Shale: Good For Gas, Oil...and Nuclear Waste Disposal? 138
Lasrick writes: Chris Neuzil is a senior scientist with the National Research Program of the U.S. Geological Survey. He thinks the qualities of shale make it the perfect rock in which to safely and permanently house high-level nuclear waste. Given the recent discovery that water is much more of an issue than originally thought for the tough rock at Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Utah, the unique qualities of shale, along with its ubiquitous presence in the U.S., could make shale rock a better choice for the 70,000 metric tons of commercial spent fuel currently sitting above ground at nuclear power facilities throughout the country. France, Switzerland, and Belgium are all considering repositories in shale, but it hasn't been studied much in the U.S. "Shale is the only rock type likely to house high-level nuclear waste in other countries that has never been seriously considered by the U.S. high-level waste program. The uncertain future of Yucca Mountain places plans for spent nuclear fuel in the United States at a crossroads. It is an opportunity to include shale in a truly comprehensive examination of disposal options."
Is there anything we can't pump into our aquifers? (Score:2, Funny)
I know Benzene is just a good idea to mix up with groundwater, so high level radioactive waste must be an order of magnitude smarter.
Captcha : osmosis
Re: Is there anything we can't pump into our aquif (Score:2)
The only problem with subduction zones is they tend to spawn volcanos which would just spit the waste back up.
But will it hold? (Score:1)
Every time they think they found the 'perfect' solution to storing nuclear waste. And every time it turns out it's not sufficient after all.
Re: But will it hold? (Score:2)
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You mean not sufficient for politicians?
The uncertain future of Yucca Mountain places plans for spent nuclear fuel in the United States at a crossroads.
Yucca Mt. was a political construct from start to finish, and was NEVER a serious consideration by those in power. What left the US at a crossroads was about 20 years ago when every temporary nuclear storage facility in the US was at capacity, and nothing was done about other than this Yucca Mt. fiction.
I think the solution to the energy crisis is never going to be solved with more nuke plants (though that may help reduce the waste problem... but with more deadly longer, more concentrated waste), but with
Re: But will it hold? (Score:5, Informative)
3 mile island scale... you mean a media induced panic over a non-event that hasn't harmed anyone, compared to the absolutely devastating cost of coal alone to the environment and human life?
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3 mile island scale... you mean a media induced panic over a non-event that hasn't harmed anyone,
I lived in the area during the TMI meltdown. It was mostly hype in regards to the general public. Though some radiation was vented into the atmosphere. Of course Hollywood had released "The China Syndrome" around that time too, so it really struck a nerve.
However, it is not true that no one was harmed. I dated a girl who's father worked at TMI during that time. He was dying from cancer, as were some of his ex-coworkers. The plant was paying for his treatment and a sizable settlement to his family.
compared to the absolutely devastating cost of coal alone to the environment and human life?
Agreed.
Re: But will it hold? (Score:4, Interesting)
It showed the dramatic contrast in attitude between the early stages of design where the containment vessels were made to be the strongest in the USA due to the risk of a plane crashing into it on approach to the nearby airport, and the implementation of the control and monitoring systems years later that sucked by any measure. It resulted in the early retirement of some other reactors that were frankly death traps and the improvement of all the others.
The engineers of the time didn't write it off as a non-event like you are counterproductively doing. Such bleating as above harms the cause of nuclear power instead of helping it. Instead of ignoring it the engineers put in the work and extra care that resulted in nothing like the Chenobyl incident happening in the USA, despite some of the older plants initially being inherently more dangerous.
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If the nuclear industry was so large and so powerful, they wouldn't have so much trouble securing permits and finding locations for waste disposal.
They have no problem with continuning to do what they've been doing since they started.... just pile it up on location. There is no commercial nuclear power plant in the US that isn't also a rather large unregulated depository of nuclear waste.
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Ah, perhaps you didn't know, that Yucca idea was political fiction from start to finish, though the scientists that did the work did not know. The Federal government had no intention of letting nuclear waste be transported on such a massive scale. Harry Reid was involved, but hardly a one man tour de force! It was politicians in Nevada, and it was the nimbi politicians... the entire idea was all a pageant.
