What about reprocessing?

[struggle4progress]

John Murawski, Staff Writer

... "From the perspective of waste reduction, it doesn't really give us any benefit," said Felix Killar, senior director of nuclear insurance and fuel supply for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group in Washington ...

http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/388784.html

[amandabeech]

1. Calling NNadir!

Seriously, if he doesn't show up for this thread, you should PM him.

This is one of his favorite topics, and I'm sure he'd either pick this article apart or refer you to one of his previous posts or threads or both.

[Dead_Parrot]

2. While we're waiting...

...I'll quietly direct you to the storage medium of fossil fuel waste, which you're breathing at the moment. I may also glance meaningfully out of my window at the Pacific ocean, where carbonic acid is finishing off the reefs...

[amandabeech]

3. Lovely!

Then I can go out and do a soil sample of my yard here in Pennsylvania, which is undoubtedly contaminated with who knows what from decades of coal ash containing acid rain.

[Dead_Parrot]

4. Yeuch...

I don't know what grows in your soil, but I wouldn't want to eat it... :)

[NNadir]

6. Here I am. Do I have to say anything?

Ah shit, I can't help myself. :-)

Reporters write illiterate articles all day long, since no one has to understand science to become a journalist.

The operative point is that uranium is cheap, because it is abundant. The writer of this article has misconstrued this point to make it seem that "there is no solution to the 'problem' of so called 'nuclear waste'." People don't recycle nuclear fuel because it is more expensive to do that than it is to simply use virgin uranium.

So called commercial "nuclear waste," is not really a problem. The world has been handling commercial nuclear waste for over 50 years now, without a single death attributed to it.

Irrespective of the carping however, nuclear power is on the upsurge. The world demand for virgin uranium is going to rise, and with it the disparity between the cost of recycling and fresh uranium will fall. However the cost of fuel is, at the end of the day, a trivial factor in the cost of nuclear energy. An increase in the price of uranium from the current 50-60 dollars/kg to $1000/kg would only result in a marginal rise in the cost of nuclear energy. As uranium prices rise, and as thorium becomes an increasingly valuable commodity - the incentive to recycle will increase.

The issue is economic and political, not technical.

Every nation that is serious about nuclear power - with the exception of South Africa - where the 24 reactors planned will be of the unfortunate pebble bed type - sees a long term potential for fuel recycling. Most nuclear professionals know that this will be the ultimate outcome of the fuel cycle.

I personally believe that no long term permanent structures for any radioactive isotope, including the problematic fission products, Cs-135, Tc-99 and I-129, should ever be built. I note that many nuclear professionals do not agree with me. Whether or not my views are accepted in the coming centuries - the centuries in question only occurring if humanity survives global climate change - the risks of nuclear power remain extremely small compared to the alternatives for continuous on demand power needs. The claim that any long term geological structures for the containing of nuclear materials is unsafe is absurd. It is scare mongering and misinformation.

Personally, I think there are good reasons to recycle nuclear fuel, if only through regulatory fiat. Recycled fuel has excellent non-proliferation properties because of the fundamental way it effects plutonium isotopic mixes.

The main point is that the alleged safety incidents occurred in the 1980's - almost twenty years ago - and the illiterate reporter is still raising them in an attempt to isolate the question of risk from spent fuel from all other energy risks.

His article would be far less disingenuous if it included a list of every event producing death related to fossil fuel - but then the newspaper would have to be thousands of pages long and it would be dull and uninteresting since people don't give a flying fuck about fossil fuel waste.

This article does nothing more than try to obfuscate the truth: There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[mastein]

5. National Security Concerns dominate that debate

Reprocessing has been debated since the energy crisis of the 1970s, and again throughout the Yucca Mountain storage debate for the next generation. The main reason why it is not on the table is that reprocessing leads to making of Pu and other isotopes which can be used to make nuclear weapons. The government's position, going back to the Carter administration is that the cost of securing those isotopes is greater than any benefit that the reprocessing could give us.

That said, given the already ridiculously high security around the country already plus the high cost of oil (which isn't going down soon) it might be worth a reanalysis of the topic.

Regards,

[jpak]

7. Commercial reprocessing in the US was a commercial failure

In the early days of nuclear power, the federal government granted reactor operators a Plutonium Production Credit (one of the many incentives offered to reactor operators - one of the others was providing uranium enrichment services *at cost*).

