Fukushima Melted Fuel Removal Begins 2021, End State Unknown (go.com) 113
Japan's economy and industry ministry said Monday that it will start removing melted fuel from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2021. The milestone step of debris removal is considered the most difficult part of cleaning up the crisis-hit facility. ABC News reports: Nearly nine years after [the Fukushima nuclear power plant was wrecked by a massive earthquake and tsunami], the decommissioning of the plant, where three reactors melted, remains largely an uncertainty. The revised road map, to be formally approved later this month, lacks details on how the complex should look at the end but maintains a 30- to 40-year target to finish.
By far the toughest challenge is to remove the 800 tons of nuclear fuel in the three reactors that melted, fell from the cores and hardened at the bottom of their primary containment vessels. In the past two years, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), has made progress in gathering details mainly from two of the three reactors. In February, a small telescopic robot sent inside Unit 2 showed that small pieces of debris can come off and be lifted out. The milestone step of debris removal is scheduled to begin at Unit 2 by the end of 2021. [...] TEPCO started removing the fuel rods from the Unit 3 pool in April 2019 and aims to get all 566 removed by March 2021. Removal of the rods from Units 1 and 2 is to begin in 2023. By 2031, TEPCO also plans to remove thousands at two other units that survived the tsunami to be stored in dry casks on the compound. More than 6,300 fuel rods were in six reactor cooling pools at the time of the accident, and only the Unit 4 pool has been emptied. "Japan has yet to develop a plan to dispose of the highly radioactive waste that will come out of the reactors," the report adds. "Under the road map, the government and TEPCO will compile a plan sometime after the first decade of debris removal ending in 2031."
"Experts say a 30- to 40-year completion target for the decommissioning is too optimistic. Some have raised doubts if removing all of the melted fuel is doable and suggest an approach like Chernobyl -- contain the reactors and wait until radioactivity naturally decreases."
By far the toughest challenge is to remove the 800 tons of nuclear fuel in the three reactors that melted, fell from the cores and hardened at the bottom of their primary containment vessels. In the past two years, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), has made progress in gathering details mainly from two of the three reactors. In February, a small telescopic robot sent inside Unit 2 showed that small pieces of debris can come off and be lifted out. The milestone step of debris removal is scheduled to begin at Unit 2 by the end of 2021. [...] TEPCO started removing the fuel rods from the Unit 3 pool in April 2019 and aims to get all 566 removed by March 2021. Removal of the rods from Units 1 and 2 is to begin in 2023. By 2031, TEPCO also plans to remove thousands at two other units that survived the tsunami to be stored in dry casks on the compound. More than 6,300 fuel rods were in six reactor cooling pools at the time of the accident, and only the Unit 4 pool has been emptied. "Japan has yet to develop a plan to dispose of the highly radioactive waste that will come out of the reactors," the report adds. "Under the road map, the government and TEPCO will compile a plan sometime after the first decade of debris removal ending in 2031."
"Experts say a 30- to 40-year completion target for the decommissioning is too optimistic. Some have raised doubts if removing all of the melted fuel is doable and suggest an approach like Chernobyl -- contain the reactors and wait until radioactivity naturally decreases."
So much easier than windmil blades (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:So much easier than windmil blades (Score:5, Informative)
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Pretty sure that pales in comparison to the numbers that will die due to climate change. We can't solve any major problems at this point because people get so bogged down in the minutiae.
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And according to USA Today, "Cats that live in the wild or indoor pets allowed to roam outdoors kill from 1.4 billion to as many as 3.7 billion birds in the continental U.S. each year, says a new study that escalates a decades-old debate over the feline threat to native animals."
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Wind mills and feral cats tend impact different species. Raptors and song birds respectively.
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Got a citation for that? I'm sure you have a video of 1 windmill killing 1 raptor, but I have one of a walrus destroying a car.... so......