Its ok, no one pro nuke will admit the obvious facts that Yucca was NEVER SERIOSLY CONSIDERED by ANYO
Re: But will it hold? (Score:1)
billion$ for 1% You sure? (Score:2)
> We have myriad energy solutions now... and in fact most are at parity with the cost of nuclear power (if you're honest about it, and include government R&D and subsidies in the cost).
You sure you want to include the billions in taxpayer subsidies it takes to get 1% of our energy from solar? I don't think Comedy Central instructed you to point out that solar-electric is 4.8X times as expensive during the daytime, and far more costly at night.
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A great opportunity for an innovator to develop lunar panels to supplement solar panels! That reduces the problem to moonless nights.
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> We have myriad energy solutions now... and in fact most are at parity with the cost of nuclear power (if you're honest about it, and include government R&D and subsidies in the cost).
You sure you want to include the billions in taxpayer subsidies it takes to get 1% of our energy from solar? I don't think Comedy Central instructed you to point out that solar-electric is 4.8X times as expensive during the daytime, and far more costly at night.
Billions? BILLIONS? I do not think you know what that word means. The US has likely invested close to half a trillion in nuclear energy development. Whatever change accidently slipped out of Uncle Sam's pockets and into solar R&D is, in comparison, quite nothing at all. Also, had the US invested just 5% of what they spent on nuclear energy development since the 1950s on solar, we wouldn't even be arguing. Solar would be crazy cheap! And nuclear, still where its at... competitive with coal, (not beating
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> Also, had the US invested just 5% of what they spent on nuclear energy development since the 1950s on solar, we wouldn't even be arguing. Solar would be crazy cheap!
No, reality does not work that way. You don't throw money at a problem and expect all scientific and technological issues to be magically solved. And besides, solar has gotten plenty of development effort, especially if you consider the insane amounts of money invested into semiconductor tech by the electronics industry. If solar is any goo
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73 billion is billions. English? (Score:2)
> please stop making up numbers and posting them all over this story
Since I said "billions" and you replied with a link to where someone posted $73 billion, I can only guess that English isn't your native language and you didn't actually mean to say what you said. I suppose the alternative is that you're so completely closed to the facts that in order to maintain your faith in Comedy Central as your policy adviser you've convinced yourself that $73 billion isn't "billions". That would be sad.
FYI, citin
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mea culpa (my bad, catmistake) (Score:2)
> Look closer, I was responding to catmistake, not your post.
Mea culpa. Catmistake, if you're reading this, pretend I said "my bad".
Re: billion$ for 1% You sure? (Score:2)
"(if you're honest about it, and include government R&D and subsidies in the cost)."
If we're going to be honest about it, what energy technology isn't supported by government R&D and subsidies?
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If they nuclear power industry were anywhere near a powerful as you claim, they would have kicked the crap out of the coal industry as well as banning the infernal combustion engine. So Nuclear remains a viable backup power source to cover the next 50 to 100 years until a more advance power source is available and a more advanced society can be trusted with it. The big shift in nuclear needs to be away from high output short term energy supply to low output long term energy supply, far simpler pulsed outp
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The demands for energy...
Its a rather thin thread that nuclear is hanging on, if it is merely the demands for energy that have you sold on it. If the demand is there, the demand will pay for energy no matter what its cost. We don't need to bow down to the "demands for energy" like its an enemy we need to placate somehow. Fuck energy demands, seriously. Energy is not food... is not air... is not anything that the human race needs. I know this because there was no stored energy of any capacity less than 100 years ago, and for hundred
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for hundreds of thousands of years this "demands for energy" was an unanswered cry.
You're right, and it was called the dark ages.
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Dark ages most apt. The demands for energy now are what is needed to clean up our environment and it will take a lot of energy to do that. The need to more fairly distribute energy access across the globe along with the spread of global information as the benefits that are provided by easy access to energy become obvious to those that are currently energy starved. The balance is pretty clear, the greater the access to energy, the less natural resources that are required to supply human needs, the more land
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For decades, while wearing my "I am a geologist" tee shirt, I have been proposing a particular shale (OK, claystone : shale without marked fissility) formation as the ideal location for a high-level nuclear waste store.
