First-of-Its-Kind US Nuclear Waste Dump Marks 20 Years (apnews.com) 157
"In a remote stretch of New Mexico desert, the U.S. government put in motion an experiment aimed at proving to the world that radioactive waste could be safely disposed of deep underground..." reports the Associated Press:
Twenty years and more than 12,380 shipments later, tons of Cold War-era waste from decades of bomb-making and nuclear research across the U.S. have been stashed in the salt caverns that make up the underground facility. Each week, several shipments of special boxes and barrels packed with lab coats, rubber gloves, tools and debris contaminated with plutonium and other radioactive elements are trucked to the site.
But the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has not been without issues. A 2014 radiation leak forced an expensive, nearly three-year closure, delayed the federal government's cleanup program and prompted policy changes at national laboratories and defense-related sites across the U.S. More recently, the U.S. Department of Energy said it would investigate reports that workers may have been exposed last year to hazardous chemicals. Still, supporters consider the repository a success, saying it provides a viable option for dealing with a multibillion-dollar mess that stretches from a decommissioned nuclear weapons production site in Washington state to one of the nation's top nuclear research labs, in Idaho, and locations as far east as South Carolina. If it weren't for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, many containers of plutonium-contaminated waste would be outside, exposed to the weather and susceptible to natural disasters, said J.R. Stroble, head of business operations at the Department of Energy's Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees the contractor that operates the repository.
"The whole purpose of WIPP is to isolate this long-lived radioactive, hazardous waste from the accessible environment, from people and the things people need in order to live life on Earth," he told The Associated Press.
But the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has not been without issues. A 2014 radiation leak forced an expensive, nearly three-year closure, delayed the federal government's cleanup program and prompted policy changes at national laboratories and defense-related sites across the U.S. More recently, the U.S. Department of Energy said it would investigate reports that workers may have been exposed last year to hazardous chemicals. Still, supporters consider the repository a success, saying it provides a viable option for dealing with a multibillion-dollar mess that stretches from a decommissioned nuclear weapons production site in Washington state to one of the nation's top nuclear research labs, in Idaho, and locations as far east as South Carolina. If it weren't for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, many containers of plutonium-contaminated waste would be outside, exposed to the weather and susceptible to natural disasters, said J.R. Stroble, head of business operations at the Department of Energy's Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees the contractor that operates the repository.
"The whole purpose of WIPP is to isolate this long-lived radioactive, hazardous waste from the accessible environment, from people and the things people need in order to live life on Earth," he told The Associated Press.
Indeed (Score:2)
""The whole purpose of WIPP is to isolate this long-lived radioactive, hazardous waste from the accessible environment, from people and the things people need in order to live life on Earth," ...with armed guards for 184.000 years only, a piece of cake, cost-wise.
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
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We have the technology to permanenly and safely dispose of all radioactive isotopes,
So why isn't it used on a wide scale ?
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So why isn't it used on a wide scale ?
Because mining new uranium is way cheaper than reprocessing highly radioactive waste.
Re: Indeed (Score:1)
Nope. Jimmy Carter signed the moratorium on reprocessing. Reprocessing is an avenue for plutonium extraction for weapon making, and the naive fool believed that would help prevent proliferation. It didn't, but since then the eco-terrorists have prevented all western efforts to reprocess fuel. Mining uranium isn't the cosy, enriching it is, and reprocessing will reduce the energy cost amazingly, like 70%, and reduce the volume of highly radioactive waste, but nuclear is bad, so we've dumped billions o
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Because the anti-nuke hysterics scream bloody murder whenever the idea is floated?
And do note that this is not about waste storage from a normal reactor. This is about waste storage from a reactor designed to produce Pu-239....
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Fixed.
Re: Indeed (Score:1)
The unjustifiable cost is the judicial stonewalling and the CO2 emissions. Nuclear is the only power source that has a clean up reserve required, and more than 2/3 of the cosy of nuclear is malicious judicial and regulatory delays. Not oversight and good design requirements, just the malicious delays.
