Due to environmental, technical and economic reasons and given that reprocessing is a net energy drain, the rest of the world is actually moving away from reprocessing. In France, foreign countries have ended reprocessing contracts with the state-owned plutonium proliferation company AREVA & only 0.02% of the spent fuel now at la Hague is from other countries. In the UK, the state-owned THORP reprocessing plant has been down for two years, affirming the claim in as a major mistake to build (under Prime Minister John Major). The UK "recycles" 0% (zero) of the reprocessed uranium and plutonium from THORP. If reprocessing in the US is so great, where's the private funding for it? There isn't any as it's yet another big-government give away to special interests. People in South Carolina will fight the big-government give-away for reprocessing and work to stop the nation's spent fuel being dumped at the Savannah River Site.
The Charleston Post and Courier has seen through the dangerous and costly reprocessing scheme and editorialized against it. The paper also ran a thoughtful op-ed on July 12 against reprocessing:
http://www.charleston.net/news/2..._may_be_coming/
And, an op-ed against reprocessing ran last week in The State:
http://www.thestate.com/editoria...ory/
519571.html
Plus see a very good article in the April 2008 edition of Scientific American:
“Nuclear Fuel Recycling: More Trouble Than It's Worth” - Plans are afoot to reuse spent reactor fuel in the U.S. But the advantages of the scheme pale in comparison with its dangers
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm...-fuel-
recycling
I meet engineers almost everyday, these are intelligent hard working americans who love what they do. Regardless of whether we can re-process or even eventually make radioactive waste inert, why bother, nuclear energy is the by-product of Hiroshima and is the sole source of eergy that can irradicate the human species. We can do better and are doing better at cost competitive CHP plants all over Europe. Why not use efficient processes until those egineers can come up with a permanent solution. If its so safe put closer to Large metro areas and keep it away from my kids.
Stop reprocessing - the op-ed that you pointed to in The State is exactly the same editorial I discussed in my post, just a different venue.
Andrew - can you tell me what kind of fuel the CHP plants burn? I would bet that it is not clean enough to run inside a submarine.
I would also guess that there is a 35-50% chance that it comes from either Russia or Iran, either of which has a proven history of using their control of fuel as a policy weapon. (As an aside, if I was either Iranian or Russian, I would also consider fuel as a means to influence world actions.)
Fission is safe, the fuel is cheap, it is clean, and it is reliable. It is even possible to design fission heated systems that are well suited for Combined Heat and Power systems.
I do not advocate a policy of immediate recycle or a large government program. What I do support is the idea that we should not waste valuable resources simply because it seems cheaper in the short term to do so rather than to figure out ways to refine used material and put it to good use.
When it comes to fission fuel byproducts, the materials are rare and have useful characteristics that can be put to an incredible variety of uses. Future generations would be correct to condemn us if we simply buried them in difficult to reach locations. They are not a "waste", but a resource.
Concerned - You ask an important question - "If reprocessing in the US is so great, where's the private funding for it?" There are several reasons why established enterprises are not terribly interested.
1 - the US government has laws on the books that declare it to be the monopoly supplier of used fuel handling concepts
2 - established businesses in the energy industry have little interest in big changes - they are making a lot of money the way things are today.
3 - uranium mining companies like supplying fresh material and actively discourage any investments in techniques to recycle
4 - nuclear fuel suppliers like supplying new fuel assemblies and discourage any investments in radically improved ways to make those fuel assemblies produce more energy before they are removed from operating reactors.
It is a pleasure to converse with you all. Please keep participating and asking honest questions. Please also listen for the answers - if they are not satisfactory for technical reasons, please challenge. However, if you plan to just keep repeating what you have heard or the talking points of groups that are focused on stopping nuclear power development, be aware that I just might begin to wonder if you are really trying to sell fossil fuel.
Check out an interesting interview on reprocessing by the S.C. Coastal Conservation League with Dr. Frank von Hippel of Princeton University, from May 2008, after a forum on the problems with reprocessing at the University of South Carolina. Dr. von Hippel debunks the reprocessing scheme.