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The leading cause of species dying off is habitat loss. Putting up hundreds of turbines across hundreds of thousands acres is not exactly the environmentally friendly option IMO when 26 acres for a better capacity factor is a better option.
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Is there any compelling reason we couldn't just put them where we grow our food? You know, the vast swaths of this country where we have already destroyed the habitat?
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Scale is pretty important here. Cats kill between 1.3 and 4 BILLION [nature.com] birds a year. If windmills are killing 0.0082% of what cats are, I'm sure the populations are won't notice the windmills. Hell, I imagine that cars kill around that same percentage a year.
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I'm all for nuclear. Just attempting to put the 'horrors of used windmill parts' into perspective.
Which you haven't done. Even including the nuclear equivalent of the Hindenburg, the materials throughput for nuclear is tiny by comparison, and far more easily managed.
You clearly don't appreciate the scale of mining and materials that go into renewables, their short life cycle, and that recycling hasn't yet been proven economically viable. It may never be for things like turbine blades, which will be buried by the millions.
As somebody who works in the wind power industry pointed out a while ago, a whole lot of these turbine blades can also be shredded and burned. That of course de-sequesters carbon but those emissions are dwarfed by the amount of carbon de-sequestration those wind turbine blades prevented over their lifetime. Also, even if you bury the fiberglass ones (which can be economically recycled) the amount of material we are talking about here is not on a geological scale, as in 'OMG, we are going to fill up the Chal
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If you can't figure out by now how much easier/safer it is to dismantle some windmills compared to a nuclear plant. I don't think there is anything anyone could tell you that would change your mind.
Some people just don't want to know stuff.
(That's just in general under normal circumstances. Not even considering what happens in a disaster.)
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Call me when Hanford is all cleaned up. Ditto with Chernobyl.
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The scare quotes were there for a reason...
Re: So much easier than windmil blades (Score:2)
From the sound of things, that's true. The media is largely blowing up a non-issue from the beginning causing the Japan government to incite a panic and force evacuate causing 2000 additional deaths after a massive disaster had already hit. The investigation and cleanup efforts have exposed more people than the actual incident did.
The reactor was contained and all fuel rods are already in containment vessels which remain unaffected and were planned to be there for at least another few decades. There is no t
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...The only ethical case for Nuclear energy is: Global warming is going to kill humanity off in 1,000 years....
It's important, I'd say, to acknowledge that global warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is real, and the basic science is well understood, and supported by data.
But, no, warming is not going to "kill humanity off in 1,000 years." I don't know where you got that, or even whether you're trying for hyperbole or sarcasm here, but no. Global warming will change the ecosystem, will have economic effects, and have significant impact on important things like food growing, but no, it's not going
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The only ethical case for Nuclear energy is: Global warming is going to kill humanity off in 1,000 years.
Bigger case is that fossil fuels will run out long before that, and we need a reliable alternative.
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Re:So much easier than windmil blades (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it?
What kind of effort would it need to recycle the blades of that many windmills that could produce the energy that the nuclear power plants in Japan has produced in the last 53 years since the first Japanese nuclear power plant came online?
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Before March 2011 Japan had 47.5 GWe of nuclear capacity, although of course actual output was considerably lower.
That's maybe 100,000 windmills accounting for capacity factor. For comparison that's less than China already has installed.
Japan has some of the best wind resources in the world due to its location and extensive shallow coastal areas, about 150 GW onshore and 600 GW offshore.
Re:So much easier than windmil blades (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of effort would it need to recycle the blades of that many windmills that could produce the energy that the nuclear power plants in Japan has produced in the last 53 years
The cost of the Fukushima disaster and cleanup over the next 40 years will cost between $400 billion and a trillion USD.
That is enough to pay for a lot of turbine blades.
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Not really.
The only reference I see to the Fuku
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Have you incorporated the cost from accidents involving spent fuel from existing nuclear plants that occur up to 10,000 years in the future? Of course you haven't.