This program paid reactor owners for plutonium accumulated in spent fuel. Plutonium that was to be recovered by commercial reprocessing at some future date.

Only one commercial reprocessing plant has ever operated in the US - the Nuclear Fuel Services plant at West Valley New York. It reprocessed ~640 metric tonnes of spent fuel and produced ~1200 kg of Pu-nitrate which was sold for ~$20 million.

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:IToGp_Nnh0YJ:apollo.osti.gov/osti/opennet/document/purecov/nfsrepo.html+West+Valley+New+York+Nuclear+Fuel+Services&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

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

....and produced 600,000 gallons of high-level liquid wastes which presently stored in leaking underground tanks...

The plant, however, was never profitable and was closed...and turned over to the state of New York....and then again to the federal government.

It will cost US taxpayers an estimated $8 billion to decommission this facility....or about $6.7 million per kg of Pu recovered.

Such a deal.

I also note that India and North Korea used reprocessing to acquire Pu for their nuclear weapons program.

This is direct evidence that reprocessing is a threat to world peace.

Ignorant writers indeed....

[NNadir]

8. Um, it's a stretch to go back to 1972, no?

Gasoline was much less than a dollar in 1972. So what?

This may have escaped the notice of some people, but many things have changed since 1972. The world is not static, nor is technology. Even the failed solar PV industry has become more affordable since then - although it still is not more than parlor dressing when measured in exajoules.

The production of nuclear industry has grown by a factor of 50 since 1972.

. Since the industry measures itself here in units of thousands of terrawatt-hours, 1000 terrawatt-hours = 3.6 exajoules, this is impressive.

Reprocessing is still not economic compared to virgin uranium. This is because uranium is cheap. When uranium becomes more expensive - and it will because, measured in exajoules produced, the nuclear industry is expanding rapidly because it is safer than all other on demand scalable sources of energy - the economics will change. At that point, it will be economic to reprocess fuel.

As I state many times - I believe that reprocessing should be mandated, irrespective of the economics, especially given the huge advances that have been made in the processing technology in recent decades, such as pyroprocessing and electrorefining. The reason I believe that reprocessing should be mandated I often state - to change the isotopic composition of remaining weapons grade material; to minimize the need for mining (on environmental grounds), and to provide nuclear resources for many future generations that will need this material in the case that humanity survives global climate change - the probability of which is ever decreasing as global climate change spins out of control.

In fact, the reprocessing industry existed at all in 1972 because of a 1950's calculation that the world would run out of uranium in the 21st century. Nobody realized in those days that uranium is as common as tin. In fact, uranium resources prove to be vast when compared with the 1970's assessment. Mostly the reprocessing industry survives because of political considerations, not economic ones.

The conceit of the anti-environmental anti-nuclear movement is that any cost associated with nuclear energy - or any plant that operated poorly - is justification for saying that nuclear energy is unacceptable. The scheme is dependent on the sleight of hand that extracts the nuclear industry from all other energy industries - "nuclear exceptionalism."

Anti-environmentalist anti-nuclear activists think that they can say "billion dollars" and impress someone. This is further evidence of this group's general incapacity with issues of numbers or issues of scale. (Incompetence with issues of scale is a big player in why these people think that solar PV electricity is a big player in the world energy supply - it is not.)

The United States burns 21,000,000 barrels of oil per day.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/mer/pdf/pages/sec11_6.pdf

The price of oil is now over $65/barrel. Thus the United States consumes for energy purposes - ignoring for the moment coal and natural gas - 8 billion dollars worth of fuel every 6 days. Much of this money is sent to people who have horrible ethics. In the meantime, this fuel, oil, is killing human beings, poisoning the air, destroying ecosystems, and creating tyranny world wide at an ever increasing rate. The external cost of oil is not measured, or billed or charged and no one pays for it except with their flesh.

However, no one, not one person, died from operations at West Valley. It is doubtful that anyone ever will. Some people wish that trillions of dollars be spent on nuclear risks, completely ignoring the cost per life saved. It is not morally true that one should a billion dollars to save a single person from a putative risk from nuclear systems while de-funding simpler programs that could save many thousands or even millions of lives for the same cost.

The anti-nuclear case is becoming increasingly shrill because effectively the world is ignoring it on the grounds it is ridiculous. Most people can do math.

A person, by the way, who thinks that things are exactly as they were in 1972 is called a conservative.

[jpak]

9. 1972-thinking???? Let's look at what's happening today...

