Guardian: New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel

[Maslo55]

New generation of nuclear reactors could consume radioactive waste as fuel

A new generation of "fast" nuclear reactors could consume Britain's radioactive waste stockpile as fuel, providing enough low-carbon electricity to power the country for more than 500 years, according to figures confirmed by the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc).


Britain's large stockpile of nuclear waste includes more than 100 tonnes of plutonium and 35,000 tonnes of depleted uranium. The plutonium in particular presents a security risk as a potential target for terrorists and will cost billions to dispose of safely. The government is currently considering options for disposing of or managing it.

The engineering firm GE Hitachi has submitted an alternative proposal based on their Prism fast reactor, which could consume the plutonium as fuel while generating electricity.


"It's a very elegant idea that we should try and use [the waste] as efficiently as possible. I definitely find it an attractive idea", said Prof David MacKay, Decc's chief scientific adviser.

Fast reactors are indeed a no-brainer IMHO. Killing two birds with one stone - getting rid of radioactive waste from traditional reactors permanently, and generate lots of carbon-free electricity at the same time. Finally is this elegant idea being considered, after billions wasted on geological storage "solutions". Nuclear "waste" is not really a waste, it is a very energetic and thus valuable fuel.

Related article by british environmentalist George Monbiot:
A Waste of Waste

[PamW]

1. Correct - read about the Integral Fast Reactor

Fast reactors can turn long-lived radioisotopes into very short-lived radioisotopes.

Read about the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) designed by Argonne National Laboratory
in the '80's and early '90s. Courtesy of PBS Frontline, here is an interview conducted
by Pulitzer-Prize winner Richard Rhodes with nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till, who at
the time was Associate Director of Argonne:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: So they go in, and then those are broken into fission products, or some of it is. Right?

A: Yes.

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

Too bad this research was terminated in the early '90s by a monumentally short-sighted decision. Read Dr. Till's story of that.

PamW

[kristopher]

8. "the realm of economic mythology, like the “too cheap to meter” slogan"

9. To propose, as some have done, that most of the uranium resource value in existing spent fuel could be used is in the realm of economic mythology, like the “too cheap to meter” slogan of the 1950s. Reprocessing plus breeder reactors are much more expensive than light water reactors today, which in turn cost more than wind-generated electricity. To use most of the uranium resource, breeder reactors would have to move to the center of U.S. electricity generation. It cannot be done using light water reactors. Even a single penny in excess generation cost per kilowatt-hour in a breeder reactor-reprocessing system would lead to an added $8 trillion in costs if essentially all the uranium, including the uranium-238, and the plutonium in the 100,000 metric tons of spent fuel that existing U.S. reactors have generated or will generate during their licensed lifetimes is to be used as fuel. At present, the economic hurdle is far greater than a penny per kWh. Further, it would take hundreds of years to accomplish the task, involving the separation of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs worth of fissile material every year. The inspection, verification, and materials accounting problems of the adoption of the approach globally would present problems that are far greater than any concerns to date, which have been significant. It will also require storage of a significant part of the spent fuel for very long periods – likely in the hundreds of years. On-site storage is the most secure management option available today. But extending on-site storage to hundreds of years will create its own economic and security concerns. This is the principal reason that direct deep geologic disposal of spent fuel should be developed.

10. No reprocessing program can obviate the need for a deep geologic repository. Even complete fissioning of all actinides – an unrealistic proposition – will leave behind large amounts of very long-lived fission and activation products like iodine-129, cesium-135, and chlorine-36 that will pose risks far into the future much beyond the 24,100-year half- life of plutonium-239.

THE MYTHOLOGY AND MESSY REALITY OF NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. April 8, 2010

More details Chapter G, pg 37-42
http://www.ieer.org/reports/reprocessing2010.pdf

[Maslo55]

9. ...

Are they really complaining that it will take a long time to fission all the plutonium? lol.. The fact that plutonium from nuclear waste can supply our energy for such a long time is a POSITIVE, not a negative. It shows how great the energetic value of nuclear "waste" is.

The isotopes you speak of can also be transmutated by neutron radiation, they just dont produce sustainable reaction - energy (are not a fuel). Plutonium would produce enough neutrons, or energy for accelerator neutron generation, to break down all such isotopes.

Their economic calculations are also very loaded - they tried to come up with the highest sum they could, but that is additional price for 500 years of power generation - what is 8 trillion spread over 500 years, when compared to the the value of generated electricity (800 trillion KWh!)? Nothing.

Not to mention that repeating the "too cheap to meter" strawman, which has always been said in relation to fusion, not fission, casts high doubts of their knowledge about nuclear energy history.