"Q&A with Dr. von Hippel about Nuclear Reprocessing"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t...h?
v=trgFPZo2624
and
and a talk by Dr. von Hippel on "The Illogic of Reprocessing" at the LBJ School of Pubic Affairs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V...pbJ1DSUg2Y&
NR=1
I am not well-informed enough to comment on either the relative cost or safety of reprocessing v. long-term storage of nuclear waste. What I do believe to be incontrovertable is the fact that our current levels of energy consumption, let alone future levels based on current trends, are not sustainable, whatever the energy source. While nuclear power may not directly emit greenhouse gases, reprocessing does.
SRS representatives (I include private contractors) boasted to the SC Governor's Nuclear Advisory Council this past week that they were using wood chips in place of fossil fuels. This may be good in terms of dependency on fossil fuels, but it does not address greenhouse gas emission or deforestation.
Nuclear power also places great demands on water resources. I don't think it matters whether the fuel is "virgin" or "experienced." It seems irresponsible at best to put extra demands on the water resources of a state (SC) that still depends on agriculture for a large part of its economy and experiences frequent and sustained droughts.
I am also very skeptical of any project involving the Dept. of Energy. It was DOE employees who aided the attempt to destroy incriminating evidence when the FBI raided Rockwell's Rocky Flats facility in 1989.
My main point is: the future of humanity will be, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes, "poor, nasty, brutish, and short," unless we address the root problem regarding our relationship with the planet. That is, as more of Earth's total mass is tied up in human bodies and their byproducts, less will be available to support or sustain life - human or other. Rational population control, leading to reduced energy demands, must be part of any workable plan for humanity's future.
If reprocessing is so wonderful, why has it cost so much, taken so long, and still there are 49 of the original 51 tanks of "incidental" reprocessing waste at SRS. Since 1990, DOE has been paying Westinghouse over $1 billion per year to empty those tanks and vitrify the plutonium and other highly toxic radionuclides. Only two tanks have been emptied enough to be grouted. Even those two still have very high concentrations of radiation in the sludge that is impossible to dislodge.
Jay Hakes, in his new book, "A Declaration of Energy Independence" recommends deep well injection of spent fuel instead of reprocessing or disposal in Yucca Mountain.
President Jimmy Carter recognized that reprocessing made plutonium much easier to divert to nuclear weapons. He outlawed it in 1977. Regan reversed the prohibition, but the econmonics prohibited it's resumption. Now it is just another pork barrel project.
Instead of reprocessing and relapsing into the old nuclear money pit, invest in solar panels, wind mills, ocean thermal and tidal electric generators. Oceanlinx even has a desalination device that runs exclusivly on energy from Ocean tides, with hydrogen as the by- product.
We want renewable energy for our electricity and our transportation, and we want it now. Reprocessing, in fact all nuclear power projects, are technologies whose time has passed.
No nukes, ya'll
With new reprocessing technologies such as pyro-processing in development and proven technologies such as dry-cask storage, there is no need to rush into reprocessing. We have the time to see which technologies would work the best. As for solar and wind, they need a radically different grid than we have now. I would be interested to see how the costs stack up for an all renewable economy with the grid cost compared to nuclear with reprocessing. I would not be surprised if nuclear would be cheaper due to economy of scale.
As for destroying the world with nuclear fission, the knowledge is not going away even if all the plants were closed. The issues of proliferation are independent of nuclear power.
The information I gave above on how much spent fuel other countries remains unreprocessed at the AREVA plutonium-proliferation complex in France was incorrect. The amount of foreign spent fuel fell to 0.2% at the end of 2007 (not 0.02%). In any case, foreign reprocessing at the facility is essentially over & no new reprocessing contracts are pending.
Country & amount of spent fuel at AREVA’s la Hague reprocessing facility
(from AREVA 2007 report on reprocessing at La Hague, in French):
France 99,8%
Allemagne < 0,01
Australie < 0,01
Belgique < 0,01
Italie 0,1
Japon 0
Pays-Bas 0 (Netherlands)
Suisse 0,1
With the UK’s THORP out of the picture, we can see that John McCain misspoke in his June 26 interview with the Las Vegas Sun blog.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs...ccain-interview
“Reprocessing Isn’t that a good answer? That's what the Europeans are doing? Have you seen that? Yeah, flash—that's what the Europeans are doing. Hello?”
