Why don’t we use nuclear waste? use it to heat process/laundry water, or use it to irradiate food (meat, tomatoes)-no more salmonella! Why waste such a potentailly valuable materail?
Do you really want irradiated food to consume?
The majority of that waste is ‘spent’ – the radioactivity is no longer concentrated enough to efficiently heat water, irradiate food, etc. But it’s still potent enough to be dangerous to living beings, doing bad things to their cell structure.
Oh, piffle. I’ve heard much worse plans: Yet Another Modest Proposal; The Roentgen Standard. * The profession of tax collecting would carry its own, well, deserved penalty.
So would certain other professions. An Arab oil sheik might still grow
obscenely rich, but at least we could count on his spending it as fast as it
comes in, lest it go up in a fireball. A crooked politician would have to take
bribes by credit card, making it easier to convict him. A bank robber would be
conspicuous, staggering up to the teller’s window in his heavy, lead-shielded
clothing. The successful pickpocket would also stand out in a crowd. A thick
lead-lined clove would be a dead giveaway; but without it, he could be
identified by his sickly, faintly glowing hands. Society might even have to
revive an ancient practice, amputating the felon’s hand as a therapeutic
measure, before it kills him.
Foreign aid could be delievered by ICBM.*Actually this isn’t far from current foreign policy.
Pah! They just didn’t use enough. That’s the problem with amateurs; they think they can just pile up a few hundred pounds of low grade dynamite and go poof! They really should have used high grade demolition explosives with a high brisance factor; even better if you freeze it down with liquid nitrogen first. And of course, directed the shock wave outward toward the ocean rather than up. This is what they make cyclotol for.
Um, you’re talking about material that is radioactive, toxic, and in the case of liquid processing products, highly reactive. Herman Kahn might be okay using this for washing clothes, but I’m not, thank you.
Stranger
Umm, volcanoes, no. Like everyone has said.
One of the reasons to store it, and not dump it into the deepest spot in the sea is that we may again find a use for it. And would be doing this :smack:
Also dumping it at sea would create more transfers and risks.
What does Japan and France do with it.
IMHO, we needed to start building more reactors 20 years ago.
I was wondering a few days ago – could the spent fuel from a nuclear reactor be used as fuel in radioisotope thermal generators?
The FDA is pretty cool with it, so I dig.
(Of course, current food irradiation techniques usually don’t involve raw hunks o’ radioactive waste.)
Sometimes they are. However, you can’t just through material into a casing willy-nilly like David Hahn and expect to get anything useful; in order to build a power source that will function reliably for a calculated amount of time, deliver a consistent power supply for mission duration, and not irradiate the hell out of your personnel or sensitive scientific equipment, you have to use material of a known composition, which means separating out the requisite material. This can often be more costly, or even (especially in the case of plutonium) impossible versus a dedicated process to produce the RTG fuel. There is also the issue of safety; the desirable RTG fuels are primarily alpha emitters (so you don’t need much shielding versus more energetic gammas) and have relatively low neutron emission (which means they also have to be highly fissile materials and don’t produce waste products that parasitically absorb neutrons), but most materials that meet that criteria are also biochemically reactive; Strontium-90 functions as a replacement in the body for calcium, and Polonium-210 for selenium. Plutonium, the material favored for American space probes when RTGs are needed, is not highly biochemically reactive (though it is processed by the body as a heavy metal) and tends to remain reasonably solid. We also have a lot of experience in making fire-resistant plutonium “pits” for nuclear weapons which translates into making well protected RTG “pits”. In short, RTG design is very complex and requires material of an exacting composition which is usually at odds with radioactive waste.
The Wikipedia article on the topic is pretty superficial but gives at least some basic coverage on the topic.
Stranger
Harper’s had an excellent article about the intricacies of WIPP, though the article was in fact about designing the “keep out” sign. If radiation is lethal for thousands of years, how can you tell future generations to keep out? Cconsider how different our English from that of Shakespeare…a keep out sign can’t be just a written thing because future generations may not know our language. And for all we know, the USA may not exist in the future, so we can’t entrust it to the government even if we thought they wouldn’t botch it.
You can probably find the article if you subscribe. IIRC the title was “Letter from Carlsbad,” and it was fascinating stuff. Anyway here’s the link to Wikipedia on WIPP:
IIRC WIPP was the first permanent nuclear waste storage facility in the world, and it isn’t designed to handle spent fuel rods. Instead they take things like beakers and other contaminated waste, but not the really hot stuff. God only knows where the other deadly stuff is stored, left out in steel drums or what not. The article said that we were in a big rush to build the reactors and decided that we could figure out disposal later.
