the criticism of that "scientific" decision?
Oh, I see, it's only republicans that can make politically motivated "scientific" decisions. Silly of me.
"You can't have water in a breeder reactor since it is a moderator."
Sure you can. You just need to re-work your neutron flux for your design. It won't be as efficient as a NAK reactor or other designs not using water, but it'll work. Plus you can use more "normal" materials.
Breeder reactors that are designed to maximise Pu production from U-238 can operate at the same temp and pressure other plants have, they will have a much higher neutron flux though.
"In the 1970's someone realized that the Plutonium-239 was also useful as bomb-making material. They decided that the risk of some of this being diverted to some third-world country which wanted a nuclear bomb was too high to take and so President Carter canceled the research project."
Which has ben shown then and now to be totally specious line of reasoning. The technology and cost to take a mixed oxide fuel (MOX) bundle and pull out the Pu to use to make a bomb would require the resources boyond the reach of almost all nations. But the main problem was that the neutron flux of commercial power reactor cores is "wrong" for breeding the Pu isotope most easily used to make a bomb. You need a different (and harder to maintain) neutron flux to get good bomb making Pu. MOX fuel from commercial reactor cores wouldn't work as a source of bomb making Pu.
Only a few commercial plants in the US could be modified (such as the CE System 80 designs) to achieve the higher flux values to breed good useful quantities of MOX. It would be prohibitively expensive to convert the design of the rest. Even to use the resulting MOX bundles will require some design changes for most US plants.
Next generation plants could easily have this ability designed in.
Fragile? You obviously have never seen one of these things. They are most decidedly NOT fragile. The damn things could probably withstand a drop from many thousands of feet in the air.
You would have about a snowballs chance in hell of raising the temp of the ocean a billionth of a degree. Just think how big the ocean and the earth really is. Now think about how much heat just the Hawaiian hotspot put's into the water.....80,000 tons of more than 10 year old waste (after ten years the heat output is about 1/10000 of the heat when first discharged from the core) is not going to put out enough heat to do anything to the ocean by comparison.
Check your facts please. They have spent about 8.1 billion on research/design/construction/site characterization and testing of various storage strategies there.
80 billion? Sounds like FUD to me.
The 400F figure in the article is a worst case number for design verification purposes, with brand new very hot waste (and a lot of it) all stored together. The actual temperatures will be way lower, say 150F or less. Not enough to make power generation worthhile. But it's a nice thought anyway.
I'm all for just compensation for the state of Nevada for taking on this burden for the good of the whole country. Other states have been compensated when they were forced to accept federal projects that did them no good at all.