Uh, John, keep it accurate – the Europeans are getting out of reprocessing and have a load of plutonium and dirty reprocessed uranium (aka waste) to deal with. Next time, like, check your facts and talk straight.
If anyone wants to make a case that reprocessing in Europe is growing or question the above figures from AREVA, please make your case. (I have the AREVA document in hand.)
I cannot defend the decisions made by others. If you want to appeal to authority and point to Jimmy Carter, please understand that he made his decision based on the information available to him in 1976, not what is available today.
Please also understand that he knew next to nothing about nuclear energy, having dropped out of the Navy's Nuclear Power School without even completing the basic phase so that he could go home and run the family business.
When it comes to European energy policy, isn't that the continent that now depends on Russia and Iran to supply as much as 40% of the natural gas that it uses?
Isn't Germany the country that has more than 25 new coal fired power plants in various stages of planning? Those polluting plants are being planned in order to make up for the loss of reliable power provided by Germany's well operated nuclear plants when they are forced, by a political decision engineered by a man who now works for the Russian gas supplier, to shut down when they still have decades left on their potential operation.
I am not trying to support the "analysis" offered by any political candidate - my support for recycling nuclear fuel predates any announcement by anyone in the current race. It simply makes sense to me to not throw valuable material away.
For those opposed to nuclear power, please think deeply about the following question - can you name a single instance when anyone anywhere in the world has been hurt by exposure to the routine emissions from nuclear power plants or their used fuel? In contrast, can you name any of the tens of thousands of people each year who die an early death due to exposure to the deadly waste products of fossil fuel?
If you really want to live in a world powered by the sun and the wind, please indicate which 98% of your current electricity use YOU are willing to give up. For a complete answer, please indicate how you plan to live without access to any transportation system outside of sailing vessels or access to any manufactured product that requires industrial process heat above about 200 degrees C.
You can "want renewables" till the cows come home - tell me how you are going to make them work given the fact that the wind does not reliably blow and the sun reliably sets every single day.
Has anyone done a study on how much energy would be needed to provide the bare essentials of life to the planet's current human population, and then compared this to the energy which could practically be obtained from renewables alone?
aek:
You wrote:
"While nuclear power may not directly emit greenhouse gases, reprocessing does."
Building wind turbines and solar panels also requires a significant input of fossil fuel. In fact, there have been some very detailed studies done by organizations that have all kinds of different power systems in their mix, and it turns out that the overall emissions level of nuclear power is about the same per unit power as wind and much lower than solar (either PV or thermal).
You also introduced the topic of population control with the following comment:
"Rational population control, leading to reduced energy demands, must be part of any workable plan for humanity's future."
I am a humanitarian who happens to have been trained in energy production systems. I also have a fair quantity of real world experience in running them, maintaining them, and computing how much they cost. I have visited a number of very primitive places where people do not have access to energy and found that the people there live short, difficult lives with many risks of disease. They are also very dependent on the weather and vulnerable to its vagaries.
What matters to me is that there are more than 6 Billion people on this planet now and we need access to reliable energy that makes as little impact as possible. I want no part of any effort to cull that number down by denying that access.
I happen to believe that history and demographics shows that rich countries with plenty of physical resources tend to achieve low or zero population growth as a natural result of that wealth. If you are really concerned, help figure out ways to make us all achieve European living standards.
concerned:
Thank you for the links to Dr. Von Hippel's talks. I have not yet had a chance to listen in their entirety, but I was amused by the venue - LBJ School of Pubic Affairs - and the sponsor - Jon Brumly - of the lecture series for the second link.
LBJ was tightly associated with the Texas natural gas industry throughout his political career. Here is what Encore Energy says about Jon Brumly, its current CEO. "Jon Brumley is a seasoned energy industry executive with an outstanding record of developing several oil and gas production companies into industry leading companies."
As anyone who reads Atomic Insights can tell you - one of my theories about the - so far -successful battle to slow nuclear fission's inevitable advance is that it owes a great deal to steady support from the fossil fuel industry.
