So one of the biggest problems with nuclear power is the waste by-product. NIMBY has a stranglehold on the waste storage issue and nuclear power advocates will usually pull out emotional appeals to bias if you ask them how they would solve that problem. It seems like they’d rather not think about it as they tout nuclear power as the halcyon solution to every energy crisis.
So please explain to me what the issues are, why people don’t want to store it in sparsely populated Texas/Nevada/New Mexico backwaters. With a 700m half-life on Uranium 235, what do we do as it adds up year after year?
NIMBY Nobody wants it . It will be poisonous merely forever. It will outlive whatever receptacle you put it in. The receptacles are very expensive and require a fortune to engineer. Then you have to bring radioactive waste and parts across country to put it there. Of course we have sunk a fortune into Yucca and when and if it opens it could immediately be filled. Then we have to start all over again.
Basically, no one trusts that any waste site wouldn’t leak into the air, soil or groundwater. Yucca Mountain was chosen because it’s geology looked very stable and the risk of leaks migrating was considered close to zero. But apparently that wasn’t good enough.
The biggest problem with reactor waste is actinides- mostly traces of plutonium that were created when the U-238 content of the fuel absorbed neutrons and transmuted- which in a breeder reactor is deliberately intended to create plutonium for bombs or fuel. Pu-239 has a half life in excess of 23,000 years and is an alpha emitter- it’s natural radioactive decay involves emitting alpha particles. These are extremely harmful if the radioactive substance is actually taken into the body, where the alpha particles can bombard surrounding tissue. So plutonium is considered far more biohazardous than would be expected solely on the basis of how radioactive it is.
It’s been proposed more than once that the smart thing to do would be to reprocess the spent fuel to remove the plutonium and other actinides, which could then be reused as fuel. The remaining waste would consist mostly of shorter-lived isotopes which would decay to very low levels of radioactivity within a century. So why isn’t nuclear waste reprocessed? Because of nuclear proliferation: it would mean refining tons of bomb-grade plutonium from the civilian power industry, and that is considered simply unacceptable for security reasons.
The latest proposed reactor designs are ones where either any plutonium produced is fissioned as you go, or else contaminated with the isotope Pu-240, which can be used as fuel but is unsuitable for bombs.
I thought that the plan was to bake the stuff into inert glass blocks, then stack them in caves in a stable formation, then wall up the caves. Is this not doable?
Stick it in a mountain, or reprocess it. The “nuclear waste problem” is primarily a matter of anti-nuclear hysteria, not a technological one. It isn’t nearly as dangerous as people like to claim; no, you don’t want to spread it on your dinner, but a tiny bit leaking out over a period of centuries isn’t going to do anything of importance. Nor do we treat other substances that are just as dangerous ( or even just as radioactive, like some coal ash ) with anywhere the same degree of paranoia.
Some years ago Sixty Minutes had a segment on a place in the former Soviet Union where the Soviets had simply created an open-air dump for high level waste. The site is so radioactive that footage had to be filmed in black and white: color film was too sensitive to radiation. I half-seriously wonder if as long as there’s a hopelessly contaminated Death Zone in the former Soviet Union anyway, maybe we could pay Russia to dump a few million more curies there?
I have heard the argument regarding coal ash before. I agree with sticking it in a mountain, it kind of irritates me every time activists get up in arms in a state with a low population density. I lived in New Mexico and was all for sticking the waste there.
Hey now, Texas has at least as much open desert as we do. Plus, their average IQ is far lower than in NM, so any damage it would do to intelligence won’t even be quantifiable.
I don’t get this concern unless they’re reprocessing it in the parking lot of the nearest Wal Mart. Is it really that hard to protect something precious/dangerous like this?
It’s not that hard unless you really want to be absolutely 100.0000000% sure that nothing goes missing. Like with most things, difficulty (hence cost) is a multiple of the degree of certainty. The assumption seems to be that if you are talking about quantities of plutonium sufficient to make tens (or hundreds) of thousands of nuclear weapons, it’s worth paying attention to quite a few decimal places (although there are plenty of lost & found moments even at the moment).
FYI this is a visual represenation of how much plutonium was needed to flatten Nagasaki, about 5-6 kilos worth. As of a couple of years ago the UK alone had a civilian stockpile containing about 103,000 kilos of plutonium (source here).
What do we ship through major population centers every day: gasoline (highly volatile and explosive), natural gas (explosive), high voltage electricity (deadly), all sorts of chemicals and solvents (go look at Home Depot), pesticides and herbicides (ditto).
For some reason the enviromntalists have a bug up their ass about nuclear power and nuclear waste; it’s too “sciencey”. The level of thought is about as deep as Palin’s critique of national health care.
It’s 65 years after Hiroshima/Nagasaki: how many people have been killed by nuclear weapons vs those killed by dynamite 65 years after it’s introduction?
The biggest problem isn’t what’s going to happen to us, but rather what’s going to happen a hundred thousand years from now. Will the human race still exist? If it does, will it be technologically advanced? The human race has suffered many setbacks, and it’s entirely possible that our great-great-great-grandchildren may live in a new paleolithic. Since these materials will remain toxic for millions of years, they will outlive any kind of containment we devise. Of course, over the really long haul, it will be subducted under the continental plates and cease to be a problem, but before that happens we may be condemning millions upon millions of our descendants to a horrible death in order to pay for our SUV and air conditioner lifestyle.
You’re misremembering somewhat. That would be Chelyabinsk, which was the unfortunate victim of three nuclear-related disasters, and has been called “the most contaminated spot on the planet”. It’s true that the Sviets dumped a lot of high-level waste there, but it wasn’t “open air” – it was under a lake. When the clake dried up, however, the waste was in the open air, and winds blew it all over.
Film isn’t in black and white because the radioactivity would fog color film – excessive radioactivity would fog black and white film as easily. Black and white is just easier to obtain, is my guess.
