What should be done with nuclear waste?

Factual Questions
1

The volume of nuclear waste is orders of magnitude greater than an underthedesk sized box (not sure if that is a Reagan UL or not. Apologies if it is). There is high and low level waste, liquid and solid waste, and mixed (i.e. radioactive material mixed with toxins i.e. lead, mercury, etc.) waste that is scattered about the country in various DOE and NRC facilities. What should be done with it?!

Remember, it is going to remain toxic much longer than our or our imagination’s lifetime. It is going to remain toxic for a geological length of time. Deserts can flood, fault lines can move and dormant volcanoes can become active again. And remember politics, too. It is one thing to suggest walling up Newark and storing it all there, but that is not an option. So what gets done with all of the waste?

It does not matter if you are pro- or anti- nuke for this question. If you are pro-nuke, though, you have the additional burden of finding a repository / solution for future waste streams.

On a side note, depending on the solution(s) you think is most viable, do we accept waste from other countries?

This is a good place to find a bit of background information on environmental concerns.

Thanks for your thoughts,

Rhythmdvl

PS:
I have read in a few places that adding sugar to a liquid waste stream prior to calcining (sp?) it makes for a much more efficient process. Sugar?! Any physicists out care to explain what is going on? Nuclear waste with a sweet tooth? Thanks.

2

have thwarted any serious discussion of how to use the )Potentially) valuble material now known as “nuclear waste”!
First: the low level stuff (contaminated gloves, spend fuel casings, etc.) burial in a slat mine (which will isolate the stuff for a good many millions of years is good enough!
Second:
the highly radiocative waste left over from nuclear fuel reprocessing: this can be solidified, and fused into glass-and glass is one of the most stable materials known to man-we have found ancient glass (in a mediterannean shipwreck, CA 800 BC), with no physical changes of any kind.
So the dangers are vastly overstated, by those anti-nuclear, anti-technology people with an axe to grind!

3

The problem with nuclear waste is that it is grossly concentrated and refined from its naturally occurring form (radioactive ore), rendering it highly toxic. And let us not forget that this stuff is so toxic that its eventual resting state, lead, is considered a blessed improvement, despite the fact that lead poisoning is one of the most pervasive forms of poisoning in the modern world.

Seriously, I’ve heard of only two places where radioactive waste might be rendered harmless to man: Either reinjected into the Earth’s mantle, or thrown into the sun. Either place presents incredible engineering and safety difficulties and are probably well beyond our current technological capabilities.

Egkelly does have a point: Today’s toxic waste is tomorrow’s wonder fuel. Radioactive material has many potential uses – the problem is that human beings do not think in geologic time, nor do they even think in lifetimes, they think in terms of profit margins and retirement plans, so the prevailing question in nuclear waste storage for the past fifty years has not been, “How can we safely store these highly toxic materials until my great-great-grandchildren figure out a use for them?”, it has been, “Having been awarded the contract for getting rid of seveteen thousand barrels of radioactive waste, how can I make the most money for the least effort and pass on all the problems to my replacement?” This is how small mexican children get exposed to barrels of powdered Cesium-137, which they think is pretty glowing stuff and spread all over themselved until they die from burns and exposure.

Until human beings learn to think beyond thir own selfish ambitions and clue in to the big picture, nuclear waste will remain (so to speak) an explosive issue between political factions.

4

Here’s what I’d do:

Low level(gloves, overalls, etc…): Seal up tight & bury in mined-out salt mine or some other geologically stable area. The minor radioactivity isn’t enough to really concern ourselves with relative to the rest.

Med/High level: Vitrify(turn to glass), seal in very secure containers, & dump in deep ocean subduction zone. Not much life down there, and not much in the way of currents either. If it’s sealed up well, you won’t get any alpha or beta emissions, and water moderates gamma rays pretty effectively, so barring any sort of seepage from the vitrified waste(that’s why we would vitrify it), it’s about as safe as nuclear waste gets.

Plus, in a subduction zone, it’ll eventually get carried back down into the mantle.

5

Hee hee, not to be taken seriously:

I do recall a science fiction writer (one of the really caustic ones: Might have been Ted Sturgeon, I really don’t recall) proposing in an editorial that the low-level radioactives (radioactive metal, anyway) be minted into money.

