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Guest Post: U.S. To Bury Its 70,000 Tonnes Of Nuclear Waste
Submitted by Joao Peixe of OilPrice.com,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has released a recent study which has determined that if and when the US ever decides to actually pursue the technology to recycle nuclear waste, it will take 20 years to develop. Based on this knowledge they have suggested that the current stockpile of spent nuclear fuel should be buried without any thought as to its retrieval in the future.
Officials from Oak Ridge involved in the report said that,
“based on the technical assessment, about 68,450 metric tons or about 98 percent of the total current inventory by mass, can proceed to permanent disposal without the need to ensure retrievability for reuse or research purposes.”
The remaining two percent will be used for research into recycling and storage technologies.
The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, co-chaired by Steven Chu, also believes that the means to recycle nuclear waste is too far off for any consideration at the moment.
“No currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments—including advances in reprocessing and recycling technologies—have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenges the nation confronts over at least the next several decades, if not longer.”
Although they did add that it was
“premature for the United States to commit, as a matter of policy, to ‘closing’ the nuclear fuel cycle given the large uncertainties that exist about the merits and commercial viability of different fuel cycle and technology options.”
Recycling is often thought of as a perfect means of dealing with nuclear waste, producing more energy and making a more efficient use of the fuel, yet anti-nuclear activists are readily against reprocessing technology.
Mali Martha Lightfoot, the executive director of the Helen Caldicott Foundation, says that,
“recycling is a euphemism for reprocessing which is one of the worst polluters of the atmosphere and the ocean, and is a direct conduit to proliferation. It is not really a solution to anything except how can the industry get more of our money. It also ups the ante for reactor accident danger, as in the case of Fukushima, because MOX fuel has plutonium in it.”
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Opposition to Yucca mtn means that all of our nuke plants are like Fukushima - stacking tons of waste right next to the reactors that can potentially melt down. The danger of each nuke plant is magnified as a result. You may want it to happen to make a point but once it does it will NEVER be cleaned up. Yucca is the answer.
Apparently Yucca was NOT the answer. At least not in a democracy. The problem is the democracy, Russia encrypted their meltdown by sending thousands of forced laborers to their death.
Yucca was the answer that ratepayers already spent billions on. Harry Reid is the problem.
and now, they (Russia) are having to do it again.
Like most things govt can't manage properly, and due to incompetence....
It's your grandchildren's problem
Just launch that crap out into space. Rod by Rod.. On a slow trajectory out into the never.. That should cool it off..
Bullish for rocket builders..
Send it to detroit ... its not like anyone wants to live there anyway.
Nah. Send it to the South.
By the looks of people there, the nuclear waste will be the only thing "active", if you know what I mean.
This nation has a much tougher issue ahead of it when it comes to how to discard of all those soon to be worthless stockpiles of US dollar waste.
Well if Yuca Mountain was still a project, there would be a storage facility available
I always laughed at those late night convoys with 100 state troopers escorting a giant flatbed with a tiny metal cylinder in the middle of it. Now I think they camouflage them as carnival rides. Nobody wants to hang with the carneys. 70,000 tons huh? That's a lotta circus trains.
Send it to the Huffington Post and tell that it was Obama's idea. They'll praise him til their eyes start glowing.
europe has recycling plants
Funny, the French don't seem to have any difficulties recycling nuclear waste into new fuel.
Nope, nothing political about this.
Attention to one of the Tylers:
Please do not advance outrageous conspiracy theories
You are either with us or with the terrorists.
I never could understand why dont they just put the used radiactive materials in disused uranium mines? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Because it eventually goes critical, melts through the bottom of the mine and into bedrock, and contaminates the aquafer for hundreds of miles in all directions for millions of years.
In the original mine the nuclear material was scattered, now we've concentrated it and that creates a problem for storage. So to accomplish what you sugget they would have to actually reverse the entire mining+refining process, mixing the high-grade waste with dirt, to create lower-grade nuclear ore sand, and bury that.
They really should do. It would serve them right.
But it would cost so much money it would probably destroy the global economy. And who wants to be the guy working underground trowling the nasty shit back into the mine? Nobody, that's who.
Presumably the same guys who dug the uranium ore up wouldn't mind to get it shovled down? and why or why somebody would pile it up in one chank to induce fission....surely the mining involves extracting millions tonns of material. So volumewise you have a lot of space in a disused mine to spread the waste around.
Yup. There is always some poor, ignorant shlub willing to do the dangerous work for the plutocrats.
We used to call them slaves. Now we pay them a little bit for their trouble and put them on disability when their bodies explode.
If you were going to go ahead with such a plan, developing and building robots capable of doing the simplest manual labor would be rather cheap and easy, comparatively.
The nuclear waste is contaminated with plutonium. Half life is 240,000 years.
Despite the noise about Iran's nuclear enrichment program (+20% enrichment of U-235) the real bomb material is plutonium not U-235. A uranium bomb is too heavy to put onto a rocket, and is not efficient.
