French nuclear scientists outline plans for management of actinides.

[NNadir]

The use of recycled nuclear fuel is already an industrial practice in many countries. Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Russia all use MOX fuel, a plutonium based fuel in their nuclear reactors, but none of these nations do so quite on the scale of France, which operates more than half of the plutonium fueled reactors in Europe.

Although this advanced approach is now a widely used practice - its chief goal to minimize the volume of spent nuclear fuel and its long term toxicity, while the ability to maximize use of nuclear resourses has been of far less importance. The French plan calls for the management and use of plutonium for the next several decades, until it is critically needed (pun intended) in the Gen IV nuclear plant that will be build in the mid 21-st century. Note that the French intend to shift to multiple cycles of plutunioum, so that essentially all of it is destroyed either by fission or transmutation. Current French policy employs only a single plutonium recycle.

I found it an interesting read and offer it for those who may be interested: http://www.nea.fr/html/pt/docs/iem/lasvegas04/06_Session_I/S1_05.pdf

This is a plan that would run over about a century and result in a series of reactors that consume all of their own wastes.

[Massacure]

1. Do you have any cost data comparing current reactors versus these listed?

[NNadir]

2. The Gen IV program is designed to address most of the drawbacks

encountered by earlier generations of reactors.

Included in these are cloture of the actinide fuel cycles through transmutation capability directed primarily at actinides, weapons proliferation resistance, high fuel burn-up, fuel resource utilization and lastly costs, including capital costs of construction.

These are a series of evolutionary reactors and the program is not yet complete. I would expect the reactors to be relatively inexpensive. However I don't think any price ideas have been developed at this point.

The program is one that is planning for 20 years hence, should humanity survive global climate change.

[depakid]

3. This is interesting but what about Bataille's law?

and the waste they already have?

From a Frontline story I read:

French technocrats had never thought that the waste issue would be much of a problem. From the beginning the French had been recycling their nuclear waste, reclaiming the plutonium and unused uranium and fabricating new fuel elements. This not only gave energy, it reduced the volume and longevity of French radioactive waste. The volume of the ultimate high-level waste was indeed very small: the contribution of a family of four using electricity for 20 years is a glass cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter. It was assumed that this high-level waste would be buried in underground geological storage and in the 80s French engineers began digging exploratory holes in France's rural regions.

To the astonishment of France's technocrats, the populations in these regions were extremely unhappy. There were riots. The same rural regions that had actively lobbied to become nuclear power plant sites were openly hostile to the idea of being selected as France's nuclear waste dump. In retrospect, Mandil says, it's not surprising. It's not the risk of a waste site, so much as the lack of any perceived benefit. "People in France can be proud of their nuclear plants, but nobody wants to be proud of having a nuclear dustbin under its feet." In 1990, all activity was stopped and the matter was turned over to the French parliament, who appointed a politician, Monsieur Bataille, to look into the matter.

Christian Bataille resembles the French comedian Jacques Tati. His face breaks into a broad grin when asked why he was appointed to this task. "They were desperate," he says. "In France, executive power dominates much more than in Anglo-Saxon countries. So that if the Executive asks parliament to do something it means they are really at the end of their ideas."

Bataille went and spoke to the people who were protesting and soon realized that the engineers and bureaucrats had greatly misunderstood the psychology of the French people. The technocrats had seen the problem in technical terms. To them, the cheapest and safest solution was to permanently bury the waste underground. But for the rural French says Bataille, "the idea of burying the waste awoke the most profound human myths. In France we bury the dead, we don't bury nuclear waste...there was an idea of profanation of the soil, desecration of the Earth."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

[NNadir]

4. Bataille's "Law?"

What you are discussing is not a "law," as in a "law" of physics or for that matter a "law" of chemistry. Bataille is a politician. He is not a physical scientist. One suspects that he neither knows nor cares very much about the physics of actinide recycling or the chemistry of actinide recycling.

One can always find, anywhere on earth, a subset of people who convince themselves that so called "nuclear waste" is the only form of energy "waste" that is important, and that no other waste matters, even if such waste is infinitely more dangerous. (It happens that carbon dioxide is probably the most dangerous waste there is, although not many people agnonize all that much over it.)

One can always find, anywhere on earth, a subset of people who will elevate the concerns of that other subset, the subset of people who focus only on so called "nuclear waste," to make them more important than they are.

However, in this context, that there are people who elevate fission products and actinides (which by the way injure almost no one) over carbon dioxide is irrelevant.

The original post in this thread refers to physical scientists, who are people to whom physical laws matter, not "sociological" laws, or "psychological" laws or even "political" laws.

If you look at the original link, you will find that it is about things like reactor design, fuel burn-up, transmutation rates, partition rates, cooling periods, equilibrium ratios, etc.

There isn't anything at all about the social "sciences," nor should there be in this context.