His reasons: Since no one in their right mind would want to handle the stuff for more than a few seconds, it would stimulate the economy by inducing people to spend it as quickly as possible. Furthermore, inflation would cease (if not reverse) as everyone dropped their prices and raised their costs, and miserliness would become a thing of the past, since anyone who valued money more than goods would quickly die of cancer.

Before anyone jumps all over me, it was written as satire, not serious recommendation. Just a silliness.

6

The concern with burying waste in a mine or other location, is changes in climate. Current debate over anthropogenic climate change aside, deserts have been floodplains in the past, and may become wetter regions again. Though it is a monumentally difficult task to predict future climates for particular regions, it is not very difficult to show that there is a tendency towards change. Is it responsible to put the waste in a place where it could contaminate an entire bioregion’s groundwater supply? Even if one were to insist that climates don’t change, there is still rain that falls (albeit relatively small amounts) upon every region of the country.

As for vitrification and calcination, these are viable options but not without problems. For example, the byproducts of heating the waste to temperatures needed have serious human health impacts to those around the sites, and all waste streams do not lend themselves to such processes. The product you are left with after solidification is just as toxic as the original material, the only advantage is that it is easier to manipulate. Storage is also a problem. I believe current design standards mandate that storage containers last for only a small fraction of the waste’s lifetime, and that is proving to be a difficult environmental challenge. I think that the greatest damage to the containers comes not from the caustic properties of the waste, but from the heat it generates. It is not necessarily enough to power a turbine, but over time (a hundred years, for example) the heat builds up inside the container. If we buried the waste, than there is no where for the heat to go, the integrity of the container (or matrix the waste is suspended in) is breached, and you are left with radioactive waste sitting in soil. The above concerns (and others) of rainfall / groundwater come into play at this time.

There are whackos out there, but that does not mean that there are no dangers, nor engineering challenges we have yet to overcome.
Fiona:
You are right about the overemphasis on short-term thinking. As for the wonder-fuel of the future, is there anything on the drawing board that would utilize some of the waste? Oh, and damn your silliness! :slight_smile:

7

Anyway, the question is not how long the stuff will remain radioactive, but how long it will remain radioactive enough to pose a serious environmental threat. These are two very different things.

The main reason nuclear waste is so difficult to deal with is political. High and Low level wastes are mixed together and stored on-site. Treatment like glassification is not carried out because no one can get permits to transport the stuff to plants that could do it, and because of the aforementioned mixing of high and low level wastes.

Nuclear plants do not put out a significant amount of high level waste (the really dangerous stuff - spent fuel rods). As I recall, if you ran the entire United States with nuclear power for the next 100 years, the total amount of high-level waste created would fit in an area smaller than a football field.

Turn it to glass, and sink it into the deep ocean. There is zero transference of materials from the deep ocean to the surface, and if you place the stuff in a subduction zone it’ll eventually be covered anyway.

The low level wastes are not nearly as hazardous. The main risk is cumulative exposure. So, stick it in a geologically stable place and put a big KEEP OUT sign around it. End of story.

There are, of course, risks. Any form of concentrated energy carries its own risks. Nuclear has proven to be the least risky of all major power sources, but that doesn’t satisfy the anti-nuke people, because they are operating out of ignorance of engineering, safety analysis, statistical risk measurement, and all the other tools that professionals use to determine the correct course of action. They’ve managed to kill Nuclear power in the U.S., and made it very difficult to build new power plants of other types. But our energy demands are increasing. At some point, there will be shortages, which will have real human impact. But the eco-luddites don’t care.

8

Cecil wrote a column about this:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_229.html

9

There’s some interesting ideas in trying to figure out what could be used as a “keep out” sign that will last 10’s of thousands of years. Materials erode. Languages die out.

10

Could a year’s waste from a nuclear power plant be stored under a desk?

What’s so tough about disposing of nuclear waste?

11

I dunno: the mineshaft thing does sound iffy and indicative of short-term thinking. About the only chunk of earth’s crust that I can think of that might be safe to park radioactive waste in might be some of the non-ice-covered parts of Antarctica. (And if you ever want to see an eco-freak’s head explode, try suggesting that as an alternative)

The problem with Abyssal trenches and other subduction zones is that the water pressure may rupture or even powder anything you put there. As for the statement: “there’s zero transference of material from deep-water trenches to the surface of the earth”, that cannot at this time be verified. Furthermore, if we sink waste containers down past the depth where they may still be repaired or retrieved in the future, we may well shoot ourselves in the foot. Abyssal lifeforms do interact with upper-level life (Think about the elusive giant squid, for instance) - it’s just that their interactions and food chains are very difficult to study, again, because of the pressures of the depths.

