An earlier version of this piece was posted on Works in Progress. Apologies for double posting, but I wanted to give the Gordian Knot subscribers a chance to comment. Take Away For practical purposes, spent nuclear fuel remains radioactive forever. However, the penetrating form of radiation is essentially gone in 600 years. After that, the used fuel must be swallowed to be harmful. But that would require eating rocks. Bacon is probably more dangerous than aged nuclear fuel. You are much more likely to swallow that carcinogen.
Hi, Jack - My co-author Tim Maloney and I, in our upcoming book Fear of a Nuclear Planet, have determined how many solar panels it would have taken to produce the same energy as the "spent" fuel stored in the Connecticut Yank dry cask storage farm.
Using the Sunpower E-327 panel with an estimated 40-year lifecycle, we calculate that on the same sized storage pad, the used panels would form a solid stack 670 feet high, or 530 feet high if the panels were crushed flat. I'll send you the graphic and calculations by email -- feel free to use it!
“It’s only dangerous if you eat it”. At longer time scales, should we worry about inhaling wind born dust particles created by erosion (or explosion)? I.e. eating by other means.
If 600 years is the relevant timeframe for nuclear waste, why do we hear about thousand-year duration nuclear wastelands, particularly for Chernobyl? Did that disaster create compounds that are more dangerous and long lived than standard nuclear waste?
A good overview of radioactive decay and cask storage of spent nuclear fuel, but it assumes that the cask will retain its structural integrity for at least 600 years. There has been some work to justify a 300 year cask life, but has yet to be licensed by the NRC. Storage requires security, monitoring, and maintenance by a governing entity over the life of the cask. I doubt that any assurances, at present, can be given about the structural integrity of a storage cask or a regulatory body to oversee above ground storage of nuclear waste for 600 years.
A lot of thinking about long timeline nuclear material is shaped by the complete absence of any coherent picture of how the long run future goes overall. One scenario is a singularity, in this scenario, the nuclear waste doesn't matter unless it causes problems before then. The singularity has technomagic that can basically do anything, nothing else we make will be of significant use or a significant problem.
If Figure 4 is dose rate at the fuel element surface, outside the cladding, shouldn't alpha and beta particles be zero? Maybe these are the rates assuming the cladding is removed? Also, there might be a big difference whether you are touching a single rod with your finger, or wrapping your hand around it, or carrying a bundle of rods to a nearby truck. Maybe this should be does rate per square cm for a single rod.
I have just discovered this blog and based on this very interesting and informative first entry will surely work myself through your A-list over the coming weeks.
I agree with everything said in this piece and learned a lot of new things. However, I have a residual concern about dry cask storage. It is admittedly a small risk, but it at least carries much more weight than what-ifs about our reptilian successors not understanding million-year-old radiation warning signs.
My concern is about nuclear war. Fortunately, the number of nuclear warheads has (for now) been reduced to an extent that they will probably not suffice to end us as a species in the event of an all out nuclear exchange.
However, this raises the immediate strategic question who will win such a conflict. Whoever is able to build back quickest is likely to dominate the world post nuclear apocalypse.
This makes permanent area denial a very powerful strategy. "Unfortunately", thermonuclear weapons "burn" rather cleanly and the resulting radiation vanishes quickly. On the other hand, your typical dry cask storage may well contain the equivalent of hundreds of reactor inventories which emit gamma radiation for hundreds of years to come (and even alpha/beta emitors are a problem when ground to dust and mixed with the soil). I have not seen this modelled, but my guess would be that hitting a dry cask storage with a thermonuclear weapon in the right way would spread this radioactive material far and wide.
If I were Russia, I'd have some of my ICBMs trained on the storage sites. So should we not put the stuff inside a nuclear bunker?
In fact, let me go full prepper (You never go full prepper! This last part will undoubtedly convince you that this comment is crazy and can be safely ignored. Alas I can't resist.): there are all sorts of existential risks for which a nuclear bunker with functionally infinite energy supply would be great. And current breeder reactors are not exactly great, are they? So why not include a breeder reactor R&D facility in the storage bunker for good measure?
Hi, Jack - My co-author Tim Maloney and I, in our upcoming book Fear of a Nuclear Planet, have determined how many solar panels it would have taken to produce the same energy as the "spent" fuel stored in the Connecticut Yank dry cask storage farm.
Using the Sunpower E-327 panel with an estimated 40-year lifecycle, we calculate that on the same sized storage pad, the used panels would form a solid stack 670 feet high, or 530 feet high if the panels were crushed flat. I'll send you the graphic and calculations by email -- feel free to use it!
“It’s only dangerous if you eat it”. At longer time scales, should we worry about inhaling wind born dust particles created by erosion (or explosion)? I.e. eating by other means.
If 600 years is the relevant timeframe for nuclear waste, why do we hear about thousand-year duration nuclear wastelands, particularly for Chernobyl? Did that disaster create compounds that are more dangerous and long lived than standard nuclear waste?
A good overview of radioactive decay and cask storage of spent nuclear fuel, but it assumes that the cask will retain its structural integrity for at least 600 years. There has been some work to justify a 300 year cask life, but has yet to be licensed by the NRC. Storage requires security, monitoring, and maintenance by a governing entity over the life of the cask. I doubt that any assurances, at present, can be given about the structural integrity of a storage cask or a regulatory body to oversee above ground storage of nuclear waste for 600 years.
A lot of thinking about long timeline nuclear material is shaped by the complete absence of any coherent picture of how the long run future goes overall. One scenario is a singularity, in this scenario, the nuclear waste doesn't matter unless it causes problems before then. The singularity has technomagic that can basically do anything, nothing else we make will be of significant use or a significant problem.
If Figure 4 is dose rate at the fuel element surface, outside the cladding, shouldn't alpha and beta particles be zero? Maybe these are the rates assuming the cladding is removed? Also, there might be a big difference whether you are touching a single rod with your finger, or wrapping your hand around it, or carrying a bundle of rods to a nearby truck. Maybe this should be does rate per square cm for a single rod.
I have just discovered this blog and based on this very interesting and informative first entry will surely work myself through your A-list over the coming weeks.
I agree with everything said in this piece and learned a lot of new things. However, I have a residual concern about dry cask storage. It is admittedly a small risk, but it at least carries much more weight than what-ifs about our reptilian successors not understanding million-year-old radiation warning signs.
My concern is about nuclear war. Fortunately, the number of nuclear warheads has (for now) been reduced to an extent that they will probably not suffice to end us as a species in the event of an all out nuclear exchange.
However, this raises the immediate strategic question who will win such a conflict. Whoever is able to build back quickest is likely to dominate the world post nuclear apocalypse.
This makes permanent area denial a very powerful strategy. "Unfortunately", thermonuclear weapons "burn" rather cleanly and the resulting radiation vanishes quickly. On the other hand, your typical dry cask storage may well contain the equivalent of hundreds of reactor inventories which emit gamma radiation for hundreds of years to come (and even alpha/beta emitors are a problem when ground to dust and mixed with the soil). I have not seen this modelled, but my guess would be that hitting a dry cask storage with a thermonuclear weapon in the right way would spread this radioactive material far and wide.
If I were Russia, I'd have some of my ICBMs trained on the storage sites. So should we not put the stuff inside a nuclear bunker?
In fact, let me go full prepper (You never go full prepper! This last part will undoubtedly convince you that this comment is crazy and can be safely ignored. Alas I can't resist.): there are all sorts of existential risks for which a nuclear bunker with functionally infinite energy supply would be great. And current breeder reactors are not exactly great, are they? So why not include a breeder reactor R&D facility in the storage bunker for good measure?