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The unjustifiable cost is the judicial stonewalling and the CO2 emissions. Nuclear is the only power source that has a clean up reserve required, and more than 2/3 of the cosy of nuclear is malicious judicial and regulatory delays. Not oversight and good design requirements, just the malicious delays.
Mod parent up. Nuclear is expensive because we are forced to use old inefficient designs and NIMBYists make licensing the plants insanely expensive. Its also the only energy technology that scales. So our choices our fossil fuels or nuclear. Unicorns don't exist...
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New designs are an old red herring. No design is ever going to make nuclear power completely safe or cost effective. You are always going to have issues with security and containment that simply do not exist with other power sources. As for plants being expensive to plan and build - there's a reason for that. Just ask the residents of Fukishima. Where all your supposed co
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As much as a $2.5 million Bugatti with no brakes or seat belts is cheaper than a Honda Civic, sure.
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Anything is possible with Fantasy Calculus. The same sort of wingnut math that is used to argue that a Prius pollutes more than a Hummer [slate.com] can easily be used to ignore uranium mines and the vast amounts of concrete needed for nuclear power to throw stones at wind and solar.
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Informative)
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You need both: waste storage and reprocessing. Some contaminants are also highly radioactive (like Sr-90 and Cs-137), but aren't terribly useful in a reactor. Yeah, yeah, you can use Sr-90 in a radiothermal generator, but it isn't terribly safe or economical to do so.
You don't need reprocessing if you burn it all up during the first cycle like in a Thorium reactor. Also, neither Sr-90 or Cs-137 last longer than 300 years so storage is a realistic option for those medium lived fission products.
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...neither Sr-90 or Cs-137 last longer than 300 years...
Um... that's not how half-life works. Both of those isotopes have half-lives around 28 and 30 years, respectively. A 30-year half-life means that every 30 years, half of the atoms decay. So if you start with 120 grams, you have 60 grams left once 30 years elapse, 30 grams at year 60, 15 grams at year 90, and so on. After 300 years you will only have a small fraction of the original isotope left, but some very small number of atoms will certainly last longer than that.
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Re:Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
A nuclear reactor "Burns" radiation to run a steam engine. Dumping radioactive waste in the ground is dumping fuel in the ground. Use fuel reprossessing to remove the contaminants that prevent it working in a normal reactor and re-use it as new fuel. We have the technology to permanenly and safely dispose of all radioactive isotopes, it just costs more than dumping.
That's not accurate. The 93% of the heat in a reactor is from fission and not from radioactive decay as you state. And the issues raised about fuel reprocessing aren't about cost either. Its about nuclear proliferation risks.
The worry is that during the reprocessing, someone will steal pure fissionable produce from the reprocessing station. Now, often that requires a nation-state level of industrial facilities to process the fissionable material from the unused fuel and fission products. The problem is that the same purification systems used in reprocessing can be repurposed and used to enrich fissionable material which is a step in making bombs. The other problem is that nuclear fuel in our current civilian reactors is only 4% used up so there are lots of fissionable isotopes left in the "waste". However, this isn't true for the Th-U fuel cycle and Thorium reactors wouldn't have this issue as they burn up 96% of their fissionable material and their waste stream doesn't have enough fissionable material left to make weapons. It would be easier to start with natural Uranium ore than the waste from a Thorium reactor.
When a reactor operates, it fissions the fuel and creates fission products. Based upon the fuel cycle and energy of the neutrons in the reactor (and other factors), you can calculate what fission products are created. The fission products are the waste and will decay on a specific period. Reactors with lots of Pu will make waste that takes as long as 10,000 to decay to natural levels of radiation (at which point its "safe"). Reactors with lots of U-233 (Thorium breeders) make waste that lasts *only* 300 years. Thorium reactors burn up 96% of their nuclear fuel leaving very little fissionable material in the waste stream making reprocessing of this material safe in comparison with the reprocessing that happens with a current generation U-Pu reactor.