Of course, these problems pale in comparison with the engineering difficulties of injecting directly into the mantle, so there is something to be said for subduction…

(Pun omitted)

Fi

12

Amen. The risks may be debatable, but something is amiss when we’re generating toxic waste with no plans on how to handle it.

13

I think it is a reach to say that there is no interaction between deep ocean currents and surface currents. The Antarctic Bottom Current, for example, does circulate, and does have points where it interacts with other currents. Again, remember that at the time scales in question, very small effects can add up.

There is a concern that is often overlooked when considering dropping waste into deep waters: heat. The reason why there is such a small amount or (or no) mixing of the currents is because there the water at the bottom of the ocean is colder and denser than the currents above it. But if you drop a large number of containers of radioactive material in a relatively small area, you are going to begin to raise the temperature of the water. Forgetting for the moment the environmental hazards to benthic fauna, the small amount of heat will decrease the density of the surrounding water, cause plumes to rise and interact with the (moving) currents above, and mixing will take place. Should one of the containers suffer a breach, and you have radioactive material released into the ocean at the very point where mixing is taking place. As the material is the very heat source that is causing the mixing to take place, it is anybody’s guess as to where it will end up. In your great^5 grandchild’s tuna salad, perhaps?

Lastly, which subduction zone should we dump it in? On which / what type of unsinkable boat? Could all nations of the world do this, or would they have to find their own dumping ground? And how would you get 300 thousand gallons of liquid high level waste from Idaho to the tanker? And which port city should start accepting these shipments? Should the intervening states be required to allow the material to pass through?
Thanks for the Cecil-links

14

Er… I have heard it said that what is left over is less radioactive than what you start with. This would seem to make sense, as if it were more radioative, it could still be used as fuel. I heard this from a guy who has one of his PhD’s in Physics, so I believe it.

So, very simple:

  1. find ore
  2. refine ore
  3. use fuel
  4. remove leftover “spent” fuel
  5. unrefine it
  6. stick it back where you found it.

Alternatively to 5 and 6, you could just atomize it out of the back of an airplane, but the wackoes would go ape. That would be easiest and give you the best safest redistribution.

What’s unrefine mean? Grinding it into fine powder and mixing it up with dirt. An alternative to 6, use it for fertilizer. Probably wouldn’t be advantage when mixed in thinly enough, but what the heck, couldn’t possibly hurt.

15

Export it to countries that harbor terrorists.

16

The problem here, is that it’s impossible to satisfy the eco-terrorists, who apparently believe that there wasn’t any such thing as radioactivity before we humans started meddling with Things We Were Not Meant To Know. Fact is, there’s a lot more natural than artificial radiation, and as jmullaney points out, we’re actually slightly reducing the natural background by using the stuff in a controlled manner as fuel. Since we can’t satisfy the extremists no matter what we do, I say don’t even try. A soultion like jmullaney’s (put it back where you found it) is actually what I would have suggested, with the possible change of vitrifying it instead of just mixing it with soil. Any rational objections to this idea?

17

my apologies in advance if this is a double post. I always have ‘trusted the CGI’ but I recieved a different error message this time. Must be all that waste under my desk!)
Just in case it is, I’ll add something too it so it is not completely a waste of space. I’ll supply a specific (i.e. rational) objection to vitrification - two components of mixed high level waste are typically mercury and lead. To vitrify the waste, you would inevitably end up with mercury and lead vapors out in the atmosphere. That, gererally, is not a good thing. OK, enough adding onto a possible double post, on with my original intent:

Again, one does not need to be a whacko or an eco-terrorist to acknowledge the danger of the material in question. To suggest that those claiming that waste is a significant threat to human and environmental health are such, is to put yourself in an analytical position the same distance from rationality as the eco-terrorist-whacko. This is not a thread asking ‘is nuclear waste good for your children?’. It is a thread asking what to do with the waste we have.
Nuclear waste as fertilizer is only good for growing Tommaco, (SNPP.com does not have the capsulation up yet, or I would post a link. Simpsons fans know what I am talking about). and there are problems with this. But seriously, there are lots of rational objections to spraying it in the air and putting it back where you found it. One of the most serious objections to vitrification I have mentioned above. You are trading one potential hazard - the possibility of spilling a liquid - for a very real hazard - the toxins released to the atmosphere during the vitrification process. Follow the link I posted in the OP, and look at the analysis done discussing the potential hazards of various alternatives.

