Setback for safe storage of nuclear waste

Waste of time and effort, In my view, The good old Soviet Union have the problem licked. They are embarking on a massive, Fast Breeder Reactor Programme, What a good game of 'Chess' those Ruskies play.....First they sell us the Nuclear Fuel, and then they take our waste and charge us for burning that off in their home reactors.

Well Cool, and very good business.

The waste is disolved in the glass. If the glass breaks, you have some new glass surface exposed, which I suppose could leach. What was not exposed at the surface would have no further hazzard than the unbroken piece. Even crushing to a powder would not add to the risk substantially. This sounds like the same wolf cry of the ocean biologists worrying about acidification of the ocean water with CO₂ preventing calcification in corals and shellfish. The added CO₂ further prevents solution and aids the excretion of CaCO3 by cells. Acidification with HCl would have the effect they are afraid of.

RichH

Whether it lasts 10,000 years or 2000 years, the technology will be far enough advanced by then to deal with whatever problem may arise; and in any case, I for one, won't be around to even care about it.

In the not too distant future Plutonium could be worth several times more than Gold. Whatever storage method is used, recovery at a later date, should be planned for. Fast Breeder reactors could eliminate the problem. Also generate masses of electricity as well. Though far more expensive to build, Fast Breeder Reactors have proven to be intrinsically stable. On the very few occasions when there have been 'coolant' failures, the reactors have just risen a little in temperature, and then settles down into quiescent self-moderation. There is no hurry, fix the problem in your own sweet time.

I agree with Alastair Carnegie.

We need to get over our paranoia and start thinking smart about managing nuclear waste. There is a class of Nuclear Reactor, called "Fast Neutron Reactors" which not only does not produce plutonium, but can consume it along with most of the long-lived highly radioactive waste products that have accumulated from our conventional "Light Water Reactors". Our current stockpile of highly radioactive waste from our current Nuclear Plants could be reprocessed and burned in these Fast Neutron Reactors, thus drastically minimizing the problem of storing huge plies of radioactive waste. Fast Neutron Reactors are not even new technology! The French have been running them for decades. You can read more about this in the December 2005 issue of Scientific American (or online at www.sciam.com).

There is an "electroplating" process that could recover and concentrate the radioactive elements from the waste and make it into a grade suitable for fuel in Nuclear Reactors. This is much like the way Copper is refined from ore. Sure, it will be expensive, and sure it will take a lot of energy, but the cost of trying to safely bury the waste for millennia is also huge, and the energy recovered in new reactors would be far greater.

Besides, with Global Warming already reaching dangerous levels, we need the energy from nuclear power because all the other "Green" sources collectively fall short of the demand and will become a clutter if expanded much further.

Thank you very much for the support 'Ray8', Your comment has been forwarded to a very dear friend, who may take the matter further, we hope and pray. Also thanks due to all the other contributors to this thread.

Thanks for caring so deeply about the human race A narcissism so destructive is pathological.

I hope our Guest, who is not unique in his views, becomes a little more optimistic. not about whether nuclear waste is around in years to come, but that s/he will not be around in two or ten thousand years. We can't be certain that we won't be. We may be 'around' in some form or another, for eternity. Certainly we hope our children will be around. An advanced civilization may be able to time travel? If that is the case, 10,000 years may as well be a day. Our guest may take a ride on a spacecraft, he lives a year, and returns in 10,000 years..... Relativity says this would happen at near light speed...... Better safe than sorry, is a good watch-word.

President Carter signed a presidential decree forbidding the recycling of spent fuel. He had a fear that while reprocessing the fuel, weapons grade plutonium would be recovered and stolen by terrorist groups that would then use this material to manufacture nuclear weapons.

The French recycle their nuclear fuel and we have no control of their processes or of there safeguards to prevent this recovered plutonium from being stolen from them.

The cost of reprocessing the fuel is about the same as burying it and the amount of disposable waste is greatly reduced.

Plutonium recovered from the spent fuel is far from the purity state that is required to make a nuclear bomb, so it would have to be refined again to achieve that purity. This is not a basement project, but rather a extremely costly, complicated process requiring extensive amounts of equipment and a great amount of raw unprocessed fuel.

We should abandon the idea that we should store all used fuel for many millenniums, instead we should build a spent nuclear fuel recycling center and recycle, recycle, recycle.

Recycled fuel is actually better than the original fuel and will fuel a reactor longer without refueling.

The millions of tons of spent fuel that is stored at most nuclear plants is (in some cases) poorly maintained and retaliativly poorly guarded.

Just a dumb hillbilly's thoughts

As a general rule of thumb, everything Jimmy Carter did as president was the exact opposite of what should have been done.