Japan is building a $20 billion reprocessing plant.

It is a white elephant and will NEVER be economic...

http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/vol_9/9-4/rokkasho.html

http://www.ieer.org/comments/rokk-pr.html

http://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-2/takagi.html

http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/vol_9/9-2/puend.html

More about the history and economics of reprocessing (from Harvard and the National Academy of Sciences)...

http://www.nap.edu/books/0309052262/html/413.html

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:U-4Mql_mP8MJ:bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/BCSIA_content/documents/repro-report.pdf+japan+reprocessing+economics&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Let's see how well Britain's THORP reprocessing plant (Sellafield) is doing these days....

http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/nuclear/sellafield/37998.html

ooops!!!!!

...and the only people advocating reprocessing ARE conservatives, that collaborate with well known nuclear proliferators...

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:b5u4Kbah-R0J:www.armscontrolcenter.org/resources/20050728_energy_daily.pdf+japan+reprocessing+20+billion&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

on edit:

:rofl:

[NNadir]

10. Yeah I know, the nuclear industry is being shut down by the solar industry

It is failing because of economics and will vanish because of the unavailability of uranium and because the solar industry is growing exponentially.

Blah, blah, blah. It's the same old, same old, same old.

One by one the rotten timbers of the anti-environmental anti-nuclear religion are being kicked out from under it.

I actually OWN the 1996 book on transmutation technologies. I read it years ago, shortly after it was printed. What it says is that recycling is NOT economic now because dumping waste is cheaper. It does not say that nuclear power is failing, just that geological disposal is preferable to recycling. This short term case will be less and less true because many exajoules of extra nuclear production is now planned world wide.

I note that the chapter linked begins with a discussion of event in the 1960's.

Here are the committe recommendations that can be found on page 349 of that work:

The committee recommendations pursuant to the above conclusions are as follows:

The Department of Energy should consider the removal of actinides as one option in its broader systemic evaluation of the thermal strategy for Yucca Mountain.

Pursuit of a HLW repository should be continued.

The benefits of S&T should continue to be studied as part of the continuing evaluation of repository performance. This should include explicit consideration of the optimum recovery of various radionuclides.

S&T technology should continue to be developed in an orderly manner, and by the turn of the century it should be brought to the point where preferred technologies could be selected and demonstration projects initiated if deemed appropriate. This development should be closely coordinated with continued development of the ALMR and its attendant nuclear fuel cycle.

The design of the repository should incorporate features that would allow spent fuel to be readily retrieved and reprocessed and the resulting HLW to be emplaced at a higher effective density.

http://www.nap.edu/books/0309052262/html/349.html

Here are the overall recommendations of the National Research Council made in 1996:

PRINCIPAL RECOMMENDATIONS
The committee recommends the following:

None of the S&T system concepts reviewed eliminates the need for a geologic repository. DOE should continue efforts to develop a geologic repository for spent LWR fuel.

The current policy of using the once-through fuel cycle for commercial reactors, with disposal of the spent fuel as HLW, should be continued.

Fuel retrievability should be extended to a reasonable time (on the order of 100 years) to avoid foreclosing alternative fuel strategies that may be in the national interest.

Research and development should be conducted on selected topics to support the cost-effective future application of S&T of commercial spent fuel and separations for defense waste applications.

A sustained, but modest, and carefully focused program of research and development over the next decade could prepare the technical basis for advanced separation technology for the radionuclides in spent LWR fuel and for decisions on the possible applications of S&T as part of the more efficient future use of fissionable resources. The research and development effort should focus on the factors that strongly influence fuel-cycle economics, especially the costs of reprocessing spent LWR fuel, minimalization of long-lived radionuclides to secondary wastes in the reprocessing cycle, and on the need to minimize the possible increase in proliferation risks that could result from the commercial use of plutonium in recycle fuels.

http://www.nap.edu/books/0309052262/html/10.html

I note that I do not agree with all of these recommendations but I do agree with two notable recommendations of this work you have linked: Number 1, I agree that: "Fuel retrievability should be extended to a reasonable time (on the order of 100 years) to avoid foreclosing alternative fuel strategies that may be in the national interest." Number 2, I agree that "A sustained, but modest, and carefully focused program of research and development over the next decade could prepare the technical basis for advanced separation technology for the radionuclides in spent LWR fuel and for decisions on the possible applications of S&T as part of the more efficient future use of fissionable resources."

http://www.nap.edu/books/0309052262/html/10.html


The anti-environmental anti-nuclear movement that is now being swept aside has great difficulty with context, commensurate with it's poor comprehension of numbers and scale.


