The real problem is the gross lack of technical understanding that the general public have of nuclear radiation in general and high level waste in particular. Thanks to various TV programs, most people have an image of HLW as haphazardly piled rusting 40-gallon drums oozing a glowing green goo. Nope. A used, and hence highly radioactive, nuclear fuel bundle looks much the same as an unused, and hence only mildly radioactive, fuel bundle. Another problem is the linear non-threshold theory that says all nuclear radiation is harmful down to the tiniest detectable amount. LNT theory is becoming recognized as nonsense, and that low levels of radiation are essentially harmless. Certainly HLW needs to be stored in a safe place for a long time, but the hysterical fear of it in some quarters is uncalled for.
Hanford was the ancient FOAK nuclear weapons site that has nothing whatsoever to do with modern commercial nuclear energy. They used to dump radioisotopes into the environment just to study their effects (at the time unknown).
It's also a big government porkbarrel cleanup scam kind of like their never ending wars. They will be pouring $billions into their Syria & Ukraine war scams for the next 50yrs likely.
There was nothing dangerous about the radioactive watch dials. It was dangerous for the workers who licked the paint brushes containing the radioisotope. Less dangerous than smoking cigarettes however.
The problem is people not being wary of how dangerous the thousands of toxic, carcinogenic substances being dumped into the environment in vastly more amounts, vastly more dangerous than the minuscule amount of radioisotopes that come from nuclear energy. A lot of them coming from various non-nuclear energy industries including wind/solar/battery storage.
You're just pissed because I exposed your MOD POD as a scam, and also how jealous you are of Rossi's E-Cat which keeps beating the crap out of the MOD POD by every metric.
We could reduce the volume of nuclear waste through reprocessing. Unfortunately, we banned reprocessing in the 1970s because we didn't want Iran and North Korea to get weapons-grade fissile materials...oh wait
Actually it was the Malthusian, Jimmy Carter, who banned reprocessing, while touting renewable energy scams. Ostensibly to reduce proliferation, which of course was total nonsense. Considering Carter was a total nobody until the Trilateral Commission promoted him, once again you can see the hidden hand behind the anti-nuclear movement.
Burying this stuff is crazy full stop. Interim storage is fine and after 600 years you could probably reprocess it in your living room if you wanted to. That is where the proliferation risk really is, but I want some plutonium just to say I have it…
Weapons proliferation using spent nuclear power plant fuel is a giant stinking red herring.
Weapons-grade plutonium must be 93% Pu-239. Plutonium in spent fuel is 54% Pu-239. Britain tried to make an explosive device using specially-prepared power plant fuel, obtained by much shorter fuel cycles, and other easily-noticed methods. They got a fizzle instead of a bang. One British scientist remarked "we will not bother to try that again."
India built a weapon in secret using materials recovered from used CANDU fuel. That’s why Gerald R Ford banned civilian reprocessing in the USA. Carter reaffirmed the ban, and Reagan rescinded it. There has not been a ban on civilian reprocessing in the USA since the 1980s.
"Nuclear Waste" is an intentionally misleading term. Only 5% of it is fission products, which need 300 year custody. Unused fuel needs 300,000 year custody — or so they say. Thanks to Jimmuh Cahtuh we refuse to separate fission products from spent fuel, and consume the unused fuel. He apparently believed that if the United States did not process spent fuel, then Pakistan and North Korea and Iran would not develop nuclear weapons. They were apparently not on the memo's distribution list.
The Nuclear Waste Act of 1986 charged nuclear utilities 0.1¢/kWh, but courts eventually held that utilities need not continue to pay because DoE had reneged on their responsibility — legally mandated by the act — to take custody of spent fuel. The fund now stands at $43 billion. But the act explicitly forbids any of its funds from being used for spent fuel processing. That needs to change. The best way to process spent fuel, at least the best way that's been demonstrated at larger then lab-bench scale, is the pyroelectric process developed by Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories. The estimated cost would be 0.085¢/kWh. The Act needs to be revised to allow spent fuel processing.
Only 9.26% of fission products — the two elements caesium and strontium — need 300 year custody. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. Fission products are created at the rate of about one tonne per gigawatt year. Activists insist an all-electric USA would have have appetite for 1,700 GWe. So an all-electric all-nuclear American energy economy would produce 78 tonnes of caesium and strontium per year — about the weight of one dime per household. The volume would be less than nine cement-mixer truck loads. We can handle that.
Details (and much more) in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so readers can verify I didn't just make up stuff.
Good stuff. I work in DOE’s Consent-Based Siting Consortia for Nuclear Fuel. Grateful that our government is funding a public conversation about this matter to fund the YIMBY communities.
