Excellent! Very clear and easy to follow. I still have a couple questions, but need to take some time and read the whole piece again to see if I missed anything.
One epistemologist once commented that a number standing alone has no meaning--one has to have another number with it to provide proportion and meaning. It seems to me that it would be useful if someone would take a real world example and compare it to another. Thus, I think it might be enlightening to compare the 20 year spent fuel output of a familiar nuclear power plant, such as Diablo Canyon, and compare it to the 20 year waste output of an existing large solar farm that produces the same annual gigawatt hours as Diablo Canyon. I am presuming that one would have to extrapolate because there are no solar farms that large, and I am also presuming that we are looking at a 20 year lifespan for the panels--but we could up that---and I would guess that the most efficient existing model would be the big farm in southern CA. I have done this in my head and the results are pretty eye-rolling, but I don't have the very specific numbers in front of me to make an accurate comparison. I guess we could also do that with wind power, but that would be harder for me because I have even less access to those numbers. (and of course, we bear in mind that for a given number of KWH, coal plants produce more radioactive waste than nuclear plants--as for quantity, which would you rather have in your backyard: one pound of spent fuel (the size of a golf ball) or 23 Ford F150 pickup trucks of coal ash;-).
GREAT explanation of the back end of the nuclear energy fuel cycle. Nuclear waste is not a technical problem. It’s a social issue created by antinuclear fanatics that weaponized fear of it, and political career politicians that capitalized on that fear as an issue to get elected or re-elected on. I agree with the author that used nuclear fuel is valuable and I think will soon be economically recycled. But the social contract with US citizens was that Congress would provide a repository and failed too. That failure (also orchestrated by antinuclear fanatics) should have backed up the used fuel rods in cooling pools and ended nuclear energy as the antinuclear fanatics intended. When the room in cooling pools ran out, at that time, we would have had to shut the plants down. But necessity is the mother of invention. A company called Holtec came up with a dry cask storage system that can store that fuel for years. If we do build a repository the casks should be retrievable for at least 100 years. There is so much energy left in those casks we could power the US for over 1,000 years by burning it in advanced reactors. All of our nuclear waste will soon be looked at as a national treasure. So maybe the silver lining is we did not bury in a place we could not retrieve it.
After taking the useful isotopes, and burning all the burnable stuff in breeder reactors or molten salt reactors etc, why not put the remaining back in old uranium mines, where the dirt originally came from anyway?
Excellent! Very clear and easy to follow. I still have a couple questions, but need to take some time and read the whole piece again to see if I missed anything.
One epistemologist once commented that a number standing alone has no meaning--one has to have another number with it to provide proportion and meaning. It seems to me that it would be useful if someone would take a real world example and compare it to another. Thus, I think it might be enlightening to compare the 20 year spent fuel output of a familiar nuclear power plant, such as Diablo Canyon, and compare it to the 20 year waste output of an existing large solar farm that produces the same annual gigawatt hours as Diablo Canyon. I am presuming that one would have to extrapolate because there are no solar farms that large, and I am also presuming that we are looking at a 20 year lifespan for the panels--but we could up that---and I would guess that the most efficient existing model would be the big farm in southern CA. I have done this in my head and the results are pretty eye-rolling, but I don't have the very specific numbers in front of me to make an accurate comparison. I guess we could also do that with wind power, but that would be harder for me because I have even less access to those numbers. (and of course, we bear in mind that for a given number of KWH, coal plants produce more radioactive waste than nuclear plants--as for quantity, which would you rather have in your backyard: one pound of spent fuel (the size of a golf ball) or 23 Ford F150 pickup trucks of coal ash;-).
GREAT explanation of the back end of the nuclear energy fuel cycle. Nuclear waste is not a technical problem. It’s a social issue created by antinuclear fanatics that weaponized fear of it, and political career politicians that capitalized on that fear as an issue to get elected or re-elected on. I agree with the author that used nuclear fuel is valuable and I think will soon be economically recycled. But the social contract with US citizens was that Congress would provide a repository and failed too. That failure (also orchestrated by antinuclear fanatics) should have backed up the used fuel rods in cooling pools and ended nuclear energy as the antinuclear fanatics intended. When the room in cooling pools ran out, at that time, we would have had to shut the plants down. But necessity is the mother of invention. A company called Holtec came up with a dry cask storage system that can store that fuel for years. If we do build a repository the casks should be retrievable for at least 100 years. There is so much energy left in those casks we could power the US for over 1,000 years by burning it in advanced reactors. All of our nuclear waste will soon be looked at as a national treasure. So maybe the silver lining is we did not bury in a place we could not retrieve it.
Does figure 12 show submarine reactor cores or submarine e reactor co.partments? The latter, j believe.
I STAND CORRECTED. THE PHOTO IS REACTOR COMPARTMENTS AT HANFORD>
Not cores at INL. Mea culpa.
Jack
Roger,
The reactor compartments go to Hanford after the cores have been removed. The photo shows the reactor cores at INL.
After taking the useful isotopes, and burning all the burnable stuff in breeder reactors or molten salt reactors etc, why not put the remaining back in old uranium mines, where the dirt originally came from anyway?