Plutonum can be easily separated from chemically distinct Uranium isotopes by dissolving the waste matrix in acid then using reagents to isolate the plutonium out of solution. The US learned how to do this in 1943 and built both reactors to gain plutonium and the factories to process relatively pure plutonium in 1944 (in Hanford, Washingon).
If waste is buried, it can be dug up, once in hand it can be processed to remove the plutonium which can then be fashioned into weapons. This only requires the 1944 technology.
Waste can be buried in the ocean bottom but newer robotic submersibles and similar forms of commercial technology renders such burials insecure. Putting waste onto large ships then pumping the ships full of dirt to cause them to sink would be dangerous as plutonium has a tendency to self-aggregate and form critical masses both in- and out of solutions. The outcome could be a nuclear explosion @ the bottom of the ocean.
The only positive approach is to burn plutonium and other radiological wastes in special reactors designed and built for the purpose. These would be fast-neutron reactors that would produce no electric power but would accelerate the transmutation of heavy fissile material such as plutonium into isotopes, ultimately to lead. It would take about 300 years to reduce the 70,000 tons of waste into an equivalent amount of lead.
We could put it in ice cream!
Use the plutonium for fuel.
Feel the glow , bitches.
A long time ago, wristwatches had "glow in the dark" hands that you could read without light. Today those are made using simple light-retaining pigments, but at first they were created using paints containing radioactive radium. So you could own a watch that today would probably trip the sensors in some airports.
A bigger problem was that the people doing the actual painting were coming down sick and dying of radiation poisoning. One can imagine these were mostly women, and probably mostly poor women in Asia. They used very tiny brushes to paint the radium onto the watch face and hands, and to keep the brush tip sharp would lick it before picking up the paint. They were eating radium the entire time. Probably their bodies would classify as strategic nuclear waste upon their death. Who even knows what happened to their children.
We have a long and very dark history with this shit.
Tritium sights bitchez!
Those spent fuel rods can be used to make energy in thorium reactors and made non-toxic in the process. Win-win.
China is going pell mell into thorium, and India is revisiting thorium to update their capacity:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/978404...
Beware, all thorium 'deniers': http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-20100035-48/is-a-nuclear-powered-ca...
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To use a oft used word around here…
Thorium Bitchez! Thorium!
Was hoping somebuddy would point that out.
Mucho Thanks.
•J•
V-V
All used nuclear fuel contains plutonium. Burning MOX fuel in a nuclear reactor actually results in a net destruction of plutonium, reducing the problem that critics of reprocessing are pointing out.
wtf
OilPrice.com's "partner" is world news daily. How seriously can you take them?
there you go..all answers in one article
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/countries/US_nuclear_fuel_cycle.html
That "cheap" price for nuclear energy just got astronomic.
Now you know why the cost of de-commissioning of a nuclear plant is never shown or approximated when they propose building these things.
The ultimate can kick.
Nearly 30 civil prototype and commercial reactors have been decommissioned in the USA. Twelve have been totally dismantled (Decon optionf) so that the site is released for unrestricted use, notably Fort St Vrain, Big Rock Point and Shoreham. Ten are in various stages of dismantling, or Safstorf.
The Nuclear Energy Institute reported in 2006 that of the total $32 billion estimated to decommission all eligible nuclear plants at an average cost of $300 million
Since 2006 I bet that estimate has gone up at least 2 levels of magnitude.
yep, and if they started expanding known research on 'Thorium Reactors/Modules' twenty sum-odd years ago, there would be no nuclear waste to dispose!
The thorium cycle produces no fuel for nuclear weapons so it has been a non-starter.
"Recycling is often thought of as a perfect means of dealing with nuclear waste, producing more energy and making a more efficient use of the fuel, yet anti-nuclear activists are readily against reprocessing technology."
But the first paragraph of the story says that the recycling technology is at least 20 years away...WTF?
Government definition of cleaning up a toxic waste site: "Dig it up and transport it to another site and bury it."
Nuclear is so much cleaner..so lets shut down all that dirty coal stuff.
lmao
Hard to know which way to jump when you're caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea.
The Democrats are afrad of an earthquake in the next 5 million years and closed Yucca Mountain. So bury it where exactly?
Well actually I imagine there are probably some Republicans worried about the same thing. See it has not so much to do with one's political leanings and so much more on where you are down-wind of that shit when it goes critical some night while nobody is looking.
Hell, just send it to the CERN project, it can be altered...
Marianas trench subduction zone
This is where our descendants will ultimately decide is the best and safest and coincidently cheapest place on the planet to dispose of this stuff.
Ya it was the most obvious and cheapest solution and ya, they'll take a few hundred years and hundreds of billions of dollars in wasted funds to come to that conclusion but they will, eventually.
They don't even have to bury it, it buries itself.
Bury it with Bush's weapons of mass destruction and Dick Cheney's email. No one will ever find it then.
Actually, I think the best place to store it is Fukushima and Chernobyl. These places are already so radioactive, the addition of the worlds spent fuel wouldn't even generate another tick on the Geiger Counter. Could be a nice source of income from an otherwise unusable patch of earth we have already poisoned to death.
Why can't they just shoot the stuff out into space and be done with it. Give NASA or some private entity something to do.
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