"...And India used a research heavy water reactor for its first weapons grade material. It has nothing to do with spent fuel reprocessing." Finally someone gets it right.
I would hope that planning for any site recognizes the resource inherent in transuranics being stored. To the extent there is progress in the proposed fast reactors, those reactors specifically can benefit from the 97% or so of energy remaining in the material, while light water reactors extract only 3% - considered good enough obviously - since U-235 is so energy dense.
It was Gerald Ford that banned commercial reprocessing in response to India testing an atomic weapon in 1974 with material from civilian reactors. Carter reaffirmed Ford’s executive order, and later Reagan rescinded it. So there is no ban on reprocessing. Industry is simply not interested due to cost and risk.
No it was Carter banned reprocessing with an executive order in 1977 which caused a newly built 1500t/yr plant at Barnwell to be scrapped. Industry is very interested in building new reprocessing plants and one is being planned. Fuel cost is calculated at 0.1 cents/kwh, the same as the DOE's waste storage fee that isn't used.
And India used a research heavy water reactor for its first weapons grade material. It has nothing to do with spent fuel reprocessing.
Like I said, Carter reaffirmed Ford’s order. I never specified NPP, only that it was civilian, and you don’t recover Pu without reprocessing something (fuel or target). It was done in secret and in violation of agreements with the USA and Canada who supplied the reactor technology and materials.
It’s all moot because Reagan rescinded any ban in the USA.
No he didn't reaffirm, he issued his own executive order which shutdown a newly built SNF reprocessing plant.
Yeah, like a nation wants to go through the long, hard, expensive task of nuclear weapons development but they better not because the minor amount of fuel reprocessing they need might not be approved by the USA. That's like saying someone wants to do a mass shooting but would have to trespass in order to succeed so that would stop him.
No it ain't moot because when ideologues, the corrupted or just plain stupid, show what a-holes they can be by shutting down a newly built valuable green energy plant, that is going to put a giant damper on any investment. Nobody wants to be another Shoreham. If Reagan rescinded and a plant was built what's to stop the stooge, Clinton, from banning it again? Like he did the incredibly successful IFR program.
The IFR was a brilliant success, cancelled not by executive order but by budgetary process in Congress (after jawboning by Clinton). The technology would not be restricted, and there are plans for commercial deployment. The only things standing in the way are demand (economics) and an NRC that is poorly equipped to handle new concepts.
I don't see anything in there but for a mostly idiotic change in reprocessing policy, that separates plutonium, from pro to anti. I don't see anything about a legal ban on doing it.
And technically you can claim making MOX fuel is not separating plutonium (which is not weapons grade and can't be made weapons grade) but removing most of the U-238 & fission products from SNF leaving a reactor fuel running ~10% plutonium, 90% uranium.
Nobody has ever deployed nuclear weapons made from spent commercial nuclear power plant fuel because every other way to make them is easier and cheaper. One significant problem is plutonium isotope separation, which is far more difficult and expensive than uranium isotope separation, not least because the mass difference is only one AMU instead of three. Weapons-grade plutonium is 93% Pu-239, but plutonium in spent fuel is only 54% Pu-239. But all the other plutonium isotopes, and indeed all transuranics, are perfectly good future fuel in the right kind of reactors, that is, sodium-cooled fast neutron reactors such as EBR-II. Details (and more) in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so readers can verify I didn't just make up stuff.
Thorium isn't fissionable. It needs to be converted to U-233 in an operating reactor. A significant difference is that unlike U-238, Th-232 and U-233 can't absorb enough neutrons to create long-lived higher actinides. Thorium is four times more common that uranium, but it breeds U-233 only 1% faster than U-233 is consumed, while U-238 breeds plutonium 5% faster than fissionables are consumed. Yeah, thorium breeders work, but they're so slow we won't need them until we've at least consumed the million tonnes of uranium we have on hand in the form of spent fuel, decommissioned weapons, and depleted uranium. In sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactors, that's enough to fuel an all-electric all-nuclear 1,700 GWe American energy economy for more than 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium.
Details (and more) in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so readers can verify I didn't just make up stuff.
DoE says we'll need eight of them if we don't process spent fuel. Pretending spent fuel can be stored for 300,000 years is daft. The pyramids were plundered before 500 years!