Well, if your ideal is European rather than U.S. living standards, I'll say you're at least thinking in the right direction. The per person carbon footprint is lower, I believe, for every country in the EU than for the U.S.
Unfortunately, policy makers make life and death decisions for others every day. Sometimes they know for whom they are choosing death, sometimes they leave the specifics to fate. Our current world population will be culled, either by rational and humane policies - or by famine, genocide, and warfare. Jared Diamond's Collapse explains it much better than I could hope to.
So, basically, 99% of French spent fuel is recycled? Seems a bit high.
In your AREVA paper, does it indicate that 10% of French spent fuel is STILL shipped to Russia for reprocessing there? Then the new recycled fuel is shipped back? Hmm...
Recycling spent fuel is expensive. It's the main reason countries are not likely to engage in it until the price of enriched uranium fuel goes up.
With the new processes available, overall waste is *lowered* and the really dangerous HLW can be effectively reduced by several factors.
Even if they stop using fission to make electricity, tomorrow, you still have the remaining spent fuel to deal with, in the US about 77,000 tons. You still have to have a solution, don't you?
Any solution you come up with will be a 'plus' as to why we can *continue* to use fission to make energy.
Recycling makes sense because it's the only real solution to the spent fuel issue. Additionally, it will provide several cycles of fuel for more energy. This is why the US is *building* a reprocessing plant, the French are *expanding* theirs and the Russian and Chinese are building more plants.
David
aek:
"The per person carbon footprint is lower, I believe, for every country in the EU than for the U.S."
Of course, I am sure that you are aware that the French nuclear power system provides a large contribution to this record for itself and most of its neighbors.
I do believe that Americans - in general - have been quite short sighted when it comes to their energy use. On the other hand, we do have a larger land mass which gives some inherent disadvantages. Our Canadian neighbors and our Australian friends have similar challenges.
We can drive smaller, more fuel efficient cars, live in smaller homes located closer to the places we need to visit. We can build more livable communities and grow more food closer to population centers.
However, I do not think you would be able to convince anyone with a real understanding of how the world works to achieve an energy use pattern that would fit with the capabilities available from politically approved "renewable" energy systems.
Since I honestly believe that nuclear fission is renewable, I am a huge optimist about our future prosperity and must completely disagree with the inevitability of any vision of collapse, no matter who writes it. Of course, if we make stupid decisions, we will live with the consequences.
One of the worst decisions we can make is to allow the fossil fuel industry to continue to prosper at the expense of preventing a vibrant and growing nuclear fission energy industry.
Regarding the "bare essentials" comment, certainly folks disagree on what standard of living constitutes bare essentials.
I am not going to say that nuclear does not have issues (cost, specialized education requirements, etc.), but I would maintain that nuclear is the safest 24/7 energy source. In a world where we worry about resources, using nuclear while researching which are the best reprocessing technologies (even using thorium) is a lower risk way to buy the time we need to raise world living standards (e.g., clean water, hospitals, transportation and refrigeration of food, etc).
Not sure how David derived that "99% of French spent fuel is recycled." The AREVA data is for spent fuel now at the reprocessing site, not for all French spent fuel.
So, two questions for reprocessing supporters -
o how many times do the French reprocess plutonium fuel (MOX)?
o what percentage of reprocessed (RepU) separated internationally (all via state supported, socialist reprocessing operations) is "recycled"? If the answer is less than 1% does this qualify as reprocessing?
As for the claim that the US is "building" a reprocessing plant - that's simply not true. I predict that this gigantic waste of money and resources will be stopped.
People in South Carolina are going to fight against a reprocessing complex at SRS, which would benefit the few at our expense. Fiscal conservatives will kill this whole deal being fomented by the big-government handout crowd.
Country & amount of spent fuel at AREVA’s la Hague reprocessing facility
(from AREVA 2007 report on reprocessing at La Hague, in French):
France 99,8%
It was unclear from your quote of stats what this meant exactly.
French reprocessing is about 9% of it's total spent fuel stream. Another 9% or so is shipped to Russia.
Both countries plan to do more.
All countries should do a lot more. The point is get rid of as much as they have in storage, which, admittedly, is not that much as Rod pointed out.