[kristopher]

11. Even a single penny...

"..Even a single penny in excess generation cost per kilowatt-hour in a breeder reactor-reprocessing system would lead to an added $8 trillion in costs if essentially all the uranium, including the uranium-238, and the plutonium in the 100,000 metric tons of spent fuel that existing U.S. reactors have generated or will generate during their licensed lifetimes is to be used as fuel. At present, the economic hurdle is far greater than a penny per kWh..."

THE MYTHOLOGY AND MESSY REALITY OF NUCLEAR FUEL REPROCESSING
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. April 8, 2010

More details Chapter G, pg 37-42
http://www.ieer.org/reports/reprocessing2010.pdf

[PamW]

10. Once again...

Once again, kristopher is decrying reprocessing because he claims it adds to nuclear weapon production or presents a proliferation problem.

Kris didn't read the entire interview with Dr. Till:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: Now, what about the issue of proliferation, the issue of making plutonium available to terrorists?

A: The object in the IFR demonstration was to invent, if you like, a process that did not allow separations of pure plutonium that would be necessary for weapons. In order to recycle, you need some kind of a chemical process. And the chemical process that was invented here at Argonne used quite different principles than present processes do. It allows the separation of that group of things that are useful, but not one from the other, so that you cannot separate plutonium purely from uranium and the other things. You can separate uranium, plutonium, and the other useful things from the fission products. So it does exactly what you want it to do. It gives you the new fuel, and it separates off the waste product, but it doesn't allow careful distinguishing between the materials that are useful, such that you could use one or another of those materials for weapons.

Q: So it would be very difficult to handle for weapons, would it?

A: It's impossible to handle for weapons, as it stands.

It's highly radioactive. It's highly heat producing. It has all of the characteristics that make it extremely, well, make it impossible for someone to make a weapon.

The fact that IFR plutonium can NOT be used to make nuclear weapons was certified in a report by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( one of the two US nuclear weapons design labs, Los Alamos being the other ) to Congress. Senators Simon and Kempthorne cited this report in their rebuttal to a New York Times editorial:

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/05/opinion/l-new-reactor-solves-plutonium-problem-586307.html

A recent Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory study indicates that fuel from this reactor is more proliferation-resistant than spent commercial fuel, which also contains plutonium.

PamW

[DCKit]

2. Great theory, and it's a sound theory.

Irradiating radioactive atoms speeds up their decay. But until there's a standardized reactor design, there is no guarantee of safety.

I watched a documentary recently that documented that every GE reactor was modified, as it was installed, to suit the demands of the buyers, contractors and ever-changing regulations.

No two U.S. reactors are identical, and that's a real problem.

Until these things can be manufactured and installed, as is, right off the production line, it's just not going to work.

[Maslo55]

4. ...

thats what GE-Hitachi intends with their Prism reactor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PRISM

The technology (IFR) was tested in the US (EPR-II) and was proved very safe, working without issues for 30 years, and validating the passive safety features.

[DCKit]

5. They'll never build these reactors as designed, because companies like Bechtel...

make many more hundreds of millions of dollars off of every reactor they customize to the site. How else do you think they get to cost over-runs of 2-4x of the initial projected cost?

A stepfather of mine worked on a nuclear project once, and the incompetence was amazing. He came home one evening and told up the project had been put on hold for several weeks because some architect had decided he could run some critical piping through the reactor vessel (and the installation of those pipes had already begun). He worked on that project for a total of about five years, until it was finally decided to scrap it. They saved an estimated $450 million dollars by turning that plant into a gas-fired plant, instead.

Seven billion dollars (the last I heard of any reactor costing) might not buy enough solar panels to generate the same level of power as a nuclear power plant, but I'd be a lot happier living next door.

[wtmusic]

3. By the end of the article "low-carbon" becomes "carbon-free"

The pace of technology is amazing.

[SpoonFed]

6. Paper reactor consumes all nuclear waste, industry saved.

No longer need to store nuke waste until the end of time.
News at eleven. (Tune into comedy central or perhaps that space sci-fi channel.)



Monbiot is a joke after his pro-nuke in the midst of Fukushima ranting in my mind.

[hunter]

7. I can see China building fast reactors.

They'll grow weary of coal, and maybe they won't be in the mood to fight for oil and natural gas overseas or across continents.

Who knows? Maybe the USA can sell China our depleted uranium and power plant wastes, reprocessed for export by proud American "right to work" employees like these:



"Glassworks. Midnight. Location: Indiana." From a series of photographs of child labor at glass and bottle factories in the United States by Lewis W. Hine, for the National Child Labor Committee, New York, August 1908.

wikipedia