The real problem is the gross lack of technical understanding that the general public have of nuclear radiation in general and high level waste in particular. Thanks to various TV programs, most people have an image of HLW as haphazardly piled rusting 40-gallon drums oozing a glowing green goo. Nope. A used, and hence highly radioactive, nuclear fuel bundle looks much the same as an unused, and hence only mildly radioactive, fuel bundle. Another problem is the linear non-threshold theory that says all nuclear radiation is harmful down to the tiniest detectable amount. LNT theory is becoming recognized as nonsense, and that low levels of radiation are essentially harmless. Certainly HLW needs to be stored in a safe place for a long time, but the hysterical fear of it in some quarters is uncalled for.
Hanford was the ancient FOAK nuclear weapons site that has nothing whatsoever to do with modern commercial nuclear energy. They used to dump radioisotopes into the environment just to study their effects (at the time unknown).
It's also a big government porkbarrel cleanup scam kind of like their never ending wars. They will be pouring $billions into their Syria & Ukraine war scams for the next 50yrs likely.
There was nothing dangerous about the radioactive watch dials. It was dangerous for the workers who licked the paint brushes containing the radioisotope. Less dangerous than smoking cigarettes however.
The problem is people not being wary of how dangerous the thousands of toxic, carcinogenic substances being dumped into the environment in vastly more amounts, vastly more dangerous than the minuscule amount of radioisotopes that come from nuclear energy. A lot of them coming from various non-nuclear energy industries including wind/solar/battery storage.
You're just pissed because I exposed your MOD POD as a scam, and also how jealous you are of Rossi's E-Cat which keeps beating the crap out of the MOD POD by every metric.
We could reduce the volume of nuclear waste through reprocessing. Unfortunately, we banned reprocessing in the 1970s because we didn't want Iran and North Korea to get weapons-grade fissile materials...oh wait
Actually it was the Malthusian, Jimmy Carter, who banned reprocessing, while touting renewable energy scams. Ostensibly to reduce proliferation, which of course was total nonsense. Considering Carter was a total nobody until the Trilateral Commission promoted him, once again you can see the hidden hand behind the anti-nuclear movement.
Yeah, I thought it was Carter.
Burying this stuff is crazy full stop. Interim storage is fine and after 600 years you could probably reprocess it in your living room if you wanted to. That is where the proliferation risk really is, but I want some plutonium just to say I have it…
Weapons proliferation using spent nuclear power plant fuel is a giant stinking red herring.
Weapons-grade plutonium must be 93% Pu-239. Plutonium in spent fuel is 54% Pu-239. Britain tried to make an explosive device using specially-prepared power plant fuel, obtained by much shorter fuel cycles, and other easily-noticed methods. They got a fizzle instead of a bang. One British scientist remarked "we will not bother to try that again."
India built a weapon in secret using materials recovered from used CANDU fuel. That’s why Gerald R Ford banned civilian reprocessing in the USA. Carter reaffirmed the ban, and Reagan rescinded it. There has not been a ban on civilian reprocessing in the USA since the 1980s.
How many weapons made from CANDU spent fuel did India deploy?
Ban, ban, rescind, regulate into impossibility. Never fund more research on better methods.
"Nuclear Waste" is an intentionally misleading term. Only 5% of it is fission products, which need 300 year custody. Unused fuel needs 300,000 year custody — or so they say. Thanks to Jimmuh Cahtuh we refuse to separate fission products from spent fuel, and consume the unused fuel. He apparently believed that if the United States did not process spent fuel, then Pakistan and North Korea and Iran would not develop nuclear weapons. They were apparently not on the memo's distribution list.
The Nuclear Waste Act of 1986 charged nuclear utilities 0.1¢/kWh, but courts eventually held that utilities need not continue to pay because DoE had reneged on their responsibility — legally mandated by the act — to take custody of spent fuel. The fund now stands at $43 billion. But the act explicitly forbids any of its funds from being used for spent fuel processing. That needs to change. The best way to process spent fuel, at least the best way that's been demonstrated at larger then lab-bench scale, is the pyroelectric process developed by Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories. The estimated cost would be 0.085¢/kWh. The Act needs to be revised to allow spent fuel processing.
Only 9.26% of fission products — the two elements caesium and strontium — need 300 year custody. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. Fission products are created at the rate of about one tonne per gigawatt year. Activists insist an all-electric USA would have have appetite for 1,700 GWe. So an all-electric all-nuclear American energy economy would produce 78 tonnes of caesium and strontium per year — about the weight of one dime per household. The volume would be less than nine cement-mixer truck loads. We can handle that.
Details (and much more) in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so readers can verify I didn't just make up stuff.
How about we just call it unspent fuel…
Good stuff. I work in DOE’s Consent-Based Siting Consortia for Nuclear Fuel. Grateful that our government is funding a public conversation about this matter to fund the YIMBY communities.