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I just wanted to check to see if you realized that your own link, in table 1b shows the total LCOE for nuclear per megawatt hour as being 38% more expensive than onshore wind, and 23% more expensive than solar pv in 3 years? Without tax credits. And you are suggesting half a cent to something that already costs more?
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Your analysis is absolutely horribly flawed. The $200B is only the cost the government is paying to decommision the Fukushima plant. The remaining economic factors can't even be calculated. The entire city had to be evacuated without warning, all of the homes, farmland, businesses, and materials left behind are now worthless.
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Well one set of windmill blades compared to one melted reactor... sure... Now compare 100'000 blades to one reactor and the calculation might well look a little bit different.
Not to mention Fukushima was 60s tech while windmills are at least 30 years younger, aren't they?
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The problem with the turbine blades is not a serious one. It's just a matter of setting up the right kind of disposal tools to cut up the material in smaller bits.
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You think the cost of recycling 100,000 windmills exceeds $400 billion? You can't recycle a windmill for less than $4,000,000 (or $10,000,000 given the higher end of the reactor cost estimate)?
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You'd be wrong. Recycling windmill blades is easy, you just can't crash them in a traditional way. But good on you for reading a headline a few months ago, and forming and opinion based on no understanding of the topic itself.
if it's economical.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't find the information here, even though it says MOX (recycled U+Pt is used in 12 reactors in Japan), and that fuel recycling is not done much and has been diminishing in recent years. https://www.world-nuclear.org/... [world-nuclear.org]
The REMIX process can recycle up to five times and get 60 years out of the Uranium. it starts at about 5% and recycles at 1%.
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There's a bunch of nasty stuff mixed in, and normal chemical separation methods would contaminate everything with radioactive waste.
Also, it's a one-off project, so you'd have to build a dedicated processing plant for a limited supply.
Re:if it's economical.. (Score:5, Informative)
why isn't it vastly cheaper to reprocess the rod material and extraction all of the unconverted U235?
Because of U-234 contamination of spent fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Natural uranium is mostly U-238, with about 0.7% U-235, and a very small fraction of U-234. U-234 concentration goes up, along with U-235 concentration, with the enrichment process but this is not a problem because at this point the primary problem is the U-238. After being run through a reactor there is more U-234 produced, a lot of U-235 consumed, and even some of the U-238 consumed. Enrich this again and the U-234 proportion increases more and then it starts to become a problem.
There are reactors being designed that can consume this spent fuel, and prototypes of these are being built. There are molten salt thermal reactors (using "slow" or thermal neutrons), with one a variant of the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR or "lifter"). There are molten salt fast reactors, one being called a molten chloride fast reactor (MCFR). There are more traditional heavy water reactors that use solid fuel rods, they are largely based off the successful CANDU design.
I'm seeing a lot of discussion on the use of fast reactors or thorium as fuel to avoid the problems of reprocessing. Fast reactors will "burn" U-234 and U-238 better than a thermal reactor. Thermal reactors are, or were, popular because they are easier to build. Using thorium as fuel avoids any need to enrich the fuel as thorium in it's natural state as a useful fuel. Mixing thorium with the used fuel from existing reactors is possible with certain variations on this theme of a thorium fuel cycle, it's not "burning" the U-235 or U-234 so much as it is "burning" the U-238 and plutonium isotopes.
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Physicist here. Unless there's some new magic I'm unaware of, Thorium is fertile but not fissile. So like U238, you can breed it into the fissile U233, but not directly fissile it. Science isn't a popularity/wishful thinking sort of thing.
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Physicist here. Unless there's some new magic I'm unaware of, Thorium is fertile but not fissile. So like U238, you can breed it into the fissile U233, but not directly fissile it. Science isn't a popularity/wishful thinking sort of thing.
Electrical/computer/software engineer here. There is no magic, only handwaving to keep from going into a deep dive in the physics.
