NMR Shows That Nuclear Storage Degrades 385
eldavojohn writes to point out recent research using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imagery that shows that certain nuclear waste storage containers may not be as safe as previously thought. From the article: "[R]adiation emitted from [plutonium] waste could transform one candidate storage material into less durable glass after just 1,400 years — much more quickly than thought... The problem is that the radioactive waste damages the matrix that contains it. Many of the waste substances, including plutonium-239, emit alpha radiation, which travels for only very short distances (barely a few hundredths of a millimeter) in the ceramic, but creates havoc along the way."
Waste? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) If this stuff is still hot, doesn't it mean there's still energy there we could use?
2) This stuff came from the ground, why can't we put it back there?
Re:1,400 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not Send it to the sun (Score:3, Insightful)
And if we had 100% success rate with rocket launch (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So why not sink it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or better yet, why not use it? There are hundreds (perhaps thousands!) of industrial uses for nearly every nuclear material imaginable. Everything from illumination products to smoke detection to electronic level detectors to medical imaging and therapy to decade-long batteries use nuclear materals. Not to mention that the Pu-239 mentioned in the article is an excellent source of nuclear fission for power production.
If we actually put the stuff to good use, we wouldn't have to bury, sink, or launch much of anything. Instead, we sit around and worry that terrorists are going to steal plutonium to make a very complicated implosion bomb rather than stealing the supposedly "safer" Uranium we currently use. Nevermind that the Uranium could be used to make a super-simple gun-type nuclear bomb that could be constructed without massive computational resources, dozens of nuclear scientists, and actual test sites that would show up on a seismograph. No, it's much better to worry about Plutonium.
Sorry for the rant. This is something of a hot button issue for me. It's just stupid that we're not putting all this *good* material to use rather than trying to find a place to bury it. It doesn't make a lick of sense to anyone except politicians.
Re:It's an economic problem in the US. (Score:5, Insightful)
The benefits of reprocessing aren't just limited to the physical amount of waste. Reprocessing also removes the actinides that are responsible for the oft-referenced 10,000-year storage. Without the actinides, the waste is safe after only about 300 years.
Re:Waste? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but the absolutely daft US regulations forbid extracting plutonium from spent fuel. After all, it might make it easier for terrists to get holda some and make a nukular bomb.
-b.
Re:It's an economic problem in the US. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, we don't reprocess it because there are some very serious special interest groups that have been very vocal and have blocked almost every attempt to build updated, new reactors and processing plants. Leaving us in a much more dangerous position than if they hadn't sounded off.
There are certain political movements that end up causing more harm, in the end, than the particular topic they are protesting. The no-nuclear-power crowd is one of them.
Three Mile Island is an example of how the system actually works to protect.
Chern...churn...that Ukraine power plant is an example of how the system fails.
The U.S. has exactly 0 old-Soviet designed power plants in operation.
Question: How many modern nuclear power plants are in France and Japan?
Question: Who leads the world in modern nuclear power plants?
It ain't the U.S. The U.S. has exactly 0 modern power plants in production. The U.S. has some of the most polluting oil and coal burning plants because the vocal nut jobs won't let us build modern plants of any kind.
Question: What major, technological leading power in the world has the most at-risk power production scheme?
Re:It's an economic problem in the US. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll give you vocal nuts blocking nuclear plants, but every excuse that I've heard about new plants of other kinds is simply that the new modern plants are simply too expensive, and vocal nuts are keeping people from building stinky old plants via the EPA.
Re:1,400 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:1,400 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Waste? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not?
2) Plutonium is a by-product of a uranium nuclear reactor. It doesn't really occur naturally.
It's either hotter than the stuff that comes out of the ground, in which case it should be better fuel and we should use it. Or it's not as hot, and it would be safer in the ground than the stuff we originally extracted from the ground.
'Sinking it' doesn't make it magically 'go away' (Score:4, Insightful)
Because, contrary to your Grade 6 "Earth Sciences Unit" animated filmstrip, subduction zones aren't neat little escalator-like places where material goes into some sort of geological garbage disposal system like you might have attached to your sink.
Instead they're messy places where continental blocks are crashing into each other in tremendously slow motion, riding up over, breaking off, dissolving, melting, all that good stuff. Material dropped on one of these places is could just lay there for the longer then we've been a species. However there is a strong possibility this material won't always just lie there but instead break up, on it's own or under subduction-related volcanic or seismic activity, and spread into the larger ecosystem (garbage in is indeed garbage out!)
While this breakdown & distribution could be a slow process it would be a chaotic environment and 'bad things' could just as well happen 'fast', with disastrous consequences. Keep in mind that while out of sight and generally low energy places the deep ocean beds are not disconnected from the rest of the planet and are also subject to disturbances; subduction zones hugely so.