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Re:Totally disrepectful to the earth (Score:5, Insightful)
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Manufactured or not, the PU is not more dangerous than the U that it was produced from and as GPP correctly stated the production consumed a significant amount of the U. Natural != innocuous & man-made != poisonous to those who are not attempting to draw over-simplistic conclusions.
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Plutonium is the most poisonous - as in poison - element on the planet. ... IIRC the deadly dose for a human over 3 years is 40mg.
On top of that it has the super ugly tendency to wander into your bone marrow
Plus even short-lived isotopes decay to other radioisotopes. ...
Either Cs or Sr, or a similar one, decays into a isotope that has only a half life of a few minutes
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You're actually correct about the decay chain of Cs and Sr ending in short-lived then stable isotopes.
As far as plutonium, yes, it's toxic. Don't eat it, breathe it in, or place a neutron reflector over a sphere of it (see also: the Louis Slotin incident). It's still not bad compared to isotopes that can give you radiation burns or kill you just because you're across a room from them.
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We're not talking about Pu (which isn't all that dangerous unless you eat it or use it in a nuke) as much as other other more highly radioactive elements like Sr-90 and Cs-137. Half life about 30 years, but even after 10 half lives, there's likely enough to deliver a lethal dose to anyone near the waste. Plus even short-lived isotopes decay to other radioisotopes.
False, 10 half-lives is usually the standard for when sometime is "safe" again. At 10 half-lives the radiation is 1/1024th of the original amount. Cs-137 produces a lot of radiation but it isn't particularly penetrating type of radiation. It can be safely stored in a normal 55-gallon drum as it is a beta emitter and not a gamma emitter. Its nasty stuff but "lethal" doses of its radiation don't last forever. Also, "lethal" isn't a standard is ionizating radiation, radiation just isn't that simple.
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PU is not more dangerous than the U that it was produced from
These are different materials with totally different properties. You're drawing an over-simplistic conclusion by assuming that they are equally dangerous.
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400mg Uranium dissolved in your body in various forms of uranium oxygenes you likely survive. ... not so much. You are an idiot. Looking at the colour of your dot behind your /. ID, I pointed that out already often enough.
Plutonium
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Well, no actually. There aren't deposits of *this* radioactive materials.
The isotopes that came from the ground contained a lot more energy than the radioactives in this dump, and had longer half lives than the important isotopes being dumped.
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and had longer half lives than the important isotopes being dumped.
That's not necessarily an improvement. The longer the half life, the less radiation per second.
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You cannot have it both ways. The shorter the half-life the less time it needs to be stored to become innocuous.
The nature of half-lives makes the materials rapidly less radioactive. Half is gone in the first period, a quarter in the second, etc. The longer half-lived isotopes draw out the period these materials should be isolated but all the shorter lived materials will have been long been degraded before the 200000 years some are claiming.
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You cannot have it both ways. The shorter the half-life the less time it needs to be stored to become innocuous.
Right, but there's a whole spectrum, not just two ways. Really short or really long half lives are easier to deal with. The worst are the ones in the middle, with half life of 100-1000 years. Short enough that they can produce strong radiation, and long enough that it will remain a problem for generations.
Re: Totally disrepectful to the earth (Score:5, Informative)
Half life is a completely overrated argument on /. (or in america?)
The questions are:
* does it get into the body?
* where does it accumulate?
* what particles are emitted?
* what energy do those particles have?
* is it harmful already if the emissions come from the outside (alpha/beta versus gamma) or only from inside the body
* is it an element that body is hungry for, like Cs?
* and in case it is released into the environment are there biologic path's by which they get accumulated, e.g. Cs again, you simply do not want to eat mushrooms around Chernobyl, regardless that the accident was 30 years go, it is still _forbidden_ to gather mushrooms in _south Germany_ because they are to contaminated with unhealthy levels of Cs
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For storing nuclear waste, half life is important for determining how long waste needs to be contained, which is why it came up (particularly in this story) and why it is discussed.
Your questions relate to contamination of large areas with radiation, but is not really relevant to storage of high level waste. You even say "in case it is released into the environment". We are trying to prevent that. It matters how long we need to keep that from happening.