Mixing it with dirt and putting it back in the original mines would work, but moving that much dirt to a location, moving that much dirt back into a mineshaft, and mixing that much waste with that much dirt would give engineers that much of a headache.

If we do vitrify the waste, then what? Do we send it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant? To Yucca Mountain? Are these facilities safe to store the waste, or are we handing a larger problem to future generations? Do we separate the waste (i.e. sort transuranics from sodium-bearing liquid wastes, etc.) or do we vitrify it as a single waste stream?

If we do bury it, how would you monitor it? Wold you make it accessible for the possibility of future uses, or would you seal it off as best you could to protect yourself from terrorists? In either case, what would you do to make sure that in five hundred or a thousand years, the materials will still be in the same place you buried them. In ten thousand years?

Do these questions need answering? If so, how confident are you that they will be satisfactorily answered. If you are not sure that they will be, does it make sense to keep adding to the stockpile of waste we have now? The same question applies if they will be answered, but not for a long time. If these questions don’t need answering, why not?

Lastly, if you really think that nuclear waste is not as harmful as it has been made out to be, would you object to receiving other countries nuclear waste material for deposition in our own repositories?
(

18

I really don’t know much about nuclear waste, but it seems to me that any way we cut it, we’re going to be handing off the problem to future generations. Right now our responsibility is to put it in as safe a state or place as we know how.

I do have something to mention about ocean dumping, though. I haven’t confirmed this, so it may be a legend, but my source is a biological oceanographer at UC Berkeley who has personally been to the area in question aboard ALVIN, so I’m inclined to believe it: Back in the '60s there was a project to dump waste in concrete containers near the Farallon Islands off the California coast. Turns out that a lot of ship captains got tired of lugging the containers all that way, and there’s now a trail of these containers from about halfway between San Francisco and the Farallons all the way to the dump site. There have been some concerns about the integrity of the containers, but I can’t remember if any of them have been breached or not.

If we store the waste in a terrestrial site, monitoring any leakage will be simpler (but not necessarily easy, if it gets into groundwater). I’d think we’d want to keep a close eye on this stuff as long as we can, just in case.

19

I hate to weigh in on this issue, since a lot of people will consider me a wacko.

Put it in drums, build a really large railgun in a place that’s already uninhabitable, and launch it at the sun or into the Kuiper belt.

Obviously, a little thought needs to go into this. First, the railgun needs to be long enough to decelerate a barrel full of crap if they detect problems along the length of the gun.

Second, you’ve gotta get the nuclear waste to this isolated spot in the first place.

Third, there is no third.

Burying nuke waste in the middle of nowhere solves nothing. By the time it becomes economically viable, there will be cheaper methods of converting what we’ve got to what we want. It will come bubbling up to the surface like a planetary Love Canal, and who wants that?

We’ve already got the necessary technology to build the railgun and the ammunition. Making sure it reaches where we fling it is also not much of a problem. The biggest problem is keeping the idiotic “No Nuke” protesters away from the site, but large-bore weapons ought to do the trick.

Sorry to sound like I don’t hug the planet as closely as the Greens, but that’s the way it is. I’d rather live here longer than have to abandon the dump.

20

Amen jamshid! I was reading through the posts and I kept thinking, “Doesn’t anyone see that we don’t have to keep the stuff here on Earth?” I completely agree. A rail gun uses basically the same principle as a maglev train, only more magnets and a much faster projectile. I say we put some money into researching a rail gun, during this time the waste should be stored here on Earth somewhere in a temporary site. The gun could then be constructed, and the waste could be launched away from Earth with the only cost being electricity to run the magnets. Some say it would be ungodly expensive, but think that the gov’t is planning on building a huge federal nuclear waste repository which would cost hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars.

This would not leave the problem to the anonymous “future generation,” we can do it within the next five to ten years. This would basically eliminate the problem of radioactive waste storage by getting rid of it. Safely. If a use was found for the waste, the gun could be used to shoot other things into space, like satellites and things. A multi-purpose alternative.