Only we never did figure that out.
And what’s wrong with irradiated food? As Ranchoth points out, there are several processes which are approved by the FDA for use on raw foods. These techniques enhance shelf-life, and reduce the risk from contamination by such things as E. coli.
What I suspect you’re not considering is that most radiation simply adds energy to a substance. Alpha particles, beta particles/rays, and gamma rays all interact with other matter by transferring energy to that matter. The effects of this energy transfer are to create free radical chemicals in the target matter, which while not good for living cells and their healthy operation, are simply chemical changes, which have no long-term effects beyond what disruption they may cause in the cytoplasm.
If you’re thinking that irradiating something will make the targeted substance radioactive, that only happens in measurable amounts if the radiation stream includes neutrons. And neutron fluxes are actually pretty rare. And none of the methods approved by the FDA use neutron emitters, for that very reason.
Another factor for this is that for a number of reasons, including political, the decision has been made in the US that we won’t reprocess spent fuel. Some of the reasons include the safety issues that Stranger mentions upthread. When dealing with reprocessing spent fuel the various separation processes multiply the volume and mass of radioactive waste, and add in highly caustic solvents to the mixture. It’s not impossible to deal with, but it is difficult and costly. And at this time, the single-pass fuel cycle for nuclear power is more economical.
I found the article but yes you have to be a subscriber:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/1992/08/0000973
I need to subscribe to them…that’s a pretty cool mag.
Uses like what? No snark, dead serious question.
Who knows? But it is a valuable resource nonetheless. The Romans threw away all the oil that kept bubbling up from their water wells, after all. So who knows what uses people will find for the stuff in 50 years? Just process the waste into its most compact form and stack it in the middle of White Sands. No huhu.
Well, for one thing, even non-breeder reactor fuel ends up usually becoming a richer source for Pu than most ores. Then consider that even when talking about a fuel cell as being spent, it’s still got a large fraction of the uranium that it started with. Then there was a Scientific American piece a couple of years ago about using a molten lead cooled reactor to “burn” reactor waste, and recover some of the heat potential for energy generation while at the same time reducing the long-term radioactivity of the material.
All of these uses are predicated on reprocessing spent fuel, however, and so they’re not being considered at this time.
Ok, the short answer: We’re trying.
Right now the Department of Energy is working with large construction companies out in the middle of the desert in SE Washington to design and construct a plant which will turn millions of gallons of nuclear waste into glass, much like obsidian. The 12B dollar plant is expected to be running in 2018 (it was delayed due to seismic testing). This project will pump all of the low and high level radioactive sludge from the holding cells created around WWII up till the US stopped generating nuclear weapons. At 50 years old, some of the storage tanks are starting to erode. The waste left over from creating material for the atom bombs used in WWII is literally some of the nastiest stuff on the planet. While this is out in the middle of the desert, the Columbia river flows about 5-6 miles away.
The process itself is much like throwing nuclear waste into a volcano. The sludge is pumped in from the holding tanks into the first building to seperate out the high and low level activity waste. Then the two materials go into giant melters which combine with sillica and other stabilizing materials to create a very thick and hard glass which prevents the liquid from moving around. The liquid is then poured into steel containers which are automatically welded shut, and then ready for storage. This is currently the largest capital project in the United States, and it’s always nice to know that I’m doing my small part to help save the world (or atleast portland).
Now to return to the murky radioactive depths of lurkdom…
I almost forgot, for more information about this project (and any engineers out there looking for work, we’re hiring!)
The Plant:
http://www.bechtelvitplant.com/
The History:
The Process:
That would be an incredibly bad idea. Not only is White Sands Missile Range home to the White Sands National Monument and adjacent to the Mescalero Apache Indian reservation, a couple of BLM sites, a National Forest, and NW state park. The runoff from White Sands also feeds directly into the Ogallala (“High Plains”) aquifer which supports agriculture in the lower and Western areas of the Midwest. WSMR also has a unique ecology that makes it a pain in the ass to do test missile launches there–they actually have a patrol that has to go out and collect the desert tortoises before a launch and replace them afterward–and caustic liquid fuel rockets have been prohibited there for decades, so one can imagine what the EPA would have to say about storing uranium hexafluoride and raffinate sludge out there.
Everybody thinks that if you stick it underground or out in the middle of a desert where no one has to look at it, it’ll just magically disappear as a problem. The reality is hardly that trivial.
Stranger
Then Groom Lake. Or China Lake. Or some other “Government Desert - Don’t Even Think About Trespassing, We’ll Shoot You On Sight” location. The key is “Don’t throw it away.” 