David
I'm talking about survival and nothing more, in order to checkmate the anti-nukes via a slogan such as "Anti-Nuclear? Pro-Dieoff!"
Rod:
Please take time to read Diamond's *Collapse* - he is no alarmist. He points out and substantiates some undeniable truths about the myth of unlimited economic expansion. I am not arguing with you about reprocessing because, as I stated in my first post, I don't know enough to say it is better or worse than permanent storage. But any policy that lulls us into a false sense of security and delays a permanent solution to our dependence on nonsustainable technology courts global disaster.
The difficulties and expense of reprocessing nuclear fuel, makes arguments about nuclear proliferation absurd. It cannot be so complex as to be prohibitively expensive to extract plutonium from used nuclear fuel for civilian power purposes, and simple, cheap and easy for third rate dictatorships to extract the same plutonium form the same fuel as a path top creating nuclear weapons.
Alternatives to conventional fuel recycling exist. One is to burn "spent" nuclear fuel in CANDU reactors. A second would be to burn it in Liquid Chloride Fast Reactors. Spent fuel can be burned somewhat less efficiently in conventional MSRs. The Indians plan to burn spent fuel in LMFBRs.
Of course, with LFTRs, a fuel reprocessing system will be part of the reactor design. Because of the relative simplicity of Fluoride salts chemistry, The 1970's era thorium breeding MSBR would have been 7% cheaper to build than a conventional reactor, even with fuel reprocessing technology included.
PUREX is the worst industrial process on the planet. When you talk about other sites, such as Harrisburg or Chernobyl, you just need to say the name for people to know what accident you're talking about. When you talk about Sellafield, you need to ask "Which accident?" It's pretty clear that the gang behind Sellafield can't do anything right.
Now, I've looked for evidence of problems at COGEMA and haven't found it. Perhaps the French really have it together, or perhaps they're better at covering up problems, or perhaps all of the literature about problems there is in French.
I ~would~ say that facilities such as Sellafield, COGEMA and Rokkasho are dual-use facilities. If Japan decides that it wants nuclear weapons, it's got a facility that can process low-burnup fuel into weapons grade plutonium. I'd say that a real commitment to non-proliferation isn't just a matter of stopping North Korea, Iran and India, it's also a matter of stopping Japan and of "legit" nuclear weapons states minimizing their arsenals.
A reprocessing cycle that involves U238 and fast reactors or Th232 and thermal breeders could offer some real benefits over "once through". The euro-japanese "twice through" cycle in thermal reactors is more expensive and more dangerous than the "once through" cycle: not unacceptably so, but it seems like a bad idea in an age of cheap uranium.
It might be best to conserve our plutonium in a proliferation-resistant form (spent fuel) until we've got fast reactors, thermal breeders or some other technology that can really take advantage of it.
I don't believe that anyone has ever claimed that reprocessing is an economical source of reactor fuel. The aim behind reprocessing is reduce, reuse, recycle. Countries, like France and Japan, that adopt a closed fuel cycle do so because they don't have the benefit of a large desert that hardly anyone wants to live in, where they can store slightly used nuclear fuel. Given that nobody else wants French or Japanese used fuel, and they're not allowed to dump it in the ocean, the French and Japanese have to do something with it. They have chosen reprocessing, which reduces the amount of material for final geologic disposal by a significant factor. Whilst reprocessing is energy intensive, in France at least, that energy is supplied by nuclear reactors, so is not emmitting a lot of green house gases.
I suspect that history will show that reprocessing is a cost effective used fuel management strategy. I don't believe that France has spent nearly the money on reprocessing that the US has spent on Yucca Mountain. At least the French have something to show for their money, the US has spent billions, and will spend billions more before Yucca Mountain is finished, or more likely abandoned in favor of a reprocessing facility at the Savannah River Site.
aek stated: "Our current world population will be culled, either by rational and humane policies - or by famine, genocide, and warfare."
Well, it appears that the human population is collapsing, but not as a result of either of the above causes. Diamond was as wrong as one can be, and his success at predicting the future is about the same as everyone else - zero. Consider Japan and their population predictions if you want a striking example of this collapse.