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Really short or really long half lives are easier to deal with. The worst are the ones in the middle, with half life of 100-1000 years. Short enough that they can produce strong radiation, and long enough that it will remain a problem for generations.
Those intermediate half-life isotopes are the ones we should be recycling. Nuclear plants produce a lot of highly radioactive iodine, but that isotope decays to insignificance in three to six months. Thallium, on the other hand, has an extremely long half-life but there is very little of it, and because of the long half-life it does not emit much radiation.
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Arsenic and mercury are naturally occurring to.
But if you concentrate it, and then dump it into a river, it's not going to have the same effect as trace amounts in the environment.
the river won't care nor will most of the fauna. The only ones that care and that it directly affects is us. We NEED to care because the earth doesn't give a ticks ass about us or anything we do, I would imagine it saying "here's a place to either thrive or die, up to you." and short of blowing the whole planet up or sending it into the sun nothing we do or can do will destroy the earth. We can/are able to effect how hospitable this rock is for us to live on it though. Few critters shit in the their beds li
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Being pedantic about terminology doesn't make you the winner of an argument. It just proves that you missed the point of the argument.
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I would imagine it saying
You imagining that the Earth is saying anything is the point where you lost contact with reality.
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You shouldn't personify the Earth, she hates that.
Re: Totally disrepectful to the earth (Score:5, Interesting)
Radioactive isotopes with long half-lives, even in minute quantities, are quite effective at causing cancer in humans if they're ingested. There is no such thing as "a little harmless pollution" with these substances.
You do realize that there are a number of naturally occurring radioactive elements?
Did you know the radioactive elements naturally present in the granite used to build Grand Central Station actually makes the background radiation in that station higher than what is allowed for any nuclear facility in the US?
Also, most materials and shielding used in a radioactive environment are considered to be 'hot' and need to be disposed of as nuclear waste even if those materials are less radioactive than the bananas in your grocery store.
Yes, Bananas are more radioactive than other fruits because they have more potassium in them. And if you don't eat enough potassium you get sick.
The claim that all radiation is harmful is an artifact of a study that found that 100x radiation would kill 100 people, and 1x radiation kills 1 person, made the blanket assumption that 0.01x radiation must kill 0.01 people.
There is literally nothing else that works like that.
Not poisons, not diseases, not blood loss, and not blunt force trauma.
Leaving artifacts for future generations (Score:1)
What a legacy. I can see it now, two thousand years from now, the grand empire that was the United States collapsed centuries ago, left in a dark age, and civilization finally built itself back up from the ashes. Archaeology becomes a viable career again, and where else to dig in search of prior civilizations than out in a desert, which potentially was once an oasis.
Inspired by tales of mystery and traps, the archeologists set out to find signs of intelligent life, but it turns out they find a booby trap
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Re: Leaving artifacts for future generations (Score:3)
I’m not sure what your overall point is. But regarding people blithely digging it up without understanding the warnings, they’ve thought of that. That said, they unfortunately haven’t implemented it.
In 1981, the US Department of Energy tasked a group of experts to design a warning message that would last millennia; a warning for the repository that would be intelligible to future generations of humans who might happen across it hundreds of thousands of years from now.
However, as of 2017, n
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the grand empire that was the United States collapsed centuries ago
The Chinese will still be around. And they'll mine the dump site and extract the valuable metals for industrial use. Which should have been done before this crap was planted in the ground.
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Funny, but radioactive materials which keep their radiation levels up for thousands of years aren't very energetic emitters.
So really, they just find some more radioactive than usual dirt.
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"thousands of miles across a desert" is kind of an exaggeration. The Great Pyramid is about 4 miles from downtown Cairo, itself adjacent to the Nile. Modern-day Cairo literally sprawls to the base of the pyramids. Back in ancient times, you could have probably seen the pyramids from just about anywhere along the Nile within 10-20 miles of Giza.