LFTR uses thorium as fuel by breeding it to U-233 and splitting those atoms by fission for heat and neutrons. A variation on this theme breeds U-238 into Pu-239. There are designs being tested now to use LFTR, MCFR, and variations on the CANDU to do this. In nearly every case they use reactor grade plutonium to get the breeding started. We can "burn" this fuel from the exist
Re:if it's economical.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Japan has been trying to build reactors that can reprocess and recycle fuel since the 60s. None of them worked properly, all failed and often in extremely expensive ways.
It's great in theory but in practice it doesn't work at scale.
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Perhaps, but such things are alarmingly common with nuclear plant operators. See disasters like "Dirty 30" in the UK, for example.
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Perhaps we shouldn't consider the Japanese' expertise on nuclear power to be the end-all data point behind reprocessing reactor viability.
No one else has come up with an economically viable reprocessing facility, either.
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The "Japanese" did not do that. "Tepco" did that. That one company basing their decision of a sea-wall built more than sufficiently for all expected tsunami cases. People keep forgetting the term natural disaster is not the same as just a bit of shitty weather. Incidentally the "Japanese" (in this case being the regulator) was also critical of both the location of the generators and the height of the seawall prior to the incident.
In related news I saw in the news the other day an American shot another Ameri
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Sure, lets trust our own. It's not like we built a reactor on a crumbling coastline 5 miles from the San Andreas fault [wikipedia.org] or anything.
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Using solid oxide fuel and pressurized water cooling for commercial reactors was a terrible idea; molten salts drastically simplify the nuclear fuel cycle, and eliminate long-term waste almost entirely.
Yes and no. I've read blog posts from Kirk Sorensen, the engineer featured in your link on the LFTR-49, where he describes the problem. With solid fuel in rods the fuel doesn't mix, meaning that the "good stuff" isn't mixed with the "bad stuff". This means I could build a pressurized heavy water reactor, put in fuel rods with reactor grade plutonium fuel, put in rods with "spent" fuel from old reactors, and put in rods with thorium fuel, and then see the plutonium fuel breed and "burn" the thorium and ur
Japan is out of options, they need nuclear power (Score:5, Insightful)
People might think Japan would be crazy to keep using nuclear power after all the trouble they've had with it so far, but they will keep using nuclear power for a lack of better options.
Japan is not all that large of a nation, so there isn't the option of spreading out windmills and solar panels to avoid storms. Battery storage would be prohibitively expensive as every year they experience a lengthy storm season where they can get no useful sun for solar PV panels and winds too powerful for windmills. Battery storage to keep the lights on for this long is not practical with current technology, and it is likely this will never be practical. Storage by hydroelectric dams is also impractical.
Japan has access to some off shore natural gas, and they rely on this heavily. They import plenty of fuel oil and coal for power but this has the problem of air pollution and excessive costs. There's also the issue of being reliant on foreign nations for a vital commodity for their economy, leaving them vulnerable to the whims of other nations.
Japan has some geothermal power, and they can certainly build more, but the best geothermal sites are in the few wildlife preserves they have. Building more geothermal power stations will not be enough, even if they ignore the detrimental impact on the environment.
Japan will need nuclear power. They have the industrial capacity to build the plants themselves, though they often collaborate with international corporations to build them. They currently import most or all of the uranium fuel but they have a large stockpile of fuel to draw from, and are experimenting with methods to extract uranium from seawater.
Nuclear power gives Japan plentiful, affordable, reliable, domestically sourced, and safe energy. I know a lot of people will see articles on the clean up of the destroyed nuclear power plant at Fukushima and think this must be the end of nuclear power in Japan. It is not. Even though people made a big deal about the hazards nuclear power poses there was only one suspected death from the nuclear accident. Other people died at Fukushima but this was from the earthquake and tsunami, not from the nuclear reactors.
Japan is not unique in this lack of options. Many other nations are in a similar situation, or will find themselves in this situation as their energy demands rise and access to fossil fuels falls. Not only does Japan need nuclear power, so will many other nations all over the world.
