Are you kidding, man? Do you have any idea how much radiation there is in sunlight?
And it causes cancer!
Regards,
Shodan
And global warming, too!
Regards,
Shodan
We could decommission half our nuclear arsenal tomorrow and still have multiples more than the rest of the world. How much Uranium is that?
I never said that they were exclusive.
Likely very little. Plutonium is a far better material to build warheads out of.
You’re aware that nuclear power plants are, essentially, great big radiation destruction machines? You dig up radioactive material, run it through a reactor so as to lessen its total radiation, and then spit it out the other end. If you mulched all the waste up with dirt and put it right back where you found it, that geographic area would have less underlying radiation than it did before you began. We’re slowly cleaning the Earth of radiation.
One thing is certain: the plant is changing the isotopes that are present, splitting atoms into fairly random bits and pieces, some with huge half lives, some with infinitesimal. Are you certain that the isotopes present in spent fuel and the surroundings are less harmful than those that went into the fuel?
That’s moronic.
But, you already know that.
No, but it was my understanding. I might very well be wrong. I remember it coming up in a discussion about simply diluting the material with water and letting it run out to sea, and the source seemed credible. I’ll see if I can find it again.
While other people have been disagreeing with some of the details of this analysis, there’s at least one plan that I’ve seen (In a 2006 or 2007 American Scientist, link here if one is a Sigma Xi memeber) for a way to reduce longer-lived isotopes by using a lead cooled reactor to burn high energy nuclear waste.
The synopsis I recall seemed pretty reasonable, and while you’d still be left with rad waste, it would all be much shorter half-life stuff, and some lower energy as well.
The authors of the article made it clear, however, that such a plan was completely counter to the current decision in the US to avoid reprocessing spent fuel. I understand why that decision was made, and see the logic to it, but I still believe that to be short-sighted.
How come the Yucca Mountan depository isn’t used? I thought it was the most secure storage area in the world.
Because it’s still being blocked by an alliance of concerned scientists, anti-nuke fanatics, and NIMBYists.
I’m not trying to say that all opposition to Yucca Mountain is irrational. Much of it is, but there are some concerns I’ve seen/read that seem to be legitimate. The problem I have is that we’re running out of time for the some better long-term solution for waste storage that was promised back in the fifties. We are all out of wriggle room.
None of the concerns I’ve seen or read match the risks associated with the current system. At this point, we’re nearing the end of the design life for a number of the spent fuel storage pools for plants that are in or near major metropolitan areas. None of the “If it’s not perfect we can’t build it” criticisms I’ve seen for Yucca Mountain match the immediate risks that the current situation entails, if it continues.
And opposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who happens to represent Nevada.
And recently de-funded by the Obama administration, which would rather power the nation with moondust and fairy sprinkles.
The thing about long half-life radioactive isotopes is that the radiation is weak. The reason the half-life is long is because an atom decays only once in a long time. The half-life is the amount of time for which a given atom has a 50% chance of decaying. So with long half-life material you need a butt-load of it in a small volume to produce large radiation doses. Our bodies are full of long half-life carbon 14, which future archiologists may find useful for dating our remains. The reason this radioactive material in our bodies doesn’t kill us is because it has such a long half-life that it is just barely within the definition of “radioactive” at all.
So when the Henny Pennys worry over waste with a half-life of thousands of years, they are ignoring the fact that the thousand-year stuff is only mildy radioactive in the first place. The really hot stuff burns itself out fairly quickly…years to decades.
** Kevbo **, in my post, I had simply wanted to underscore the fact that there is much more to the story than saying that a reactor is a net “consumer” of radioactivity.
The really short-lived stuff is very bad to have around, but it isn’t around for long.
The really long-lived stuff just isn’t doing much more than our porcelain dental crowns.
It’s the stuff in between that gets you, and if it’s ingested (after getting into ground water), it is still quite capable of doing damage.
When I was going through graphs and stuff for the post on decay heat (the one I linked to earlier), I was surprised that the decay heat lasted so long at such a high power. I had been aware of the original “7% of prior power level” figure, but even though that drops quite quickly (and is an indicator of decay rate), there are loads of isotopes that keep on going at a pretty high level for decades after, still being a danger because they need heat removed and they are still radioactive substances.
You mentioned being gone after decades as a reason to not worry; I think that lasting for decades is still a concern. IMHO.
You need to get your technical terms right Sam. Everyone knows that Obama et al doesn’t want to use moondust and fairy sprinkles…both have an unacceptable environmental impact.
Magic Pony Technology is the ticket.
-XT
Excuse me while I use your comment here for a jumping off point.
While there are still concerns for isotopes with half lives leaving them significant threats for decades, if that were the worst we had to deal with with spent fuel, the construction of a facility such as Yucca Mountain would be hugely indulgent and extravagant.
What’s making Yucca Mountain so difficult to engineer is the requirement for secure storage on the order of tens of thousands of years, not, say, one hundred.
So, while isotopes that would be of concern for decades aren’t harmless, the criteria for a storage solution in that scenario are going to be much less stringent. So, I do believe there is some practical benefit to the idea of transforming longer-lived radioactive isotopes into shorter lived ones. The details may be such that the longer lived isotopes are easier to contain, I couldn’t say off the top of my head. But it’s not a completely whacky idea, I don’t think.
Yucca Mountain is a Cluster Fuck of epic proportion. In 1987, Congress passed what’s affectionately known as the Screw Nevada Bill. The bill essentially said “We will pick the best one of the following potential sites for the nuclear waste dump based on a sound scientific evaluation: Yucca Mountain.” Naturally, Yucca is scientifically the best of the listed facilities, but that’s a meaningless evaluation.
There is a fair amount of NIMBY-ism in Nevada, but there’s also a good amount of reason not to put waste in Yucca.
Like all of the Great Basin, Yucca Mountain is geologically active. If you’re talking about ten thousand years of storage, you can guarantee there will be earthquakes in the area on that timescale. In 2007, twenty years into the study of Yucca, they found that a fault line ran directly under the mountain.
Nearly every time the EPA does a study, it finds excessive health risk, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy will try and throw out any EPA evaluation and insist that only they have jurisdiction and only they are qualified to handle the evaluation.
Full disclosure: I used to live in Nevada. I’ve moved, but I still think it’s a horrible location for long term waste storage.