This 360-degree photo vividly illustrates just how close the pyramids are to Cairo:
https://www.google.com/maps/@2... [google.com]
Another pic that really makes it shockingly clear
Now give it another 200'000 years or so (Score:4, Insightful)
And by any sane standards of safety-engineering, we will start to have data of actual worth for the task at hand.
I am not opposed to nuclear energy. I am opposed to the greedy and insane people that operate and build the respective installations and that continuously lie to the public about their safety. Nuclear could be made safe, but not by these people. It cannot, at this time, be made both cost-efficient and safe. That will require more research.
Re:Now give it another 200'000 years or so (Score:5, Interesting)
And by any sane standards of safety-engineering, we will start to have data of actual worth for the task at hand.
The D.O.E had a specification for achieving this called "Defense in Depth". Essentially the goal was to have a facility whose geology would act in such a way as to slow the flow of groundwater through the facility. From my understanding the specification called for building such a facility in Granite, and then to use bentonite clays to deal with the fractured nature of the granite.
It's not perfect, however it's a lot better than the pumice facility built at Yucca mountain after politics got in the way of the science.
The political story went something like this. From my understanding Nevada only got the facility because one of the states representatives was ill and missed objecting to the matter. To seal Nevada's fate in 1987 Idaho moved for amendments to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act to:
So there were a lot of sane people who understood how to engineer such a facility. The political will to build it does not exist.
Nuclear could be made safe, but not by these people. It cannot, at this time, be made both cost-efficient and safe. That will require more research.
As you can see, such research was de-funded and thus will not occur.
So far the only non-porus way to store the spent fuel is in crystalline structures which in the 00's, somewhat ironically, the CSIRO discovered form in granite. So politics not only got in the way of the engineering, it also got in the way of the potential benefits of the scientific discoveries that may have been made a decade or two earlier.
Forming these crystals artificially is the obvious goal to complete the uranium fuel cycle as these would be benign and may have industrial applications. Consequently U.S law is the obstacle to making any progress in this area and is unlikely to change until people understand these complex issues enough to lobby politicians appropriately.
This is the unfortunate consequence of the polarization of this debate.
South Austrlian Nuclear Dump (Score:2)
South Australa is a relatively poor state, one of whose major industries is a Uranium mine.
But one thing that it does have is a lot of nothing. Lots and lots of it. And much of it is not over the Great Artisan Basin aquifer, and on stable rocks.
There was a proposal to build a waste dump there to initially store the waste that is now stored in suburban Sydney. And then maybe import it.
Can you imagine the money that the USA, Japan etc. would pay? Suddenly that nothing would be extremely valuable.
But any
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South Australa is a relatively poor state, one of whose major industries is a Uranium mine.
They also have a lot of geothermal energy they *could* export to other states and it's also ideally suited to refining aluminum considering how close they are to some of the largest bauxite deposits in the world. Carbon free aluminum would be very valuable to many industries. So that is an alternative to...
There was a proposal to build a waste dump there to initially store the waste that is now stored in suburban Sydney. And then maybe import it.
Can you imagine the money that the USA, Japan etc. would pay?
I doubt there would be any amount of money a country could pay that would be enough. Australia happens to be the last continent free of human made radio-isotopes and the sheer volume of nuclear waste w
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So what. We're only going to be using the thermal energy.
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And by any sane standards of safety-engineering, we will start to have data of actual worth for the task at hand.
I am not opposed to nuclear energy. I am opposed to the greedy and insane people that operate and build the respective installations and that continuously lie to the public about their safety. Nuclear could be made safe, but not by these people. It cannot, at this time, be made both cost-efficient and safe. That will require more research.
You are exactly correct.
When reduced to it's basics, we have an energy dense material which is poisonous, and when mostly used up in the process to extract the energy, is still poisonous.
It is an engineering process. It can be made safe. But it is expensive and painstaking.
So we have politics involved. Shit, nothing like allowing the most corrupt baksheesh and bribe loving humans on the planet enriching themselves. Always trying to alter the laws of physics with money.