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"and winds too powerful for windmills. "
No such thing. Modern windmills have no problems up to 300 miles a hour.
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Modern windmills have no problems up to 300 miles a hour.
And this kind of progress is essential if we want the space elevator.
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I have seen 80m/s. (180 mph) [windpowermonthly.com] That is pretty shy of your 300 mph. Citation?
What is also important is the rated wind speed. Just because it can survive 80 m/s does not mean it is producing energy at winds faster than 25 m/s. This is why the capacity factor for wind tends to be around 40%.
Re:Japan is out of options, they need nuclear powe (Score:5, Informative)
They import plenty of fuel oil and coal for power but this has the problem of air pollution and excessive costs. There's also the issue of being reliant on foreign nations for a vital commodity for their economy, leaving them vulnerable to the whims of other nations.
Nuclear power gives Japan plentiful, affordable, reliable, domestically sourced, and safe energy. I know a lot of people will see articles on the clean up of the destroyed nuclear power plant at Fukushima and think this must be the end of nuclear power in Japan. It is not. Even though people made a big deal about the hazards nuclear power poses there was only one suspected death from the nuclear accident. Other people died at Fukushima but this was from the earthquake and tsunami, not from the nuclear reactors.
Actually, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), coal still has about the same LCOE as nuclear. There are fossil fuel alternatives that beat the pants off of nuclear and there are renewable alternatives that outperform both of them. There is absolutely nothing dirt cheap and affordable about nuclear energy. You may like it, you may love it, you may consider using it to a political statement because you think it makes liberals cry but you won't choose it because it is the most affordable option.
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. There are fossil fuel alternatives that beat the pants off of nuclear and there are renewable alternatives that outperform both of them.
Blindseer's entire post is about explaining why that doesn't apply to Japan. Even the sections you quote refute your post.
You may consider using it to a political statement...it makes liberals cry
There were no political statements in Blindseer's post. You brought politics into what is entirely a discussion about logistics.
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Nuclear is pretty much always the most expensive and burdensome option
Not when on a remote island in the pacific that houses the 3rd-largest economy in the world but is only 60th in land mass.
He seems to be basing his statement on a 2010 study by the Japanese government that claimed nuclear energy is about half the LCOE as terrestrial wind power. This was later exposed as imaginative accounting where they calculated the LCOE of wind power including all externalised costs but calculated the cost of nuclear power without taking into account any externalised costs at all, i.e. the excessive cost of nuclear facility insurance, nuclear waste disposal, nuclear facility security and safety measures, nu
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He seems to be basing his statement on a 2010 study by the Japanese government that claimed nuclear energy is about half the LCOE as terrestrial wind power.
Nothing in the OP is talking about anything like that. You seem to be making up points, claiming the OP talked about them, then debunking your own claims.
That is not a personal insult, it is a sarcastic framing of your complete ignorance of the fact that nuclear energy is a highly political issue.
I think that general public would consider calling someone a crying liberal and someone else "ignorant" and "in a coma" count as personal insults.
it is a sarcastic framing of your complete ignorance of the fact that nuclear energy is a highly political issue.
I never said it was not political. Perhaps you got mixed-up and are replying to the wrong post?
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You may like it, you may love it, you may consider using it to a political statement because you think it makes liberals cry but you won't choose it because it is the most affordable option.
Japan is not choosing nuclear power because it is the cheapest, they are choosing it because it is the cheapest of the options that are available to them.
They have some wind, some hydro, some solar, and some geothermal power. All of this combined is not enough to keep the lights on. If they built up more infrastructure to gather more wind, sun, water, and geothermal then they'd still not have enough because storms will put the entire nation into dark and cold which prevents all of these from keeping the l
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Japan is not all that large of a nation, so there isn't the option of spreading out windmills and solar panels to avoid storms.