The arguments that the low mobility of water within shale ("claystone", "mudrock" ; all mean essentially the same thing) formations makes them good for isolating and immobilising all sorts of nasty materials are old, old, old arguments. And they are pe
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Kind of begs the question why this crap was started without an exit-strategy...
Or this (Score:2)
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"Oh dear, we can't turn it off"
What makes you think that a TWR couldn't be shut down?
Re: the best use (Score:1)
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Re: the best use (Score:1)
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Renewables have received more government subsidies than nuclear. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki... [wikipedia.org]
Regardless of your source, which in no way supports your claim, your comment is provably false. Quite, quite, quite the opposite. Every one of the 100+ commercial plants the US built cost the US at least $50-100M each. That's just one of the costs that were never, and never will be returned. And that is a tiny cost compared to what was spent prior to the first commercial plant being commissioned. Its obscene money that has been spent on nuclear... so much its not easy to get your head around it. You could s
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Please provide sources. There are no plant build subsidies, only government loans (admittedly with low interest) that are paid back. I don't know what you mean by plant operating subsidies but the power produced is very scarcely subsidized, according the the Wall Street Journal [wsj.com], nuclear is subsidized at about $1.59 per megawatt hour, whereas solar and wind are given roughly $24 each per MWh. A research study [uni-stuttgart.de] on the externalities of energy found that nuclear externalized 0.2-0.7 cents per kWh depending on th
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Price per MWh is not dishonest, those are the only units that matter in the field of energy production. Even if wind/solar were at parity with nuclear they would be receiving more per MWh. In 2013, nuclear produced 19% of US power, while solar and wind produced a combined 4.36% source [eia.gov]. Let's assume that solar and wind are also producing 19% of US power, or 4.36 times their current level (interestingly enough 4.36 is almost exactly the square root of 19). divide the $24/MWh by 4.36 and you get $5.5/MWh, stil
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Plutonium is the fuel a fast breeder reactor burns, actually. You use fertile uranium (aka nuclear waste) with a starter of fissile plutonium (or uranium?) and breed the fertile uranium up to fissile plutonium and split it. Usually this is U-238 to P-239. The main issue with this type of reactor is designs call for on-site reprocessing for better fuel efficiency and this is considered a proliferation risk. The proliferation issue is why Russia's fast breeder designs at Beloyarsk don't have on-site reprocess
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This thread is surprisingly short, and mostly has people either agreeing that fast breeders or something similar are a great solution (maybe with some bickering on the finer points), or off topic arguing about the total investments made in various tech. FWIW, I'm 100% on board with reprocessing. I can only guess that either:
a) most people are also fine with this, so no need to post to agree... let's just post in places where we can argue
b) the proliferation risks make the conversation untouchable to them
Thi
Great.... (Score:1)
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Well let's see. The cheapest space launch options are currently around $4000/kg. So that comes to around $280 billion. Nope.
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Spacex could put 70,000 metric tons in an orbit that would eventually end up falling into the sun. Even if a couple of rockets burn up in our atmosphere, we would pollute our planet less than any other failed solution we have tried so far. The financial cost would probably be less than what has been spend on just looking for storage locations.
maybe
http://www.spacex.com/about/ca... [spacex.com]
A Falcon heavy costs $85 million to put 21 tons into geosync orbit. More can be put into low orbit, but that may not be a good idea.
We make about 2,000 tons of nuke waste a year, so it would only take like 90 launches a year ( ~ 7.5 billion) from now on plus the 3,000 launches ( $250 billion) to catch up. We can afford that.
I don't know off-hand what sort of load could be launched into the sun (nor do I see why when the moon is much cheaper to shoot at), but getting be
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Geosync orbit is a bad idea. That orbit is very useful for other purposes and already a bit crowded.
OTOH, it wouldn't need to be *very* much higher to be much more reasonable...but be sure to put it all in one place. You don't want even more junk spread around.