The fact is that actinide recycling is a feasible concept that is clearly understood on a technical basis. French scientists are preparing for it, because the French know that their nuclear program has been an enormous success on which the long term future of their nation depends. They are light years ahead of almost any other Western nation on this score. Their lights will stay on, independent of events surrounding fossil fuels. They have physical scientists who are working to see that this remains true for their grandchildren. Note in any case that these people are not discussing "waste," but are discussing "recycling." This is exactly as it should be.

People can make political decisions based on all sorts of nonsensical imagination, of course, and frequently do so. This is particularly the case where the word "nuclear" is involved. The entire discussion of nuclear energy is frequently nonsensical, and although I have heard that the "Frontline" episode was rare in attempting rational balance, much of what you hear from any of the media - PBS included - about nuclear energy is, frankly, hysterical, sensationalized and distorted. The media is generally a vast force of ignorance. If the media is somehow attempting to elevate a so called "Bataille's Law" to a level equivalent to the laws of physics and chemistry, it is merely demonstrating a consistent ability to screw things up, to elevate the irrational over the rational.

Not one French citizen has ever been injured by the storage of spent fuel, ever. This is exactly the same as the case in the United States. If the media chooses to focus its attentions on people who are freaking out because the imagine that someone, somewhere, someday might be injured, and if they do so at a time when energy waste and energy use involving other forms of energy is actively killing people, there is something vastly wrong with the picture.

[depakid]

5. The trouble the pro nuke people have

is dealing with concerns about where to store the waste- and as you can see, no one in France wants the stuff- so it's all stored above ground. No matter how efficent the process- and the French very efficient, you still generate extremely toxic material.

You can use all the arrogant technical arguments you want- but if you don't get people to accept the technology- or in France's case the waste- you've got a serious problem. Probably THE most serious difficulty to getting nuke plants built.

Bataille's Law is forcing people to deal with this in France, but the US isn't France....

[NNadir]

6. Everyone in France wants carbon dioxide though?

Or do some people object to carbon dioxide in France?

Is there some special reason you do not examine this case?

Do you imagine that the French are in favor of oil slicks?

What about soot? Are the French in favor of soot?

You have not evoked a law of any kind, but merely, again, raised an irrelevant point that has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand, which is French scientific analysis of actinide recycling.

The trouble that people who are anti-nuke is that they simply attempt to isolate the issue of so called "nuclear waste," and demonstrate no concern at all with other forms of energy waste.

I have been to France over 50 times. Many times I have tried to engage my French friends into a discussion of the subject of nuclear energy, but usually they are unexcited about the issue. Their lights are on; they work; and that's about it. One can almost hear them thinking, "stupid Americans." They have a point in this case. There may be some French who feel otherwise, but my personal perception is that while they garner much attention from some Americans, they don't garner all that much attention in France.

In any case, your comments are technically irrelevant. Even so, according to your link, the majority of people in France support nuclear power. From your link:

Second, Mandil cites cultural factors. France has a tradition of large, centrally managed technological projects. And, he says, they are popular. "French people like large projects. They like nuclear for the same reasons they like high speed trains and supersonic jets."


Part of their popularity comes from the fact that scientists and engineers have a much higher status in France than in America. Many high ranking civil servants and government officials trained as scientists and engineers (rather than lawyers, as in the United States), and, unlike in the U.S. where federal administrators are often looked down upon, these technocrats form a special elite. Many have graduated from a few elite schools such as the Ecole Polytechnic. According to Mandil, respect and trust in technocrats is widespread. "For a long time, in families, the good thing for a child to become was an engineer or a scientist, not a lawyer. We like our engineers and our scientists and we are confident in them."


Thirdly, he says, the French authorities have worked hard to get people to think of the benefits of nuclear energy as well as the risks. Glossy television advertising campaigns reinforce the link between nuclear power and the electricity that makes modern life possible. Nuclear plants solicit people to take tours--an offer that six million French people have taken up. Today, nuclear energy is an everyday thing in France.


Many polls have been taken of French public opinion and most find that about two-thirds of the population are strongly in favor of nuclear power. It's not that the French don't have a gut fear of nuclear power. Psychologist Paul Slovic and his colleagues at Decision Research in Eugene, Oregon, discovered in their surveys that many French people have similar negative imagery and fears of radiation and disaster as Americans. The difference is that cultural, economic and political forces in France act to counteract these fears.

What part of "Part of their popularity comes from the fact that scientists and engineers have a much higher status in France than in America," do you not understand?

The French, being a people with a long history of excelling in the sciences, understand concepts like external costs.

They can easily understand this simple concept:

No matter how efficient the the game that other wastes don't matter, extremely toxic material is produced by all forms of energy. It happens that so called "nuclear waste," is still the only form of (exajoule scale) energy waste that has not caused vast human tragedy.

It happens by the way, that storing spent nuclear fuel above ground (or at least where it is readily accessible for recovery) is the safest and most rational way to deal with it, since it is clearly true that this spent fuel will be a future resource of immense value in the improbable case that humanity survives global climate change. Thus even if an appeal to ignorance results in this outcome, it is probably all for the best.