But it really doesn't matter. The issue of so called "nuclear waste" is not an exigent problem. No one has ever been harmed by the storage of commercial so called "nuclear waste."

The problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a much greater problem. It is killing people right now.

[jpak]

11. LOL!!!!!!

More name calling and bullshit.

When Democrats take back the country, all this pro-nuclear anti-solar nonsense will come to a screeching halt...

:rofl:

[NNadir]

12. Well, making predictions is easier than producing results.

:eyes:

I'll add this to the other "predictions" about energy that I hear from this crowd, including the ones about the imminent demise of the nuclear industry that, like the solar nirvana, is often predicted but never actually happens.

There is NO "anti-solar" nonsense. The solar industry - with all the hype and good will - could shut down the nuclear industry if it worked on a significant scale. The problem is that it doesn't work, except for a few relatively wealthy people.

The "solar will save us" crowd - which is a profossil fuels crowd since solar PV power is unable to produce anywhere on scale - wants to project its failure on nuclear energy, but this is merely a matter of changing the subject.

The unit is exajoules. The solar PV industry has not produced an exajoule in its history. The nuclear industry produces 30 of them every year.

That said, as I say many times, I will be happy to discuss the merits of various energy alternatives when fossil fuel use is shut down, meaning that the problem of global climate change is solved.

I have no faith in the solar industry's ability to participate to an appreciable extent. It's been all talk for far too long - but if it does, I'll be happily surprised, even thrilled. This is one case where I thirst to eat my words, but thus far I don't have to do so.

I don't care if people install solar capacity. I'm not against solar energy because I'm FOR nuclear energy. I am anti-fossil fuel. That's clear and that's simple. I note repeatedly that solar PV is not as safe as nuclear power - but it is safer than coal, oil and gas.

Yet again: http://www.itas.fzk.de/deu/tadn/tadn013/frbi01a.htm

Solar power is available to anyone with enough bucks to install it. Not one pro-nuclear person has ever demonstrated against solar power. We don't have to do so. It's no skin off our backs, especially those of us who support the nuclear energy because we understand global climate change and risk. If people have the money, and they want to spend the money in this way, well, shit, it beats a Hummer.

It would be easy for the "solar will save us" crowd if they had some hard numbers like these:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

But the entire renewable energy industry, of which solar PV is a tiny fraction, actually has numbers like these:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table17.xls

Given that global climate change is happening now, and not in some putative future where the Democratic Party adopts the measures of a completely distracted minority of its membership, that's a problem.

The Democratic Party does not exist for the purpose of quashing nuclear power. (Maybe though, the so called "Green" party does.) Many Democrats, including the late Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, have always been fond of nuclear power. The worst commercial reactor ever built in the United States, the N reactor at Hanford, was specifically pushed by a Democratic President, John Kennedy, even though many nuclear engineers had reservations about it.

I note that when I switched sides from anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear, I felt no compunction whatsoever to change party affiliation. My commitment to social justice, health, the environment, the rule of law, peace, the use of reason, and secular government is in no way at odds with my support for nuclear power. In fact this positions all speak in favor of nuclear power as opposed to the rich boy's toys represented by solar PV. I am not interested in solutions that only apply to rich people. I do note that historically, for a brief period in the 1980's and 1990's, most Democrats did not favor nuclear power. However, that is changing, and I am very proud of my part in working within the party to elucidate the issue. This 2001 Field poll in California, gives some clarity to the ridiculous claim that being a Democrat is coterminous with being anti-nuclear:

http://www.sacbee.com/static/archive/news/special/power/052301priorities.html

According to Rasmussen, for what its worth, the plurality among Democrats in favor of nuclear power remains high: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Energy_Nuclear%20Power_August%2016.htm

But the issue is not determined by polling, it is determined by reality. I want my party to win, and I want it to govern responsibly, through the application of reason and common sense. There is a very important issue with which I trust my party: Either nuclear power will expand or will we all be overwhelmed by global climate change. It's really, really, really simple. There is no other workable option. I fully trust the members of my party to recognize that, since the members of my party, in general, think rather than emote.

Although there have been some individual conflicts and failures in my party, overall my party has always worked to advance the truth. Here is a truth with which I trust my party: There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[Name removed]

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