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Geosync orbit is a bad idea. That orbit is very useful for other purposes and already a bit crowded.
OTOH, it wouldn't need to be *very* much higher to be much more reasonable...but be sure to put it all in one place. You don't want even more junk spread around.
Yep, I agree there. I only mentioned geosync because that's what was in their price catalog.
Disclaimer: I do not support sending spent fuel into space because it's not the best solution, and perhaps is the worst idea.
I only joined in because I like to run the numbers on things.
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Well, sending spent fuel into orbit isn't a bad idea, but it should be enclosed in a thermionic generator when you do it. You don't need Plutonium for that if you don't want to use a minimal weight for a long period of time. If ;you're willing to use a bit more weight, or run out of power a bit sooner, there are lots of other choices.
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Well, sending spent fuel into orbit isn't a bad idea, but it should be enclosed in a thermionic generator when you do it. You don't need Plutonium for that if you don't want to use a minimal weight for a long period of time. If ;you're willing to use a bit more weight, or run out of power a bit sooner, there are lots of other choices.
Hmm, thermionic generator could be handy for moon bases, if we were to drop them there.
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Yes, and have just one shipment explode on launch and have a much larger catastrophe than Chernobyl, Windscale and Fuckupshima combined, and with immediate fine dispersal as an added bonus. Also, 1kg to orbit costs $13000 at SpaceX (and that orbit may not be high enough to cheaply get to the sun), i.e. disposal of said 70'000t would cost more than $910 Billion and would take more than 10'000 launches.
That idea is an utter failure and suddenly, nuclear power is not quite that cheap anymore...
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And if that worked, don't you think it would be the default method to launch satellites and other payload into orbit instead of unreliable and expensive rockets? Guns are very well understood, and, News Flash!, do not work for this application.
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Unlikely in the extreme.
DeltaV required to reach the sun from Earth surface is about 31.7 km/s.
For reference, deltaV required to reach Earth orbit is about 9 km/s.
Note that fuel usage on a rocket varies exponentially with deltaV requirement. Assuming a Falcon 9 could put a 40T payload in Earth Orbit, it would be capable of putting about 60kg into the Sun.
And that 60kg would include the rocket housing the w
future... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would we hide some of the most energy dense stuff known to man? Instead put it in long term storage, plan for say 200 years.
Sometime down the road future generations will reprocess it and use it. Unless energy gets super cheap, then in that case...Energy is super cheap and they will have no issue cleaning up the pasts mistakes.
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Why not? It's been our philosophy for centuries not to worry about the future and just expect that future generations will have more wits and basic decency than us.
Re:future... (Score:5, Informative)
Why not? It's been our philosophy for centuries not to worry about the future and just expect that future generations will have more wits and basic decency than us.
That's an odd bit of sarcasm given that the grandparent post is actually worrying about the future in a constructive way. Fuel rod recycling is a rather odd thing to overlook.
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Why not? It's been our philosophy for centuries not to worry about the future and just expect that future generations will have more wits and basic decency than us.
All while complaining that the youths are worse in all ways than the previous generation.
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In this case, what we call waste is actually a viable fuel. We (and I'm talking about most countries, not just the US) just have an aversion to breeder reactors that can make it so and on-site reprocessing that makes the process more fuel efficient (up to about 99.5%). Whether a need for such reactors appears before fusion is a viable alternative is the question, though if we keep throwing money at tokamak designs like ITER instead of much cheaper designs like polywell it may be.
FBR fast breeder reactors (Score:1)
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Wrong - fast breeders in the United States were killed over basically proliferation concerns and safety issues. Financial was never a reason - you go from .5-5% fuel efficiency to 70% (without reprocessing) or 99.5% (with reprocessing) - that's pretty much like going from a Abrams tank to a Prius - you basically go from a subsidized industry (because it can't compete with coal in the US due to the overhead) to an industry that can sustain itself and could beat coal handily. Sadly, the "facts" given to kill
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If you dig really deep, you will find out that all of nuclear technology is too expensive in the NATO land. Its population was brainwashed with lies about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima and believe nuclear is a thing of the devil. They irrationally demand nuclear is shutdown, but the pro nuclear lobby pushes back, in the squeeze the NRC (and its sister organizations) create an insane level of absurd extreme anti nuclear regulation that led nuclear power to be too expensive.
