US equipment issues (explosions) when used in Australia

I voted him not off-topic for you.

I agree he's right, there is so much momentum to "do something" that nobody tries to figure out just exactly what that "something" really ought to be.

Nuclear power is a perfect example. Greenpiss is dead set against it, despite the fact that one nuclear reactor generates more power more consistantly than 300 wind turbines. And the waste can be recycled so that 95% of the energy can be extracted from it, and much of the remainder is still usable for medical and industrial uses, leaving a much smaller amount of residual waste (and the original amount was not large to begin with) that is only dangerous for a couple hundred years instead of thousands like it would be if the fuel weren't recycled. But all of that is completely beyond the pale for most "enviromentalists".

Synthetic oil from coal is another one that is off the table for them.

Nancy Pelosi can't even figure out that natural gas IS a fossil fuel and you have to drill for it. And she is really fighting oil drilling because it undercuts her investments in T Boone Pickens' wind farms. What we have here is really insider trading writ large. So much for the "most ethical congress ever". She is also fighting to keep up the wind power subsidies because if the playing field were leveled, it would not be economically feasible. wind power gets 25 times more subsidies than oil does. so we wnd up paying more for it and not realizing it. Meanwhile she is laughing all the way to the bank.

G'day Rorschach,

• I agree he's right, there is so much momentum to "do something" that nobody tries to figure out just exactly what that "something" really ought to be.

It's like any engineering project, first off you need to define the problem and develop some sort of model that can be used when assessing the various responses. Unfortunately this primary and fundamental step seems to get completely overlooked and as a result we end up pissing into the wind and achieving anything between nothing and making everything worse.

A classic example was a proposed logging project for the northern regions of Australia where very few if anybody goes. The idea was to remove only the mature trees and them replace each one that was removed with a whole host of saplings.

When you have a stable old growth forest they do not remove any where near the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere as a forest that is immature and growing. By chopping down only the old mature trees you are locking up the carbon in them then replacing them with saplings that need to suck up bucket loads of carbon while they grow towards maturity.

Unfortunately the greenies got hold of the plan and chucked a temper tantrum about not chopping down trees regardless of what and how they are replaced. Instead of having a managed environmentally sustainable source of tropical hardwoods and carbon sink we have uncontrolled clear felling of third world tropical rainforests with no concern of the wider and long term consequences.

• Nuclear power is a perfect example. Greenpiss is dead set against it, despite the fact that one nuclear reactor generates more power more consistantly than 300 wind turbines. And the waste can be recycled so that 95% of the energy can be extracted from it, and much of the remainder is still usable for medical and industrial uses, leaving a much smaller amount of residual waste (and the original amount was not large to begin with) that is only dangerous for a couple hundred years instead of thousands like it would be if the fuel weren't recycled. But all of that is completely beyond the pale for most "enviromentalists".

Having said that, nuclear fission power is something that I am for the most part against. Yes you can recycle much of the spent fuel and get more out of it but you still end up with waste products that need to be isolated from the biosphere for up to a quarter of a million years. That's over 50 times longer than the pyramids of Egypt have been in existence.

So I ask you, what chance do you think we have of ensuring the long term safety of spent nuclear fission waste?

Currently there isn't even a single operational long term storage facility for high level radioactive waste on the entire planet. The US are currently constructing a facility but there's no way it will ever be capable or allowed to store the wast from all the other countries on earth that are currently using fission reactors.

Keep in mind, it only takes one corner cutting, profit driven git that doesn't give an ant's fart about the consequences of their actions to muck it up for the remaining 5,999,999,999 people that live on the planet.

• She is also fighting to keep up the wind power subsidies because if the playing field were leveled, it would not be economically feasible.

Do we really have a level playing field to start with?

Fossil fuels are actually highly subsidized.

The current cost of fossil fuels is based on the cost of mining, refining and then distributing the end product. It doesn't take into account the cost of the consequences like global climate change and warming, environmental damage etcetera.

As a result we are currently heavily subsidising the use of fossil fuels by deferring the costs of the damage and leaving it for our future generations to fix and clean up.

