Debating the Nuclear Waste Problem

[Javaman]

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/debating-the-nuclear-waste-problem/

With Nevada’s Yucca Mountain facility apparently out of the picture as a nuclear waste repository, government nuclear experts say interim measures might be needed for a very long time.

>snip<

Nuclear fuel can be stored safely for long periods, Mr. Jaczko said in remarks to reporters, and the commission will “work to see what that timeframe is really like — 100 years, 200 years, 400.”

>snip<

Earlier this month the Energy Department convened a “blue ribbon commission” to evaluate all options, including new kinds of reactors that could run partly on waste form the old ones, and convert some of the most toxic and longest-lived materials into less troublesome materials.But there is no clear path forward at this point.

>snip<

Metal parts of such casks can begin corroding in weeks if salt hits them, the N.R.C. has found. Whether this happens depends partly on the temperature of the cask (it is heated by the waste) and by the level of humidity in the air. The engineer who headed the Yucca program under the Bush administration, Edward F. Sproat III, also attending the conference, said, “you can’t keep that stuff in those canisters forever. They’re not designed that way.”

[bemildred]

1. I have thought for a long time we should either:

1.) Bury it in a subduction zone.
2.) Send it into the Sun.

[BeFree]

2. First

Quit making more of it.

Its stupid to keep making more of it when we don't know what to do with what we have. If nuke wastes were spread around like air pollution is, we'd all be dead by now. The shit just ain't natural.

[bemildred]

4. I am agnostic on nuclear power, in the sense that we need to think it through first.

So I sort of agree with you. However, the theoretical question of what to do with radioactive waste has good answers, they just tend to be expensive make nuclear power uneconomic (i.e. unprofitable).

[TheMadMonk]

14. How about we make two basic assumptions. One science based, the other economic.

We acctually have the ability to figure out how to safely conduct certain proven laboratory scale proccesses on an industrial scale economically.

And instead of attempting to maximize profit potential of each separate process, we aim for simply breaking better than even over the entire cycle of opperation even at the expense of low or negative profitability of individual proccesses. ie. selling stable and industrially and medically useful radionucleides at below their production costs.

Given that, the safe operation commercial of a liquid salt reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor is a viable option.

• Inherently safe operation is achieved through a design that takes advantages of inherent physics and chemistry to forces all possible failure modes down self damping paths.
  
• Absolute worst case accident scenario is a spill of material that does not disperse and can be cleaned up quickly with remotely controlled construction machinery; no plume to be carried away on the wind, and very low solubility to facilitate becoming waterborn.
  
• Scalable to a far greater degree than existing designs. Potentially to the level of safely powering railway locomotives and similar sized machinery, eg. mining equipment.
  
• Cheaper construction.
  
• Waste production is 800 kg per GW year, much much less than produced by a conventional uranium burner;
  
• Waste radiotoxic lifetime is 300 years as oposed to tens of thousands;
  
• Considerably lower proliferation/weaponisation potential of fuel than existing reactors.
  
• Many end products have considerable economic value and radioactive decay modes run fast enough to make extraction for commercial purposes viable; and
  
• Very short lived products have numerous medical uses.

The primary problem is the dificulty of some of the chemistry/proccessing. It's all possible, but expensive. But there are considerable secondary and tertiary benefits that offset the costs considerably. Particularly in terms of offseting the extremely difficult requirements of extremely long term storage and the amount that has to be stored.

Coal waste is both enormous in volume and in the required storage periods for waste materials. Essentially we are ultimately relying on geological proccesses and slow dispersion into the environment to take over looking after the problem from us in the long term. Then there is of course the CO2 which to date we have ignored entirely.

Solar power has a similar or larger land requirement than coal waste storage. Coexistence with other land uses is a virtual must. Here the solar tower concept comes to the fore, where greenhouses are part of the structure.

Over time land is probably the most problematical single cost, and molten salt nuclear reactor and the disposal/sequestration of the waste has the smallest land footprint by far. Low land footprint for generation and reprocessing is such that small reactors can be situated close to the demand.