All you need to do is
Bad link in summary (Score:2)
The link "water is much more of an issue" is broken (the "www." portion should be dropped). This link works: water is much more of an issue [thebulletin.org].
Backtracking (Score:3)
As I get older I am less impressed by the infinitesimal bit of knowledge that science has revealed and more impressed by the vast gulf of ignorance it has revealed. I hope however it is that our elites choose to bury this stuff, they invest at least a little attention to being able to dig it all up again when it turns out they were wrong about whatever.
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Encasing it in glass ingots doesn't waste it, it merely makes it a bit more difficult to access when you come up with a good use for it...but it keeps it relatively safe until you do.
Burying it at the bottom of a subduction trench, now, that's wasting it.
Yucca Mountain is in Nevada (Score:1)
Yucca Mountain is in Nevada and that is the reason there is no centralized repository. Henry Reid's (Senator from Nevada) political clout was enough to kill the massive, half completed project. Even with potential problems of water there, having a secure location to store the fission by-products is much better than having vulnerable piles scattered around the country.
Almost none of the existing waste is stored in dry casks but rather water filled cooling pools . This type of storage requires a constant w
(Most) nuclear waste isn't waste. (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the "waste" from pressurized water reactors still has about 97% of its extractable energy left in it. It could fairly easily be reprocessed and reused in a PWR again, or used almost as-is in the future generation IV design fast neutron reactors.
The reason most used fuel is not reprocessed now, apart from the NIMBY complaints about the processing plants, is that "virgin" fuel is so cheap and abundant that the small extra cost is not deemed to be worth it.
(Most) nuclear waste isn't waste. (Score:1)
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In his infinite wisdom... Nuclear power could have done more for the environment than Wind, Solar, or Wave renewable by eliminating coal power plants as an economically superior energy source. Instead: he created an ecological disaster by accumulating spent fuel rods in cooling tanks as a 70-100 "deferred maintenance" hidden cost for future generations to clean up.
Some day: the technology required and the information to make Nuclear weapons will be available to the general public. We should do more to prepa
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The elephant in the room is Nuclear Proliferation.
Most of the danger in country X having civilian nuclear reactors is that the byproducts like Plutonium are only available if the fuel is reprocessed.
By using specifically designed "military" reactors to breed PU & foregoing reprocessing of the output of it's civilian reactors, the US has been able to take a stance against the reprocessing of civilian reactors. Yes, there are exceptions to that stance (La Hague here in France for example), but the pretenc
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You are correct about mining and processing being a lot easier than reprocessing at this point, but it's for ecomonic and not "NIMBY" reasons. S
Nevada, not Utah (Score:5, Informative)
Not that it makes much difference, but the Yucca Mountain site is in Nevada, not Utah.
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Yes I know, it would have to be a "somebody started the timer on this enormous hydrogen bomb we got from Russia" sort of storage accident but jokes don't have to be realistic do they?
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So?
The entire Yucca Mountain plan was based on ignoring science. Why not ignore Cartography, too? :)
hawk
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The anti Yucca plan was based on ignoring science.
But we should instead reprocess spent nuclear fuel.
Leave spent nuclear fuel to cool for a few decades (at the nuclear station), the reprocess the fuel. Out of reprocessing we would get:
Uranium = put it through enrichment again (make more depleted uranium which is harmless and some low enriched uranium for new fuel)
Plutonium = mix with depleted uranium and make mox nuclear fuel
other transuranics = that would go for
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>The anti Yucca plan was based on ignoring science.
???
Did you really write that?
The anti-Yucca in Nevada is *not* anti-nuclear; it's not even NIMBY.
The law to choose a dump specified that every site on the list was to be evaluated, and that the dump *shall* be built at the safest site on the list.
Not built if a site is safe, but at the *safest* of the sites to be considered.