If we want to sustain the human experience on this planet, we need a growing population that is thousands of times larger than today, with thousands of times as much energy per person being used. If you want a better computer you need more transistors - if you want a better human society you need more people. Loss of population causes loss of diversity, a reduction in new ideas, and less policy flexibility. Reducing a population increases the likelihood of its extinction.
Clearly fission is one of our best sources of negative entropy. Clearly, the reactors in use today are not the best, so we should be investigating and trying out lots of different approaches. Reprocessing seems to be worth experimenting with, though better reactors using liquid fuels seem to offer more benefits.
Anyone who thinks that they would be happier with less energy can prove this to themselves right now. Turn off the furnace and the air coolers, and dont call the ambulance when your kids are sweating with a weird fever. Anyone who thinks they would be happier with more energy can only prove this by figuring out how to work with others to cooperatively develop the ordered systems needed to make this happen. It is an interesting challenge. To date this group has not put enough effort into defending their position and converting others. I hope this period of polite silence is behind us now. I want a lot more fission used so that the human population can achieve new levels of awareness and sustainability. It is a challenge.
Mr. Leavitt:
Surely you are making a joke! Computer technology advances because the number of circuits becomes greater while the size of the circuits becomes smaller. If humans could be made smaller and more energy efficient, then what you propose about endless population growth might have a possibility of seeming something other than absurd. But even organisms the size of a proton would have a maximum sustainable population size given a finite environment.
If your response was merely a joke, then I have been duly had.
"Dr. von Hippel" is actually one of the prime suspects instrumental in Clinton's administration frontal assault on nuclear energy production, as Clintons's science adviser, along with others such as the two natgas proponents discussed here
http://
atomicinsights.blogspot.c...xperiments.html
Another natgas related funding of von Hippel's presentations is therefore not so surprising.
If you read von Hippel articles, it is hardly an argument against reprocessing, some details are discussed here http://sovietologist.blogspot.co...-
plutonium.html
It is funny that environmentally concerned people thus entirely rely on purely economics argument - reprocessing does not pay of. This shockingly omits their priceless concerns about longterm wastes, from the argument. If they were really concerned about the dangers of actinides and heavy fissionable isotopes, they'd push policies mandating recycling even at a higher cost. Shocking, I tell you.
In reality the reprocessing costs are getting lower with improved technologies, whereas fresh uranium is getting more expensive, as well as interim and final storage. This speaks favorably to reprocessing. What is more, the future energy needs can only be met by closed nuclear cycles any way.
MSR fuel cycle concepts such are a different animal entirely, as none of the Hippel's arguments make sense in the case of a MSR. Proliferation resistance is significanlty better than of any PWR fuel cycle, there is no transporting of even reactor grade fuels anywhere, and the price of recycling is included in the design.
Finally, von Hippel does not even discuss the value of recoverable fission products such as Ru, Rh, Pt, Tc, ... and avoids discussion of any beneficial (and needed) uses of "wastes" from closed fuel cycle, such as sanitation, radiation treatment of sewage, zapping food/water off e.coli and other infections etc.
Lets consider the scale of future needs of energy supply to provide all humankind with basic living standards, which many consider granted in the West: from basic nutrition, drinkable tap water, dry shelter with a bathroom and indoor plumbing, available electricity and transportation to affordable health care and social system. ([*] slides 2,3,7)
[*] http://bnl-asap.org/EP/ASAP-ebik...e-March6-
08.pdf
Global energy consumption is about 400 EJ/year, by large from carbon fuel combustion which needs to be rather urgently transformed into some other pollution and climate change free energy resource. How much energy is needed can be estimated from [**], which shows dependence of energy consumption in the technological age for several countries. [Note the dependence on population density (USA versus Japan) and typical climate.] Assuming rather unrealistic savings (please note that an efficiency gain in utilizing a resource, while desirable and increasing quality of life by doing more with less, will most likely increase total usage of that resource due to the Jevons paradox), to get idea about the scale lets assume 5+-2 kW/capita as the energy needed to accomplish the above goal for children and grandchildren of our generations, that is near future humankind of 8 - 9 billion people.