"...And India used a research heavy water reactor for its first weapons grade material. It has nothing to do with spent fuel reprocessing." Finally someone gets it right.
I would hope that planning for any site recognizes the resource inherent in transuranics being stored. To the extent there is progress in the proposed fast reactors, those reactors specifically can benefit from the 97% or so of energy remaining in the material, while light water reactors extract only 3% - considered good enough obviously - since U-235 is so energy dense.
No! I want it in MY back yard!
It was Gerald Ford that banned commercial reprocessing in response to India testing an atomic weapon in 1974 with material from civilian reactors. Carter reaffirmed Ford’s executive order, and later Reagan rescinded it. So there is no ban on reprocessing. Industry is simply not interested due to cost and risk.
No it was Carter banned reprocessing with an executive order in 1977 which caused a newly built 1500t/yr plant at Barnwell to be scrapped. Industry is very interested in building new reprocessing plants and one is being planned. Fuel cost is calculated at 0.1 cents/kwh, the same as the DOE's waste storage fee that isn't used.
And India used a research heavy water reactor for its first weapons grade material. It has nothing to do with spent fuel reprocessing.
Like I said, Carter reaffirmed Ford’s order. I never specified NPP, only that it was civilian, and you don’t recover Pu without reprocessing something (fuel or target). It was done in secret and in violation of agreements with the USA and Canada who supplied the reactor technology and materials.
It’s all moot because Reagan rescinded any ban in the USA.
No he didn't reaffirm, he issued his own executive order which shutdown a newly built SNF reprocessing plant.
Yeah, like a nation wants to go through the long, hard, expensive task of nuclear weapons development but they better not because the minor amount of fuel reprocessing they need might not be approved by the USA. That's like saying someone wants to do a mass shooting but would have to trespass in order to succeed so that would stop him.
No it ain't moot because when ideologues, the corrupted or just plain stupid, show what a-holes they can be by shutting down a newly built valuable green energy plant, that is going to put a giant damper on any investment. Nobody wants to be another Shoreham. If Reagan rescinded and a plant was built what's to stop the stooge, Clinton, from banning it again? Like he did the incredibly successful IFR program.
The IFR was a brilliant success, cancelled not by executive order but by budgetary process in Congress (after jawboning by Clinton). The technology would not be restricted, and there are plans for commercial deployment. The only things standing in the way are demand (economics) and an NRC that is poorly equipped to handle new concepts.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1209/ML120960611.pdf
I don't see anything in there but for a mostly idiotic change in reprocessing policy, that separates plutonium, from pro to anti. I don't see anything about a legal ban on doing it.
And technically you can claim making MOX fuel is not separating plutonium (which is not weapons grade and can't be made weapons grade) but removing most of the U-238 & fission products from SNF leaving a reactor fuel running ~10% plutonium, 90% uranium.
Nobody has ever deployed nuclear weapons made from spent commercial nuclear power plant fuel because every other way to make them is easier and cheaper. One significant problem is plutonium isotope separation, which is far more difficult and expensive than uranium isotope separation, not least because the mass difference is only one AMU instead of three. Weapons-grade plutonium is 93% Pu-239, but plutonium in spent fuel is only 54% Pu-239. But all the other plutonium isotopes, and indeed all transuranics, are perfectly good future fuel in the right kind of reactors, that is, sodium-cooled fast neutron reactors such as EBR-II. Details (and more) in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so readers can verify I didn't just make up stuff.
As I understand it spent uranium could fuel thorium reactors but we haven't figured out how to build them quite yet.
Thorium isn't fissionable. It needs to be converted to U-233 in an operating reactor. A significant difference is that unlike U-238, Th-232 and U-233 can't absorb enough neutrons to create long-lived higher actinides. Thorium is four times more common that uranium, but it breeds U-233 only 1% faster than U-233 is consumed, while U-238 breeds plutonium 5% faster than fissionables are consumed. Yeah, thorium breeders work, but they're so slow we won't need them until we've at least consumed the million tonnes of uranium we have on hand in the form of spent fuel, decommissioned weapons, and depleted uranium. In sodium-cooled fast-neutron reactors, that's enough to fuel an all-electric all-nuclear 1,700 GWe American energy economy for more than 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium.
Details (and more) in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations so readers can verify I didn't just make up stuff.
We know how to build them, just try getting them past the crony, corrupt Nuclear Regulators.
The banner picture is very misleading.
DoE says we'll need eight of them if we don't process spent fuel. Pretending spent fuel can be stored for 300,000 years is daft. The pyramids were plundered before 500 years!