So, what's the answer?

There are plenty of answers, all we have to do is get off our collective backsides and get our paid representatives in government to sit down, shut up, listen to the engineers and do something constructive rathe than destructive.

Readers of this thread may be interested in visiting my CR-4 blog masu on machines where we have discussed many of the possible renewable energy technologies. If you go to the blog table of contents page you will find links to the various threads. I haven't added any new threads for some time but all the threads listed are still active and any new post will be forwarded to all the participants.

From the for-what-it's-worth department, I have of late noticed entire mile-long coal trains made up of all brand-new gondola hopper cars, so apparently the money is coming in from somewhere. It may be out of profits, or it may be subsidized, but the railcar shops are putting people to work.

Masu, You are incorrect about reprocessed nuclear waste. The remaining waste after fully reprocessing the waste is dangerous for hundreds, not thousands of years, much less hundreds of thousands. UNREPROCESSED waste is dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. But we are talking about apples and oranges here. The two different waste streams are very different in their properties.

The reason waste reprocessing was brought to a halt was that one of the products of reprocessing was plutonium (which is supposed to be returned to the fuel cycle to be burned up as a mixed oxide fuel in fast breeder reactors) and there were those who feared it would be used to build more nuclear weapons. But here is the deal. if the fuel is not reprocessed, the plutonium does not go away, it is merely left in the fuel rods and buried. What is to prevent future generations from using it for weapons? Nothing. But by burning it up in fast breeder reactors, it is no longer available to be used for weapons production. Therefore reprocessing it is actually less likely to lead to nuclear proliferation.

Yes you can reprocess spent nuclear fission fuel to reuse some of the material in reactors but you don't juts get useful by-products from splitting ²³⁵U in fission reactors.

One of the by-products is ¹²⁹I (Iodine) which is particularly nasty as it is easily taken up by plants and animals and ultimately humans in the thyroid gland and producing cancers that are particularly nasty and difficult to treat. Now ¹²⁹I has a half life of 15.7 million years.

Wikipedia has some fairly good articles on reprocessing spent nuclear fission fuels that while not 100% accurate are a good place to start reading about the problem.

Anyway, the point is, while there are useful components in spend fuel that can be recycled there are a host of long lived radioactive isotopes that are no use and remain dangerous for extremely long periods of time.

Currently the only solution I have been able find is to store them in secured facilities that will prevent them form coming in contact with the biosphere until they have been rendered safe. Unfortunately this means that unless we come up with something new they need to be stored in safe and secure installations for hundreds of millennia.

Given that it only takes one short term profit driven, corner cutting, irresponsible git to shaft everybody on the plant, do you really think it's a good idea to continue creating more and more of the stuff without having a viable solution?

Now I am not 100% up to speed on nuclear technology and if there is more up to date information I would be grateful if anybody could supply links to any relevant web pages.

PS Your are correct on the reason that reprocessing is frowned on and given the sabre rattling of some of the world's less desirable leaders the last thing we need is unaccounted for weapons grade fission materials.

Actually masu, radioactive iodine does have a use in treating both hyperactive thyroids and thyroid cancers,as well as tracer elements for nuclear medicine. So to say that it has no use is incorrect. In fact it is probably one of the most used radioisotopes used in nuclear medicine. Other isotopes used in nuclear medicine include ^99mTc, which is another very commonly used radioisotope which is a nuclear fission product.

Two other radioisotopes that are products of nuclear reprocessing are Americium and Cesium. Cesium is used in treating cervical cancer, Americium is used in smoke detectors.

Thorium, Neptunium, Plutonium and Uranium recovered from fuel assemblies can be reprocessed into fuel for Gen IV reactors. Further, Thorium has industrial uses as well.

G'day Rorschach,

• Actually masu, radioactive iodine does have a use in treating both hyperactive thyroids and thyroid cancers, as well as tracer elements for nuclear medicine. So to say that it has no use is incorrect.

A valid point and I should have been more careful about the wording.