Hint:
Once, a few millenia ago some smart people invented a thing, which is called a map
Perhaps you can look that term up and even learn how to use a map. Then you could consult it and realize how dumb you are, as Japan is quite huge! Especially the coast line ...
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365,000 km2 Japan
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Once, a few millenia ago some smart people invented a thing, which is called a map. Perhaps you can look that term up and even learn how to use a map.
Then we fast forward a few millenia and we invented Germany, a country which by your example seems to be full of just arseholes who don't know how to have a discussion like a normal polite person.
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Then we fast forward a few millenia and we invented Germany, a country which by your example seems to be full of just arseholes who don't know how to have a discussion like a normal polite person.
We need to keep an eye on those Germans, they started two world wars already and they might be planning to start a third.
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You are not only bad in geography, but also in history.
WWI was started by Yugoslavia or Austria, depending how you count it.
And actually it was only a continuation of the Turkish war.
WWII was started by the Japanese in Asia, you could argue that the Germans started it in Europe when they attacked Poland, though. Of course you can do the US propaganda thing and call that two different wars. But then you have to decide why it suddenly ended by the capitulation of Japan and not by the capitulation of Germany .
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I don't like stupid people.
Especially if they are to blind to see.
Or simply pull nonsense out of their ass, like Blindseer.
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It's about twice the size of the state of Washington in the US where I live, and we're not even a big state.
You're right that it does have quite a bit of coastline, and if we ever figure out how to build 2 dimensional objects that will matter to this discussion.
Same coastline as second-smallest country (Score:2)
> You're right that it does have quite a bit of coastline, and if
> we ever figure out how to build 2 dimensional objects that will matter to this discussion.
If we're building two-dimensional buildings, we'll probably discover that the coastline of Japan isn't measurably longer than the coastline of Monaco. Monaco is, of course, the second smallest country in the world.
Anyone who thinks I'm wrong, post the precise length of each coastline and prove me wrong. :)
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I said there is no *measurable* difference and challenged anyone to provide a good measurement because coastlines, especially rocky coastlines, are fractal. You can't measure their length in an authoritative way.
Suppose driving up the coast from Seattle to Vancouver, BC you show 230km on your odometer. You might say that's 230 km of coastline. Okay but you drove right past Fidalgo, which is called Fidalgo Island because it's almost completely surrounded by water, though it is attached to the mainland. F
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Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of fractal coastlines.
This is only a problem if you're trying to measure the "true" length of a fractal contour.
As you note:
The smaller your measuring device, the longer measurement you get for "coastline".
There is always a generalization of the coastline based on the smallest unit "you care about"
So, should I choose "meters" as an example, there is in fact a measurable distance difference between the two.
The fractal logic could be used to say that "it's an mile hike to the top of that mountain."
It may be true from a mathematical perspective (
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Should read: "It's an [infinite] mile hike to the top of that mountain"
Remember we're constructing 2-dimensional building (Score:2)
You may recall I said this is the case when we start constructing 2-dimensional buildings on said coast. It's not discussion about everyday practical reality. :)
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The catch is, that the smaller you make the unit of measurement the coastlines become longer and longer and actually approach infinite.
We just need teamwork. (Score:3)
We just train people to Naruto run in, grab a chunk, and run out with it, and repeat until we get it all out.
We'll be running so fast, the gamma rays wont even have time to Bannerize us.
After all, radiation is like sunshine; we'll also get great tans at the same time, inside and out.
Who's with me?
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I'm right behind you! You go first and show us how it is done!
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No more than 3.6 roentgen. I'm told it's the equivalent of a chest X-ray.
Fukushima was a well designed plant (Score:3)
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Fukushima was a poorly designed plant, but to be fair, back when it was designed, people just weren't thinking about worst-case scenarios. A well designed plant would be inherently safe. Inherently safe ("passive safety") designs for nuclear reactors exist: https://www.asme.org/topics-re... [asme.org]
(and the Wikipedia article isn't bad, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] )
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Every plant that pops was poorly designed in retrospect at the time it popped.