Virtually all the cons are addressable in the form of how can we do it cheap enough to make the rest possible. And one of the counter intuitive benefits is that with nuclear it will be addressed in exactly that form and not the current practice of cheap as possible to maximise absolute and percentage profit right now. Even discounting community sentiment regarding a nuclear incident, going for the biggest buck per reporting period and taking chances not at all attractive since virtually all costs when they do come are to the operators in the form of lost profits and the most major cost to the commuinity is loss of service.

[BeFree]

18. Eh?

Lets look at that last sentence, shall we:

"..not at all attractive since virtually all costs when they do come are to the operators in the form of lost profits and the most major cost to the commuinity{sic.} is loss of service."

Lets say that they can get waste control down to what someone here said "about 400 years".

Now lets use your "..costs when they do come.." and run that out 400 years. How in the world can they do that? How can they figure out the costs over 400 years? Has that ever been done? And who's gonna pay for it? Us or them?

[TheMadMonk]

19. Because at 400 year (perhaps up to 1000) entombment is more than...

...adequate. Glasification or baked into ceramics and encased in concrete.

Cheap as chips.

The waste that makes for prohibitive storage requirements is the stuff that needs to be stored for 10,000 years and more. However the thorium cycle produces very little of this class of waste.

[Statistical]

20. Ever heard of a trust?

Pass legislation requiring the establishment of a "nuclear storage and security trust fund".

Utilities currently pay by the amount of electricity generated. That is a poor metric. Instead charge utilities by waste tonnage (would encourage reprocessing) isotope half-life (length of time safe storage is needed), and by activity level (hotter waste requires more precautions).

Funds would be contributed to a trust-fund. Interest from fund would pay ongoing storage, monitoring, and security costs.

[kristopher]

8. Are you trying to fool gullible people with a crackpot idea?

Have you ever bothered to check what would be involved with that? It isn't a workable idea, not even close; why would you try to act as if it were?

[bemildred]

10. Please do explain what you mean further. nt

[kristopher]

11. It was clear the first time.

[bemildred]

12. Well, OK then, never mind. nt

[TheWraith]

13. Or better yet, just recycle it like Europe does.

We don't need to either store or destroy it.

[OKIsItJustMe]

22. This is a widely misunderstood process

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_risk/nuclear_proliferation_and_terrorism/nuclear-reprocessing.html

Nuclear Reprocessing: Dangerous, Dirty, and Expensive

Download: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear-reprocessing-factsheet.pdf">Nuclear Reprocessing Factsheet

Background

...

While some supporters of a U.S. reprocessing program believe it would help solve the nuclear waste problem, reprocessing would not reduce the need for storage and disposal of radioactive waste. ...

... reprocessing does not reduce the need for storage and disposal of radioactive waste, and a geologic repository would still be required. Plutonium constitutes only about one percent of the spent fuel from U.S. reactors. After reprocessing, the remaining material will be in several different waste forms, and the total volume of nuclear waste will have been increased by a factor of twenty or more, including low-level waste and plutonium-contaminated waste. The largest component of the remaining material is uranium, which is also a waste product because it is contaminated and undesirable for reuse in reactors. Even if the uranium is classified as low-level waste, new low-level nuclear waste facilities would have to be built to dispose of it. And to make a significant reduction in the amount of high-level nuclear waste that would require disposal, the used fuel would need to be reprocessed and reused many times with an extremely high degree of efficiency—an extremely difficult endeavor that would likely take centuries to accomplish.

...

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

3. I vote for launching high level waste towards the sun.

A large reactor produces about 3 cubic meters of HLW per year which holds about 95% of all the radioactive waste produced.
Launch the high level waste into the sun and store the low/intermediate level waste.
A nonrecoverable launch vehichle that needs no life support or many other complex systems could be used.

That's what NASA can do from now on!
Just be sure to launch from some remote desert island incase something messes up. :shrug:

[wtmusic]

5. A ton of hi-level nuclear waste crashing into the sea is not an option

and there's no guarantee it wouldn't crash 1,000mi away on land.

[Statistical]

6. Two problems with that

1) unless lift capabilities come down in price you make fuel cost prohibitive. Sending anything into space is insanely expensive and waste if no different. Lift costs are about $10,000 to $20,000 per kg just to geo-transfer orbit. To break orbit with escape velocity to safely clear earth plus improved navigation and tracking to reach sun could easily double that. Say $20K to $40K per kg. Just to put it into perspective nuclear fuel (including ore, fabrication, milling, enriching, and assembly) costs about $1500 per kg. That would be a prohibitive cost increase.