So we have accountants involve
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Indeed. Tech problems need to be solved by engineers. Anything else is pure insanity.
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It can never be made cost efficient and safe, because there will always be unknown unknowns. That translates to risk and extremely high potential losses. No matter what you do, that will never change.
Meanwhile the alternatives are getting cheaper every day. The chances of nuclear ever catching up, even with free government-backed insurance to mitigate that risk, is zero.
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Possibly. At the very least we know that the nuclear industry has screwed up badly in the last half century and still is neither cost-effective nor safe and has extreme follow-up costs that nobody has yet paid for. And the alternatives are getting better every day or are already significantly superior with much lower risks.
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It can never be made cost efficient and safe, because there will always be unknown unknowns.
By that logic nothing can ever be made cost efficient and safe, because everything has unknown unknowns.
What's that? You want me to prove that, say, solar has an unknown unknown? Ok, but first you prove that nuclear has an unknown unknown. You made the claim first that there will always be unknown unknowns, so you get to back it up first.
However, allow me to save you the trouble of trying and prove that you can't. If you can name it, it isn't an unknown unknown, it's a known unknown. Ergo, you cann
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The key difference is that the maximum damage that a solar panel can do is known. It can fall on people, it can get blown around and smash stuff up, same as lots of other solar panel sized things we deal with all the time.
Nuclear power could, if the failure was catastrophic enough, causing trillions of Euros/Dollars of damage. Even a relatively contained accident like Fukushima is costing hundreds of billions to deal with, and the compensation claims are still coming.
So while it's possible there are failure
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The key difference is that the maximum damage that a solar panel can do is known. It can fall on people, it can get blown around and smash stuff up, same as lots of other solar panel sized things we deal with all the time.
Even with as poor a job as we do with nuclear currently (according to you), solar and wind still kill far more people than nuclear per amount of power produced. But don't let facts get in your way. Also, I'm sure one of your unicorn technologies will come by eventually to save us all before climate change does us in. We don't need to use a technology we already understand and can scale to replace fossil fuels. Also, nuclear from 70 years ago is the best we can ever do and we should never do research int
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Have I understood your position?
No. Try again without all the strawman arguments.
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If it's not cost efficient, why do 450 nuclear power plants exist worldwide with another 60 under construction? (https://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm)
If it's not safe, why is its mortality rate the lowest of every kind of power plant ever constructed? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents)
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If it's not cost efficient, why do 450 nuclear power plants exist worldwide with another 60 under construction?
The same reason we still have military conflict — the broken window fallacy. Someone is making money, and they don't give a shit about the rest of us so long as they get theirs.
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Indeed. And since a lot of people mindlessly cheered for nuclear and saw it as a sign of prosperity and power (via the bomb), there was a lot of money to be made. The best part is that the follow-up costs of nuclear is extreme (in a non-catastrophe scenario), but nobody that profited is going to pay.
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We have nuclear power plants for the same reason we have military conflict? That doesn't make any sense at all. You're just throwing random words out there as if it's some sort of deeply insightful commentary. The reasons behind military conflicts are extremely varied; from ancient tribal disputes to religious strife to resource scarcity and dozens of others. None of those are why we have constructed and continued to construct nuclear power plants. We have them because there is a market/need for electrical
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We have nuclear power plants for the same reason we have military conflict? That doesn't make any sense at all.
It only makes sense if you know how to read, and pay attention. Which part of the comparison did you find unclear?
The reasons behind military conflicts are extremely varied; from ancient tribal disputes to religious strife to resource scarcity and dozens of others.
They all boil down to profit. Who gets the money, who gets the land (and all wealth is derived from the land), etc.
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Nuclear is already the safest form of electrical power generation ever implemented by mankind. And that's with all the greed, shortcuts, extreme risk taking, etc. factored into it. Nearly every nuclear plant ever built simply operated day after day, providing safe, clean power from the moment it achieved criticality to the final day of service. The few examples of problems you can think of either didn't kill anyone or caused so few deaths that it doesn't begin to compare to any other source. People die sett
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Nuclear is already the safest form of electrical power generation ever implemented by mankind.
