This has been opinion for years. If spent fuel (Plutonium) is so incredibly dangerous, then society has an obligation to reprocess it. That ignores the fact that the 1 the cost of reprocessing has already been paid for a the government has the funds in hand, and 2. the reprocessed Plutonium produces carbon free electricity .
Plutonium is one of the least toxic heavy metals. Only 1% of spent fuel is plutonium. Plutonium is an alpha emitter.. It must be ingested or inhaled to cause harm. But if ingested
the uptake is 0.0001, meaning 99.9% of any ingested material will be excreted in a day or 2. See Chapter on plutonium in Flop book.
Wasn't there a guy who offered to eat straight plutonium (a small amount) as long as someone else would eat an equal quantity of pure caffeine? Or maybe I am just making this up....
As I recall, that amount of caffeine would have been fatal.
Eric Voice voluntarily ingested plutonium to see where it would go in a human. Dr. Voice died at age 80 of natural causes. I think Voice is the guy who handed Queen Elizabeth a ball of plutonium so she could feel the warmth. At US weapons labs, the staff regularly walked around with balls of highly enriched Pu in their lab coats.
Might be a bit difficult. The Feds seem to have a problem with people walking around with weapons grade plutonium.
There's a video where Galen Winsor talks about handling plutonium. My old link does not work but if you Google his name you may be able to find it. Galen points out that he carried around two half-critical masses
one in his left pocket and one in his right, and was very careful not to let the two get together, lest there be a blue flash of criticality.
If you mean weapons-grade Pu, isn't that synthesized in the first place to be almost pure Pu-239, rather than being enriched from plutonium with a more diverse isotopic composition?
You are being a doryphore, but the wording is sloppy. I should ahve said "highly purified". It is not all that easy to separate Pu from all the other stuff in the fuel. The buildings to do that at Hanford were so big they were called "canyons".
The belief that "aged spent fuel is uniquely dangerous" is unfortunately already widely held. Until that changes, the startup firm Deep Isolation offers a solution that's much cheaper than Yucca Mountain style repositories. They use the directional drilling technology developed by the oil and gas industry to bury spent fuel deep underground, in canisters that can be retrieved whenever the fuel is needed for reprocessing. You can learn more about it at https://deepisolation.com.
Deep Isolation is not a solution. It's a capitulation. Deep Isolation is an attempt to profit on the false fear that the nuclear establishment has fostered. And they are doing it in an totally unoriginal way.
Jack, Deep Isolation is a “capitulation” to the fact that the “false fear” is widely held. In an ideal world, in which your views were widely accepted, Deep Isolation would be unnecessary. In the real world, the prevalent fear of nuclear waste is one of the main obstacles to the expansion of nuclear energy.
So how do we proceed? Your approach seems to be to educate people to see that their fears are unfounded. When do you expect that to succeed?
Deep Isolation acknowledges people’s fear of nuclear waste, and seeks to relieve it by sequestering waste far from the biosphere. They have a schedule, and are making substantial progress.
Which approach will bring about more nuclear plants sooner? Is it more important to be right, or to be effective?
The impact of the false fear being peddled by the nuclear establishment go far beyond spent fuel disposal. In fact, spent fuel disposal cost is actually a small part of the problem. By abetting this fear, Deep Iso is making the basic problem worse while making a small part of the problem cheaper.
I'm not trying to educate the public. I'm trying to change the system that promulgates false fears to the public. See UCert.
Since we store radioactive waste in water to shield us from high energy particle decay, That logically means the water itself doesn't become radioactive. Further, the spent fuel is not buried until high level decay has ceased and then the remaining mass is vitrified before burial. So I ask why, the unreasonable concern over groundwater radioactive contamination after that? Since we're then dealing with near background radiation why does fear still enter the argument?