So you're talking about essentially land-mining a significant chunk of the planet, some of the most unstable parts of the planet, with the possibility that still-lethal material could suddenly, randomly, re-enter our parts of the environment, with catastrophic results.
Yeah. No. Not a good idea.
Better to minimize the amount of material. Convert it into the least reactive forms economically & technically practical. Then using reliable systems (and that pretty much rules out 'under several thousand meters of water' with our current skills) isolate it as much as practicable in long-term stable places, and hope that future generations don't fuck with it in a bad way.
Finally, regarding the majority of your posting:
While there are indeed alarmist/ignorant/self-serving 'environmentalists', as there are boobs and headline-graspers in every part of human endeavor, there are also arrogant self-righteous techno-weenies with equally poor understanding of the topics on which they opine. As much as you look down on those you deem ignorant, those who are informed can look down on your ignorance, which to a self-aware person would suggest an attitude-check would be in order. (Frankly you come off not much different then the stereotyped asshats you rail against.)
Re:It's an economic problem in the US. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and we haven't "not-honored" any that we've signed on to, we've used clauses in treaties to pull out of the treaty itself, but we did it in the way agreed upon by that treaty, thus honoring the treaty. (We're idiots for doing so in most cases, but that doesn't mean we didn't honor the treaty.)
Re:1,400 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Why?
I myself am not coming back; only my genes will be, and then in a diluted form. I am not my genes; on the contrary, I am just a vehicle for my genes. They grew me in order to help them spread.
Don't worry, I agree with you about long-term planning. Indeed I have two sons and my thoughts are bent on their long-term wellbeing. All this gives me the euphoric glow of feeling virtuous. But that doesn't mean it's logical such that all parents who disagree are automatically in error.
Re:1,400 years (Score:3, Insightful)
Similar expectations 30 years ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's an economic problem in the US. (Score:2, Insightful)
Gross exaggeration. With reprocessing, where virtually all of the high level (and usable) fuel can be recovered, the remaining waste to be disposed of pales in comparison to the amount of radioactive heavy metals we dump into the air every year with coal plants. And here we can keep it all in one place.
As security and proliferation touch on current politics, let us set those aside for a later part of this discussion. As far as Pebble Bed reactors are concern, again this is a gross exaggeration. See the Wikipedia section on Pebble Bed criticism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor#C
A jammed feeder tube is a mechanical problem, relatively easily solved with proper design. The pebbles are unsuitable for diverting to weapons use. A gas-cooled reactor inside of a concrete shell (like this wall: http://gprime.net/video.php/planevsconcretewall [gprime.net]) is not top on my list of "things likely to break". Perhaps you would reveal in what way they have been proven to be much less safe?
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nucle
We have plenty of good reason to switch off coal, oil, ethanol, CARBON based fuels NOW. Not when the research is completed on something better. NOW. Fusion is HARD, we don't have it yet. Ecologically friendly, efficient solar cells are fine and dandy except for when the sun don't shine, and we don't have them yet. With fission, we have the technology to implement it today, stop carbon emissions today, stop coal plants from dumping radioactive heavy metals into the air TODAY. We can do more than one thing at one time, so why shouldn't we put nuclear energy in place while we research something even better. But holding out forever for the perfect energy source leaves us highly vulnerable in the meantime.
More reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc [wikipedia.org]
A clique of Fud'dites (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh noes, more heat to be trapped by the Oh-Zone layer! Duh, the point of nuclear power is we eliminate the great majority of our greenhouse gas production. Plutonium has a half-life? My god! Look at those big years, oh wait, that means that on its own it isn't very radioactive. But NPR said plutonium was the most toxic thing ever, even more than cyanide (like on James Bond)! EVEN IF that weren't pure FUD, when was the last time you were exposed to cyanide or nerve gas or any of the other scary stuff plutonium is routinely compared to by fearmongers? That's right, NEVER! Beyond the total non-existence of any possibility of you coming into contact with plutonium, it's not all that dangerous. To be anything near as deadly as it is made out to be, someone has to be unlucky enough to breath aerosol'ed PU. Get back to me when the nuclear power plants of the world start turning this stuff into micro-confetti for the fun of it.
Re:Waste? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because mining more fresh uranium is cheaper.
Yeah, it's that fucked up. We aren't burying this stuff because we have to. We aren't doing it because continuing to use it as fuel wouldn't make money. We're doing it because burying the spent fuel and mining fresh fuel improves the bottom line of the power companies - the net cost is lower than reprocessing the spent fuel.
At some point in the future (unknown, depends how many more uranium deposits we find - but at current growth rates, the ones we know about won't last 100 years), this will change. And then we're going to be digging up all this "waste" that we're burying, because we want to use it as fuel.