You can't make that claim until all of the waste has cooled. Until then, it can still kill people.
Refusing to back nuclear due to safety concerns is based purely on a provably inaccurate assessment of risk. Provably with 65 years of real-world data
65 years out of thousands? Whoopee.
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>You can't make that claim until all of the waste has cooled. Until then, it can still kill people.
I can relate the fact that after decades of real-world use, nuclear power plants have resulted in fewer human deaths per TWh than any other source. All you have is fear, uncertainty, and doubt about things you're afraid of because you don't understand them. You are incorrectly calculating risk based on flawed emotional responses.
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I can relate the fact that after decades of real-world use, nuclear power plants have resulted in fewer human deaths per TWh than any other source. All you have is fear, uncertainty, and doubt about things you're afraid of because you don't understand them.
I understand full well what the issues are. For example, the issue that the storage system we planned to use in the facility we built (dry cask) often fails. And I understand that once aquifers are contaminated, there's no way to clean them. I understand that your fact is irrelevant on the time scales that we're talking about. I fear these things specifically because I do understand them, and I know you're being a disingenuous douchebag for the same reason.
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Fuckushima with the wind blowing differently. Fuckushima with the cooling pool catching fire (which was a very close thing). No more Tokyo. That is unacceptable, even if it was narrowly avoided by pure dumb luck.
You were saying?
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And if wind turbines stop the jet stream, the whole Earth will freeze over.
See? I can come up with absurd sci-fi scenarios too. Again, you're simply playing up fear, uncertainty, and doubt with nightmare fantasies which do not reflect reality. It's a transparent appeal to emotion which doesn't match any real world data. It's anti-science, in precisely the same way the anti-vaxxer movement is anti-science. What if vaccines cause autism? But all the chemicals? Brain swelling! Someone somewhere could possibly
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Nuclear could be made safe, but not by these people.
It's not those people who prevent nuclear from being made safe, but rather people like you who oppose continuous development. You would sooner see the car banned than have Volvo invent and standardise the seatbelt.
Dry Cask handling (Score:2, Interesting)
The U.S has an issue with the spent fuel packing density currently in use at reactor facilities. One of the easiest way's to dramatically decrease the possibility of a spent fuel pool accident and, radically decrease the severity of other types of potential nuclear accidents, is to start moving spent fuel rods from pools to dry cask storage.
At an estimated $7 Billion to do this is chump change compared to some other spending that is occurring. I also suspect that injecting that money into the U.S eco
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For 7 Billion Dollars, why not just build a wall of plutonium waste on the border? That's killing a lot of birds with one stone.
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So insensitive. Part of where the wall is proposed is a bird sanctuary. You will kill a lot more birds than 2.
Re:Dry Cask handling (Score:4, Informative)
> radically decrease the severity of other types of potential nuclear accidents, is to start moving spent fuel rods from pools to dry cask storage.
They do.
When the spent fuel rods are removed from the reactor, they are still highly radioactive and still produce a significant amount of heat. They will continue to output significant amounts of heat for years (About 5 years IIRC). To keep them cool, they are stored in water. The water has the additional benefit of shielding much of the radiation
After the most radioactive elements in the spent fuel have decayed away, and they rate of heat generation is low enough that air cooling is sufficient to keep them from melting, they are removed from the pool and put into dry concrete casks.
It's not feasible to go directly to dry storage. There's too much heat, too much radioactivity, to store or transport the material in any significant quantity.
It's worth noting that the potential for accident is extremely low for the storage pools. The pools are large enough (at least in the US) that they do not need to be actively cooled. This is by design. The biggest threat is keeping the reactor core cool, which will always require active pumping of coolant and is thus vulnerable to prolonged power loss.
=Smidge=
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They will continue to output significant amounts of heat for years (About 5 years IIRC). To keep them cool, they are stored in water. The water has the additional benefit of shielding much of the radiation
After the most radioactive elements in the spent fuel have decayed away, and they rate of heat generation is low enough that air cooling is sufficient to keep them from melting, they are removed from the pool and put into dry concrete casks.