Guess how many sites were on the list. (if you guess 2 or more, you have no idea what you're talking about.
So after being told that
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Facts don't matter, but what does matter is the chance to spread fact less based hype and pass it off as some type accepted fact. Rather, just smoke from an anti nuke agenda driven organization.
Given the recent discovery that water is much more of an issue than originally thought for the tough rock at Yucca Mountain
Heh. Well, if your goal is to spread fact-less hype, you should be careful not to include blindingly obvious errors in your summary. As soon as I hit "Utah" in the summary, I stopped reading.
oh great (Score:3, Funny)
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You know the video everyone has seen where a guy open a faucet, lights up the output & blames it on fracking? My father lives near the town where it was done. The town is called Wellsville from back when it was America's first Oil boom region in the late 1800s and it's surrounded by tens of thousands of primitive oil wells that they just filled in once they stopped producing enough oil to be profitable around 100 years ago. It's funny that the people blaming fracking for all the methane in the groundwat
Mildly off-topic, but... (Score:1)
If it's highly radioactive, doesn't that mean it has unspent energy in it? I think anything dangerous for than a certain number of years simply needs to be sent through again. I've heard people say anything that stays dangerous for more than a few hundred years still has unspent energy.
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Highly radioactive usually has more to do with faster decay rate. As for how dangerous, it depends on the emitter and how it is absorbed. As for how much energy, it depends on substance, if it is fissile (at least for energy producing), and its neutron efficiency. Thorium, uranium, and plutonium generate more neutrons than they consume and thus can be used for a sustainable nuclear reaction. If it isn't one of those three, it probably isn't desirable - Protactinium, for example, has a huge cross section and
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All true, but Polonium isn't produced by nuclear fission. It is a decay product of fissile/fertile material. It is produced from potential nuclear fuel we don't use.
Nuclear reactors deal with alpha emitters with half lifes in the multi thousand to million year half life. In general those materials are far more deadly due to their chemical toxicity rather than its radioactivity. The lowest half life alpha involved in nuclear reactors is in the 50 thousand + year half life (U-233 and some plutonium isotopes).
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For a nuclear reactor, there are essentially three types of nuclear materials:
1 - Fissile material (hit it with a neutron and it has a high probability - from 60% to 99.9% of fission)
2 - Fertile material (hit it with a neutron and it turns into Fissile material)
3 - Fission products - new atoms resulting from fission
Fission products typically are highly radioactive materials, but they have already undergone fission. Many of them are fission poisons (they are neutron magnets to make it
Already solved but tight bastards (Score:2)
WAMSR (Score:2)
Instead of trying to find new ways to store nuclear waste for thousands of years we should be looking for ways to burn this stuff for energy, medical isotopes, and other useful things. One technology that comes to mind is the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor. The people from MIT that are working on this claim WAMSR can destroy spent fuel from conventional uranium fueled reactors while also producing electricity and/or industrial heat.
There are two things that destroy radioactive waste, time and neut
A random thought on reprocessing fuel (Score:2)
I know that the fuel has a lot of usable energy left that could be used in politically toxic reactors. I'm curious how difficult it is to transport that stuff? I know we use cooling ponds ad current reactors, is that the stuff that's the most lucrative in breeder reactors? How do you transport that kind of material? Or is the good breeder fuel just the stuff that has been moved the casks/etc that doesn't get so hot and volatile.
Nuclear storage must be temporary (Score:2)
Spent Nuclear Fuel is still FUEL !
At least 98% of SNF is fissile / fertile nuclear material.
Out of 35 tons of Enriched Uranium used to make fuel, just 1 ton is fissioned, 34 tons remains as Uranium, Plutonium, Neptunium, Americium and Curium. All of that stuff can be fissioned using a fast reactor. Using more complex reprocessing Uranium and Plutonium can be extracted and recycled into fuel any reactor could use.
The USA isn't doing nuclear fuel reprocessing due to economical reasons, the technology is avail
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True, Fast reactors, reduced moderation reactors could also get the job done (fissioning most of the Uranium on spent nuclear fuel or newly mined uranium or Thorium).