While there are uses in nuclear medicine and other applications when I stated that a particular radioactive component was useless I was referring to its usefulness as recycled fuel.

Most of the items required for nuclear medicine have extremely short half lives and need to be specifically manufactured on demand as the need arrises. The nuclear medicine department at the local hospital places orders and has isotopes delivered every 12 hours. If they not used within hours of their arrival they become useless and then need to be disposed of in special and very expensive ways.

The short half life of the radioisotopes used in nuclear medicine means that there is no way they can be stored or stockpiled for use as the need arrises. As a result extracting them from spent fuel is a waste of time as by the time you get them extracted, purified, sterilized and made ready for use it's no longer useful.

As a component of spent nuclear fuel they are for the most part useless and not worth extracting.

If the useful life is so short, does that mean that the Isotopes are only available in the capital cities, and the conversion installations are also in those local cities?

Snaketails depending on the isotope, yes that is often true. Many medical radioisotopes are used as imaging markers and as such are chosen specifically for their short half-life. As such the time between transmutation and use is critical. Cardinal Health is one such company that operates cyclotrons in most major cities near the major airports so that they can quickly ship their product to the destination, most of their products have a 6-8 hour transportation window if memory serves before the product is no longer radioactive enough for use. These products are used for PET scans.

Here in Houston GE operates a small medical isotope reactor near the Texas Medical Center for the production of Technetium. Which is a fission product. It is used in Cardiac Perfusion imaging.

However other radioisotopes used for thereputic uses generally are longer lived and much more radioactive such as iodine, cesium and cobalt.

G'day Snaketails,

· If the useful life is so short, does that mean that the Isotopes are only available in the capital cities, and the conversion installations are also in those local cities?

In a word, yes.

Actually it depends on the isotope but with some of the shorted lived radioisotopes the patient will need to visit one of the major population centres.

Australia only has one operational reactor which is specifically designed for scientific research and radioisotopes production. The reactor we had been using since the early 1960s was way past its design life and after an unholy confrontation with the greenies the government decide to replace it with a newer reactor. Like most things with government the construction of the new reactor was delayed and left Australia with no nuclear reactor.

They did arrange to get radioisotopes from US based reactors and fly them directly to Australia for immediate use. Unfortunately, the final decision whether or not something like a radioisotopes will fly is up to the pilot and many refused point blankly to allow it on board. The resultant delay resulted in many of the radioisotopes being useless when they arrived.

In some countries its actually illegal to allow radioisotopes to be transported by aircraft so you could unwittingly be breaking the law.

About 6 months back I had a gallium scan which involves an IV injection of a ⁶⁶Ga isotope. Unfortunately ⁶⁶Ga has a 9.47 hour half life and it also need 24 hours or 2.5 half lives for it to be taken up by the body. In order to get the scan to work the ⁶⁶Ga needs to be produced in the morning, rushed to the hospital and administered as soon as it arrives then returning no more or less then 24 hours to do the actual scan. Any delays and the whole thing is screwed and has to be done again but you can't do it straight away you must wait for 6 months.

So, depending on the specific isotope in some cases it's only available in major population centres.

With all the news of the LHC floating around, I did a google search about them..

I found that they don't just make those Isotopes in reactors, but also in particle Accelerators too, So, I guess the one at Monash Uni (Vic) will be used for the manufacture of those Isotopes?

"...one short term profit driven, corner cutting, irresponsible git..."

Alas, if that it were only the one! We could have him up on charges of general mopery and be done with it. Unfortunately, there's more than ONE Enron-CEO-grade git out there that we'd have to account for. My hope is that we can vet any staff working on a solution to this well enough to keep such gits far away. Long-term containment should be possible.

Actually, the biggest problem probably isn't one of engineering, physics, or chemistry, but of linguistics. What language of today, including our international pictograms for traffic signs and rest rooms, will still have any discernable meaning to our grandchildren 100 generations removed? Ever try to read Beowulf in the original text? And that was English... Warning signs made today will have little if any meaning in 10,000 years, much less 10 times that.