[**] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Ima..._versus_GDP.png
(Note that energy consumtion has a significatn dependence on civilization era, or generally "lifestyle", as shown in [*] slide 2,3 above)
The lower range translates to about 760 EJ/year, the upper range is about 2000 EJ/ year, center of the estimate above 1300 EJ/y. This means ramping up the total energy production 2-5 times, necessarily from some non-fossil pollution and climate change free resources. I do not see any other energy resource which could produce steady affordable baseload energy at the necessary scale of hundreds of exajoules but the nuclear power (I welcome suggestions though). Scaling up nuclear power to this realm requires closing the nuclear fuel cycle, which also solves the "nuclear waste" problem.
When all the nuclear fuel is spent (fissioned down) in the closed nuclear fuel cycle (contrary to contemporary ~3% of fuel and much less of the original heavy metal), there are no very long living transuranic elements left and the radiotoxicity of the fission products drops to the level of a typical uranium ore within several hundred years, thus making the isolation of this "waste" from the environment a trivial task.
Fission products itself are rare materials with unique properties, see the previous post.
Prior to Fossil oil the number 1 source of fuel for light? Whale Oil! The world was once flat, it is no longer flat, In my life time, personal computing, world wide web, say it, I emailed a guy in Korea yesterday, I barely know where that is, I am pretty sure I can't walk there. Cell phones, nano technology, cloning, treatments for cancer. To all you nukies, just ask yourselves this, what if you're wrong? Based on the amount of energy all these really smart people estimate we need that is a whole lot of nukes, 1 per 300,000 peeps, 1500 in the US alone. I mistake irradicates human life within 1 mile and causes a government saddled with 10 TRILLION in debt with the costliest clean up in history. You're all smart, what about CHP, or algae based C02 sequestering oil, or something else, You're arguing a 50yr old technology with drawbacks, I am asking for clean energy a new beginning? Anyone? Innovation is the back bone of America's greatness, leave Nuclear to Russia and France 2nd place prize for nice try.
Rod,
I suggest the word "sustainable" is more accurate with respect to atomic energy than the word "renewable".
Of course, if the time scale is long enough, no energy source is renewable anyway...
andrew - over 1200 nuclear plants were envisaged by EIA in the early 1970s to cover most of the expected energy demand after year 2000. Surprisingly, that didn't happen mostly because of confused antinuclear hysteria. (i.e. your statement about TMI - the largest nuclear energy accident in the US which killed none. Concerning cleanup costs, you are off "only" by 10^4 - "The TMI-2 cleanup took 11 years and cost about US$1 billion.[1]" from Wikipedia.
Nuclear power is actually the newest energy resource - utilization the so-called renewable energy sources are thousands of years old at the very least, fossil energy sources are centuries old. Fission energy dates back few decades. "New beginning" means taking fission energy seriously.
Concerning CHP - if you want direct high heat to replace fossil energy in industry, you need a nuclear source.
Andrew Streit:
You're all smart, what about CHP, or algae based C02 sequestering oil, or something else, You're arguing a 50yr old technology with drawbacks, I am asking for clean energy a new beginning?
So how old do you think Combined Heat and Power plants are? What about algae - is that something new in human experience?
This is one area where I get really frustrated - self sustaining nuclear fission is a new enough phenomenon that my dear mother was 9 years old when it first happened. As a matter of fact, she was already alive when Chadwick first discovered the neutron.
In contrast, people have known about the energy in the sun, wind, tides, algae, wood, cellulose, etc. for thousands of years.
You are right - people who favor the use of nuclear fission are smart. We have studied hard to learn about a relatively complex subject that still has a lot of mysteries to solve. We believe our figures and our experience - in my case, I operated a ship that had run for 12 years on a fuel mass just slightly larger than my own body mass. It ran for another three years before being decommissioned with more than 40% of the mass remaining in the fuel elements.
It was clean enough to run inside a sealed ship full of people.
I am simply not creative enough to see a better source of power anywhere, even though I have been looking hard at basic research for more than a decade and a half.
If you can think of something better, feel free to pursue it. In the meantime, why do you continue to persist in an effort to take a valuable tool away from the rest of humanity?