Yes, this is indeed correct. I neglected to mention that it is for spent fuel rods that have been stored in a pool for at least 5 years. Thanks for pointing that out.
It's worth noting that the potential for accident is extremely low for the storage pools.
However the impact of such an event is extremely high considering they contain much more than a single core of a nuclear reactor after years of refueling activity. What Fukushima is teaching us that the accident doesn't necessarily have to be in the spent fuel pool to affect it. Power loss or loss of coolant in the pools are a greater t
This article doesn't feel quite right (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, think about it. We are trying to find a permanent solution to the indefinite storage of nuclear material. So, why are we celebrating a 20-year anniversary? Twenty years going on infinity is still 0% of its supposed lifespan. The fact that we're saying, "Hey, look, guys, we made it twenty years!" doesn't exactly exude confidence about all the years remaining.
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Maybe not a win exactly but if it didn't make it 20 years then we could say right away we needed a new idea, so either way we learned something.
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Well, there are two challenges. One is storing the stuff permanently, but the other is transporting the waste and putting it into the permanent storage. Much of the opposition to facilities like Yucca Mountain have been around the transportation issue. That's what they can celebrate having demonstrated success with now.
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Well, there are two challenges. One is storing the stuff permanently, but the other is transporting the waste and putting it into the permanent storage. Much of the opposition to facilities like Yucca Mountain have been around the transportation issue. That's what they can celebrate having demonstrated success with now.
There are nuclear flasks [wikipedia.org] (which we've had for decades) which can withstand any abuse. "For a second test the same flask was fitted with a new lid, filled again with steel bars and water before a train was driven into it at high speed. The flask survived with only cosmetic damage while the train was destroyed." Read that again, we parked this thing on a railroad crossing and drove a train at full speed into it and the flask only has cosmetic damage, while the train was destroyed. Is that safe enough for y
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"literally unchanged for 100s of millions of years"
Gondwana and Pangaea would probably quibble over your time scale.
Besides, if that's in your back yard, the Yellowstone super-hyper-megavolcano will probably kill you long before it hurls much of this petty nuclear waste into the atmosphere.
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We're celebrating 20 years of perpetual beta.
I find it ironic (Score:2)
That they are putting nuke waste in what will be prime real estate soon due to global warming!
Moon base alpha (Score:2)
Rocket Science (Score:2)
Why are we wasting our efforts storing this crap on this planet? Get it out of here.
Put it on the moon, shoot it into interstellar space. Surely the low risk of a rocket explosion is worth just getting that crap out of here forever, since it's going to be hazardous effectively forever.
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You would need thousands of rocket launches to get rid of all of the waste. It's not just spent fuel and material for warheads. It's everything that those things have been closely exposed to. Research material, containers, reactor vessels, and a whole lot more.
The consider that between 0.1% and 1% (closer to the 1%) of launches end up in failure. Even in the best case you are looking at multiple explosions with highly radioactive material but most likely in the 10's.
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There is roughly a 5% failure rate on rocket launches.
Willing to bet 5% against spreading hazardous radioactive waste across vast swathes of the planet?
Meanwhile in France... (Score:3)
In France, spent nuclear fuel is reprocessed at the La Hague site [wikipedia.org], where the remnants are temporarily stored into the permanent underground repository. La Hague reprocessed 1700 tonnes of fuel per year.
France has a project to permanently store long-life nuclear waste 500 metres below ground in impermeable clay in Bure, eastern France, but the plan has not yet received government approval and is strongly opposed by local groups and environmentalists.
No One Read the Article or Summary? (Score:1)
"all the refugees they causes" (Score:1)
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5.8 million years isn't a problem. Stuff that decays over such long time spans is emitting radiation at such a low level its not much of a danger. The bad stuff has half lives of a few years. It's spewing radiation like mad. But it won't be around for very long. Maybe a few hundred years.