Sunday, March 30, 2008
10 comments:
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Thud said...
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Over here in U.K. we seem to have noticed France has quietly made itself a nuclear power giant and we want in..some good sense from our nulabour socialist lunatics at last.
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3/30/08, 5:16 AM
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Anonymous said...
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there is no inexpensive method of nuclear waste disposal, a product that stays toxic for many lifetimes and spent uranium can be used in dirty bombs
coal and gas waste can be cleaned
i gotta disagree with this one
george -
3/30/08, 5:29 AM
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Anonymous said...
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Sorry, George, I gotta disagree with your disagreement. (a double negative by any standard)
Certainly in the good 'ol US of A we haven't found the most economical way to dispose of nuke waste since it's become a political issue rather than a technological one. France and Japan are reprocessing the useful elements out of spent fuel to make new fuel and encapsulating the high level actinides. We're trying to bury our waste in a repository that doesn't have room for all the spent fuel we've currently created. Foolish.
What we need is 'transmutation' of high level waste after we've reprocessed the useful materials out. The Good Reverend Brother Jimma Carter outlawed reprocessing in 1978 and the transmutation tool, a superconducting supercollider that was to be built in Texas, got so piled on with pork that you couldn't see the science anymore.
No one that's been in my business, nukes, for more than 20 years thought we'd still be fissioning atoms and asking whose backyards we could dump our trash in. Fusion, transmutation, and beyond was where we'd hoped to be. We have the technology, just not the political spine.
And have you ever seen spent uranium you'd use to make a 'dirty bomb'? You'd need some specialized facilities much beyond what Osama Hussein and Co. can comprehend or afford.
Nukeman -
3/30/08, 9:03 AM
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Anonymous said...
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thanks for the education Nukeman, last time i worked with dispposal site hydrogeological studies was in the 80's
is transmutation inexpensive?
george -
3/30/08, 12:14 PM
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Anonymous said...
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Having spent a decade working the problem of waste clean up and disposal, I gotta wonder if the problems aren't as political as they are financial. The State of Nevada hasn't milked all it can from the DOE and utilities that generate the waste. You have a good point about efficient disposal though. Maybe we should no longer call it waste and re-name spent fuel "unharnessed future energy". It is all in the marketing ya know.
Yatalli -
3/30/08, 12:38 PM
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El Jefe said...
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thud: You mean to tell me all those 'wind farms' out on the Fens of East Anglia aren't cutting it? Say it ain't so, Joe!
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3/30/08, 12:51 PM
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Anonymous said...
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Someone said that perhaps the reason France gets about 80% of their power from nuke power plants is that France has the gumption to sink Greenpeace's ships. Bob Ballard--the guy who found the 'Titanic'-- has a great way to dispose of nuclear waste. You seal it in glass and dump it into the deep ocean wasteland where it will sink into the ooze and not harm anything or anybody.
Walt -
3/30/08, 12:55 PM
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SoylentGreen said...
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Dude - It's really simple... pelletize the waste, encase each pellet in lead, then plastic. Drop them into the deep ocean trenches where the natural plate tectonics process will suck them into the earth's core. It's all nuclear reaction in there anyway - and that's where the stuff comes from to begin with.
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3/30/08, 2:01 PM
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closed said...
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The only part of nuclear waste that is really difficult to deal with is SR-90 ... which has a habit of generating heat. A lot of heat ... like about 500C in pure form.
SR-90 caused the waste storage tanks at Hanford to boil. Remove it and storage becomes easy.
It needs to be processed out and used. The folks at Toshiba are trying to sell nuclear batteries based on the stuff. -
3/30/08, 2:55 PM
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Anonymous said...
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Yea, you got me there George. Transmutation will probably cost more than Ted Kennedy's eventual liver transplant but blasting high level waste back to carbon or lesser dangerous elements is, IMHO, the cleanest way to ensure we don't leave a legacy of waste no one wants.
Yucca Mt. is a waste of good postcard scenery. Vitrification (glass encased waste), as Walt and others mentioned is the French option after reprocessing which ain't bad. I'd still prefer to renuke the stuff to a nice, safe cardboard cup and serve Al Gore his cappuccino in it. Eat that, Nobel Mofo, you know?
Folks in my biz (whatever that could be) are frustrated that we seem to have given up on technology.
Nukeman -
3/31/08, 7:58 PM
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