An off the cuff question: rather than worry about dumping spent rods into a crater for 200,000 years, why couldn’t we just launch the rods into space - maybe aim them at the sun to insure their complete destruction?
How hard would it be to create a cannon (or something) capable of cheaply firing these rods out of orbit?
Ah yes, the “rocket it into space” question. The answer is, what if the rocket goes boom while in lift off? Plus considering the weight of fuel rods, it would be cheaper by far to bury them.
Considering the cost of a rocket to the sun, you’d be talking about a tax burden that no political party would dare to propose.
Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m curious as to where Cecil obtained the original numbers he used to come up with the 8k to 10k spent rods per year per 1 M Watt reactor value. It seems like a really high value, but maybe its not and it would be interesting to know.
As for the “disposal in the sun” concept … Other than the hugh cost to make it happen, the possibility of a SNAFU type development or “accident” (after all the government would be involved), it might be a an idea.
What? And render some areas of the sun uninhabitable for thousands of years??
Spent fuel reprocessing does not create plutonium. Reprocessing makes plutonium available for access by potential rogue nations and terrorists.
Economically, reprocessing creates an ENORMOUS amount of high-level liquid waste, which is VERY expensive to disposition and creates ENORMOUS CERCLA liabilities for the commercial fuel/power provider. These liabilities may not be covered under Price-Anderson or PL 85-804. Hence, the cessation of commercial reprocessing of spent fuel in the United States.
I recognize nuclear power creates some pretty nasty waste. However, the first lesson in engineering school is “there ain’t no free lunches.” Until someone discovers a source of energy that does not directly pollute the environment and/or is easily renewable, nuclear power is a great option.
Just an engineer’s two cents.
As usual Cecil is pretty accurate. (Even if his statement that Plutonium “created in reprocessing” is unforgiveable.)
Most nuclear reactor cores are made up a group of fuel elements. To take a round number, assume there are 200 of these. When the reactor is refueled (every 12 to 24 months) about 1/3 of these are replaced and the rest moved around to even up the fuel utilization. Each element is made up of many rods, between 100 and 200. Each rod is an alloy tube (remember seeing zirconium in the news lately concerning “dirty bombs”?) about the size of your little finger filled with pellets of a ceramic form of Uranium Oxide. So, in a typical reactor there might be 30,000 “rods” and 1/3 of those would be removed every 12 to 24 months.
The fuel is replaced a lot because they use low enriched Uranium -only about 5% of the Uranium is actually the fissionable isotopes. The Navy ships use highly enriched Uranium and only need refueling once every 10 to 20 years or more.
This thread has six replies, one by an administrator, and nobody has provided a link to the column yet?
The storage time you cite is way too long. Although the waste remains radioactive for the time frame you mentioned (200,000 yrears), it will emit radiation at “dangerous” levels for only about a few hundred years. This may seem like an extremely long time however, compared to chemical wastes which retain their toxicicty forever (yes, I mean forever), the hazard is much more manageable. If one has to wait until every last radioactive atom has decayed for something to be considered safe, the time frames are greatly exaggerated.
As for shooting it off into space, why bother. Store it until the politicians finally get it that reprocessing will actually work. just ask France. Sending out into space would be just throwing it away. Besides, some anti-nucular {sic} folks would prefer to throw you off the planet for suggesting it. They went bonkers with worry when the Cassini space craft approched earth a few years ago for a sling shot out to Jupiter. It contained a radioactive energy cell that scared them into fits. Cassini passed within 600 miles of the planet and is now doing what it was designed to do.