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Fukushima was a poorly designed plant, but to be fair, back when it was designed, people just weren't thinking about worst-case scenarios. A well designed plant would be inherently safe. Inherently safe ("passive safety") designs for nuclear reactors exist
They exist now but didn't when this plant was built. The six operational units on that site were second generation designs, and maybe early third generation. Units 7 and 8 that were under construction at the time would have been (if I'm understanding this correctly) passively safe late third generation (or "Gen 3.5") reactors that likely would have survived the tsunami and been able to be restarted. (I used "restarted" because it is still likely the reactors would have shutdown automatically from the sei
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Fukushima Daiichi was producing about 5 GW, or 44 TWh per year from 1979-2011, 32 years, so 1.4 PWhr total.
In rough numbers, 1 kWh of coal power is about 1,000 kg of CO2, so it is close to 1 Wh of coal is 1 kg of CO2.
Thus Fukushima Daiichi in its time saved 1.4 Eg (exagrams) of CO2 emissions. If you want to go back to tons, that is 1.543e+12 tons (i.e. 1.5 teratons) of CO2.
The market cost for CO2 reduction is now at worst $15 per ton, so Fukushima Daiichi was worth $22.5 trillion of CO2 reduction, or about
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1 kWh of coal power is about 1,000 kg of CO2
https://www.volker-quaschning.... [volker-quaschning.de] says 1 kWh of coal is about 350 grams of CO2, not 1000 kg.
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Dang European decimal commas! Yes, you are correct, 1 kWh of coal power is more like 1 kg of CO2 as per this reference [wingas.com].
It wasn't unexpected (Score:2)
Everybody knew it was coming, the CEOs were just expecting to be retired and/or dead by then.
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it was a once in a 100 year event. There were records of exactly such an event happening 100 years ago.
Everybody knew it was coming, the CEOs were just expecting to be retired and/or dead by then.
That is SO not how it works.
800 tons (Score:2)
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I would expect the disposal rate to start slow, and then accelerate over time as radiation gets less severe.
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The long lived isotopes are not a problem, because they don't generate a lot of radiation. Also, the natural decay path of uranium (when not hit by neutrons) produces alpha radiation, which is trivial to shield even with a pair of rubber gloves.
The dangerous isotopes are the ones with shorter half-lives that generate energetic gamma radiation.
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> What are they going to do in 50 years when all robots have AI and refuse to go in?
Build "dumb devices".
This isn't rocket science -- just basic computer science.
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Or just remove the "refusal-chip"
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Tomorrow's Actual Intelligence (a.i.) compared to today's Artificial Ignorance (A.I.) doesn't have a "ethics/morality" chip. It is all inter-twined.
Which neuron(s) would you cut to disable your ethics / morality ?
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It was a joke.
Re: 800 tons (Score:2)
Usually we start with the pinky.
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UO2 density is 11 g/cm^3. 800 tons is 7.257e+8 g, so that yields 65972727 cm^3 or 66 m^3, or a cube about 4m on a side.
let it rot (Score:1)
We're talking about fairly small geographical areas here. Not a huge loss of land in the grand scheme of things. Take it as a lesson learn
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I suggest you try some yummy Czech wild hog. Though I read they're down to about only half of them being too radioactive to eat these days.
Ya, the Russians had the right idea.
I see (Score:2)
And the place where they will stock that debris will be surrounded by armed guards for a million years or so.
I just hope the guy who has to make that million-year-24/7-shift-plan doesn't use Excel.
Missed opportunity (Score:2)
Too bad society doesn't invest more heavily in large scale nuclear power research. Once MSRs are perfected, they could be deployed in significant numbers, and with further nuclear waste reclamation projects, it would be unnecessary to "dispose" of perfectly utilizable nuclear fuel.
Re: (Score:2)
No such number,
Done moved on.