UO2 is soluble in water. The proposed pathway is the uranium oxide come into contact with the water, dissolves, and is transported by the water movement to someplace where it ends up being consumed by humans. Even under a long string of worst case assumptions, the resulting dose rates are invariably trivial. But the establishment uses LNT to accumulate these tiny dose rates and claim its a problem. Uranium phosphate has a very low water solubility. So it is one way of addressing this bogus concern.
By the way, Plutonium has very low water solubility. It's essentailly immobile. The Pu produced by the Oklo natural reactor has moved a meter or two in a billion years despite lots of water contact during that period.
The LNT fear factor is possibly one of the most easily disprovable of the significant list of absurdities that cripple nuclear power development. I keep thinking of how many professions use radioactive measures to do amazing things, from sensing many parameters, to all kinds to medical diagnostics, to decade long batteries for space probes, yet these people that regularly work with radiation without fear, remain largely silent in enlightening their fellow fearful citizens. The anti-nuc activists have held the floor of public opinion for far too long.
That we are now beginning to openly discuss radiation fears is a welcome departure from the active rejection even 10 years ago. Here's hoping energy poverty can one day be beaten.
It is not so much the anti-nuke activists. Most of the nuclear power establishment has a big stake in the current system which is based on that fear. The activists don't need to tell the public how horribly dangerous radiation is. The establishment will do it for them.
Canada and Korea investigated the DUPIC process 20 years ago. This is dry reprocessing of PWR fuel, and making new CANDU fuel from it. PWR fuel has about 3 times the fissile content as CANDU's typical fuel, natural U. The dream was to burn PWR fuel a second time. A side option was conversion of Th232 to U233 to kick start a thorium fuel cycle. CANDUs can be very near a breeding ratio of 1 with Th/U233.
This has been opinion for years. If spent fuel (Plutonium) is so incredibly dangerous, then society has an obligation to reprocess it. That ignores the fact that the 1 the cost of reprocessing has already been paid for a the government has the funds in hand, and 2. the reprocessed Plutonium produces carbon free electricity .
Lou,
Plutonium is one of the least toxic heavy metals. Only 1% of spent fuel is plutonium. Plutonium is an alpha emitter.. It must be ingested or inhaled to cause harm. But if ingested
the uptake is 0.0001, meaning 99.9% of any ingested material will be excreted in a day or 2. See Chapter on plutonium in Flop book.
Wasn't there a guy who offered to eat straight plutonium (a small amount) as long as someone else would eat an equal quantity of pure caffeine? Or maybe I am just making this up....
As I recall, that amount of caffeine would have been fatal.
Bernie Cohen made the offer to ralph Nader. Nader declined the challenge. See The Nuclear Energy Option p 251.
Thank you!
Eric Voice voluntarily ingested plutonium to see where it would go in a human. Dr. Voice died at age 80 of natural causes. I think Voice is the guy who handed Queen Elizabeth a ball of plutonium so she could feel the warmth. At US weapons labs, the staff regularly walked around with balls of highly enriched Pu in their lab coats.
"Balls of plutonium" I like that. Where can I get one. I would like to share with my students.
Might be a bit difficult. The Feds seem to have a problem with people walking around with weapons grade plutonium.
There's a video where Galen Winsor talks about handling plutonium. My old link does not work but if you Google his name you may be able to find it. Galen points out that he carried around two half-critical masses
one in his left pocket and one in his right, and was very careful not to let the two get together, lest there be a blue flash of criticality.
What do you mean by "highly enriched Pu"?
If you mean weapons-grade Pu, isn't that synthesized in the first place to be almost pure Pu-239, rather than being enriched from plutonium with a more diverse isotopic composition?
George,
You are being a doryphore, but the wording is sloppy. I should ahve said "highly purified". It is not all that easy to separate Pu from all the other stuff in the fuel. The buildings to do that at Hanford were so big they were called "canyons".
I think it is better to use it for fuel than to eat it!, though.