2) Adds CO2 cost. rocket launches release a lot of CO2. You have to add that CO2 cost to life-cycle of nuclear power.

ON EDIT: You are saying launch no uranium portion of spent fuel. That would be possible. The economics get better.
Roughly 4% of "spent fuel" is minor anticides, plutonium, and fission products. So 4% launched * $40K per kg = $1600 per kg of fuel.
That roughly doubles fuel costs. Of course you need to reprocess the fuel so separate uranium from everything else. That about triples cost. So we are talking something in the $7500 per kg of in fuel costs for completely fuel life cycle (including reprocessing and launching). Fuel costs are about 1/2 cent per kWh so 5x increase in fuel costs would raise price of nuclear energy by 2 cents per kWh.

Still rather expensive. If in future lift costs come down, or reprocessing becomes more efficient it could be viable.

[bergie321]

16. Would you be comfortable

With the launchpad being built in your neighborhood?
With a launch vehicle with parts made in China?

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

17. Would you be comfortable

with reading comprehension?
"Just be sure to launch from some remote desert island in case something messes up."

[NNadir]

7. How many seconds can the anti-nuke dangerous fossil fuel industry contain it's toxic waste?

I believe the answer is zero seconds.

There is NOT ONE of the concern trolls - all of them technically incompetent to understand used nuclear fuel - who can demonstrate that ONE person has been injured by the storage of spent nuclear fuel.

There is NOT ONE of these same concern tolls who gives a shit about how many people died from dangerous fossil fuel waste in the last ten seconds, the answer being "many."

Nuclear power need not be perfect to be vastly superior to all the stuff anti-nukes don't care about. It only needs to be vastly superior, which, in fact it is.

[kristopher]

9. Good thing we have renewable energy isn't it? We don't need either nuclear or fossil waste.

[NNadir]

15. Bull. In spite of 50 years of such wishful thinking prattling so called "renewable energy"

has failed to produce significant energy, hydroelectricity excepted.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/renew_energy_consump/table1.html">Hasn't changed much over the years I've been posting it in the face of hand waving, speculation, soothsaying and wishful thinking.

Thus far it all has been lipstick on the dangerous fossil fuel pig and is usually hyped by people - the ignorant circus masses excepted - by people who are paid by dangerous fossil fuel companies.

Hydroelectricity actually killed more than 1/4 of a million last century, not that we hear anything from green washing anti-nukes about that topic, no hand wringing about actually observed dead.

They. Couldn't. Care. Less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Wind is a trivial form of energy with a short untested history and yet it has killed more people in the United States than nuclear, which is the largest source of greenhouse gas free primary energy - nuclear energy - has injured in more than 50 years of operations.

Two months ago, a three million dollar windmill weighing 187 tons crashed without warning in a field across from a private home.

NOT ONE hand waving wishful thinking scare monger here reported it. Zero. Zilch.

http://www.oneidadispatch.com/articles/2009/12/27/news/doc4b3830570922b087278841.txt



If these things ever get to an exajoule scale, we're going to have deaths all over the place, still accompanied by huge loud mouthed concern from people who know zero science about imaginary deaths from nuclear energy and who couldn't care less about the people who are actually killed by stuff that is vastly inferior to nuclear energy from an environmental, economic and sustainability perspective.

[LaserSpot]

21. Do nothing

We don't need to do anything about nuclear waste right now. It's is being kept onsite at the locations where it is produced. As the article suggests, this is a political problem, not a technical one. There's no reason why nuclear waste can't stay where it is until there's a shift in politics that would allow it to be buried or reprocessed.

The nuclear waste problem is trivial compared to the waste produced by coal. Although a pound of nuclear waste may be more toxic than a pound of waste from coal, there it a lot less of it and it's much easier to contain. Nuclear plants produce a few thousand tons of waste, but coal plants produce billions of tons, most of it released into the air. If you're worried about nuclear radiation, coal plants emit much more radiation than nuclear plants do.