The belief that "aged spent fuel is uniquely dangerous" is unfortunately already widely held. Until that changes, the startup firm Deep Isolation offers a solution that's much cheaper than Yucca Mountain style repositories. They use the directional drilling technology developed by the oil and gas industry to bury spent fuel deep underground, in canisters that can be retrieved whenever the fuel is needed for reprocessing. You can learn more about it at https://deepisolation.com.
Hamilton,
Deep Isolation is not a solution. It's a capitulation. Deep Isolation is an attempt to profit on the false fear that the nuclear establishment has fostered. And they are doing it in an totally unoriginal way.
Jack, Deep Isolation is a “capitulation” to the fact that the “false fear” is widely held. In an ideal world, in which your views were widely accepted, Deep Isolation would be unnecessary. In the real world, the prevalent fear of nuclear waste is one of the main obstacles to the expansion of nuclear energy.
So how do we proceed? Your approach seems to be to educate people to see that their fears are unfounded. When do you expect that to succeed?
Deep Isolation acknowledges people’s fear of nuclear waste, and seeks to relieve it by sequestering waste far from the biosphere. They have a schedule, and are making substantial progress.
Which approach will bring about more nuclear plants sooner? Is it more important to be right, or to be effective?
Ham,
The impact of the false fear being peddled by the nuclear establishment go far beyond spent fuel disposal. In fact, spent fuel disposal cost is actually a small part of the problem. By abetting this fear, Deep Iso is making the basic problem worse while making a small part of the problem cheaper.
I'm not trying to educate the public. I'm trying to change the system that promulgates false fears to the public. See UCert.
True, but if you did grind the cement up and eat it, the Pu dose would be the least of yr problems.
One of the unanswered questions that I have ....
Since we store radioactive waste in water to shield us from high energy particle decay, That logically means the water itself doesn't become radioactive. Further, the spent fuel is not buried until high level decay has ceased and then the remaining mass is vitrified before burial. So I ask why, the unreasonable concern over groundwater radioactive contamination after that? Since we're then dealing with near background radiation why does fear still enter the argument?
Garret,
UO2 is soluble in water. The proposed pathway is the uranium oxide come into contact with the water, dissolves, and is transported by the water movement to someplace where it ends up being consumed by humans. Even under a long string of worst case assumptions, the resulting dose rates are invariably trivial. But the establishment uses LNT to accumulate these tiny dose rates and claim its a problem. Uranium phosphate has a very low water solubility. So it is one way of addressing this bogus concern.
By the way, Plutonium has very low water solubility. It's essentailly immobile. The Pu produced by the Oklo natural reactor has moved a meter or two in a billion years despite lots of water contact during that period.
The LNT fear factor is possibly one of the most easily disprovable of the significant list of absurdities that cripple nuclear power development. I keep thinking of how many professions use radioactive measures to do amazing things, from sensing many parameters, to all kinds to medical diagnostics, to decade long batteries for space probes, yet these people that regularly work with radiation without fear, remain largely silent in enlightening their fellow fearful citizens. The anti-nuc activists have held the floor of public opinion for far too long.
That we are now beginning to openly discuss radiation fears is a welcome departure from the active rejection even 10 years ago. Here's hoping energy poverty can one day be beaten.
Garret,
It is not so much the anti-nuke activists. Most of the nuclear power establishment has a big stake in the current system which is based on that fear. The activists don't need to tell the public how horribly dangerous radiation is. The establishment will do it for them.
Canada and Korea investigated the DUPIC process 20 years ago. This is dry reprocessing of PWR fuel, and making new CANDU fuel from it. PWR fuel has about 3 times the fissile content as CANDU's typical fuel, natural U. The dream was to burn PWR fuel a second time. A side option was conversion of Th232 to U233 to kick start a thorium fuel cycle. CANDUs can be very near a breeding ratio of 1 with Th/U233.
I've posted a link to here and a copy of your slide 6 to a FaceBook discussion promoting fusion as the solution to nuclear waste. https://www.facebook.com/groups/229881329205/posts/10161680263259206?comment_id=10161680768484206