I am here for one reason, my kids! I am not trying to take away anything, I am asking you to come up with something better. If this is the nuclear age, so be it, we want the same thing, a safe, affordable energy source to maintain the US standard of living. I see the hypocrisy of utilities who won't even look at cleaner sources of fuel while advertising full page ads in the state paper. I am very impressed with the nuclear sub story, If I was so against Nukes why am I posting here? I am terrified of the possibility of a Chernobyl or any 'lone idiot' sabotaging 1000's of good peoples work to the detriment of us all. Again, try and reverse engineer the situation, is there absolutely no other solution to this problem?
To aek - no, I am not joking. If we want to sustain a human and intelligent society on this planet, then we need to think deeply about what is happening and what we can do to survive. To do this I recommend that we apply objective and scientific methods, and cautiously work at making our world a better living place, day by day. Harnessing the negative entropy that we have an abundance of on this planet will allow us to make these kinds of advances. I think we should do it.
What this comes down to is the full scale use of fission to power our society. It is clean, safe, quiet, inexpensive, reliable, and readily available. We know how to do this in a crude way now, using uranium and water. The exciting thing is that we can see lots and lots of ways to improve this technology - thorium, molten salt liquid fuels, faster neutrons, - it is really open ended. So the terrestrial energy route (ie fission) is really attractive now, and clearly can get much better quickly. It is the best way to go.
OK - go where? What do we want our society to evolve to? Clearly we cannot stay as we are right now - things are just too unstable. When I think about these things I can see that more people leads to more ideas and more solutions. Do you really want to manage our world climate? How many people do we need dedicated to this task, and how do we educate and support them? Only a very rich society with lots of smart people available will be able to pull this off. I think our goal will have to be a world population measured in trillions to take on such a challenge. Others may pick a different number. However, I stand by my earlier advice - population reduction is a dangerous process, easy to begin and difficult to stop. I dont want to go there.
Many people are genuinely afraid of terrestrial power (ie power produced by sources present on our planet) because they have been told that it is very dangerous. Well, fission has been in serious use for about 50 years without any large scale disasters. During that time 500,000 coal miners have died in mines, and deforestation has increased global heating to a significant threat level. When I look at such statistics I just cant get into a panic about fission - in fact it looks really good to me. So good, in fact, that I have to wonder if the people opposing fission are joking. They could not really be serious, could they?
andrew streit - A Chernobyl type accident is only possible with a Chernobyl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK) type reactor, originally developed for weapon material production. These reactors were prohibited for civilian application since early 1950s in the West, and none wants to solve the energy issue by RBMK reactors. In short, as long as you stay away from crazy designs, (and take distance, time, shielding into consideretion), nuclear power is
remarkably safe. In terms of deaths/TWh, nuclear is about two orders of magnitude safer than Wind, even including Chernobyl.
Contemporary PWRs with open fuel cycle area exceptionally safe and clean power source, however they are very wasteful - less than 0.5% of mined uranium is used. Advanced reactors such as LMBR or a MSR can both close the fuel cycle, and be designed for passive safety, as was already demonstrated experimentally in lab scale. So far we just scratched the surface in nuclear power utilization.
I agree with your general conecrn considering future generation. I just do not see any other power sourcve which is scalable, reliable, affordable, and clean (all these in per Wh coparison), than nuclear fission.
Acceptance of a totally new energy source (strong interaction energy) should be expected to be a learning curve, as much as learning how to use fire was hundreds of thousands years ago.
Randal Leavitt,
I don't believe the Earth could support more than about 30 billion people, even given the use of nuclear energy on a huge scale.
Ondrejch,
I thought that nuclear fission, like chemical combustion, was powered by the electromagnetic interaction. The reason why fission is so much more powerful than combustion is because the (inverse-square) electromagnetic force is acting at a range of 10^-15 metres (nuclear scale) rather than 10^-10 metres (atomic scale).
Only nuclear fusion exploits the strong interaction.
I know reprocessing is the kind of nuclear wet dream all you Plutonium Economy techheads yearn for, but the American people are getting a good taste this week of what happens when you have to bail out economically unviable businesses. Nuclear power has never had any free market legs to stand on, and still doesn't. The fact that a bunch for French bureacrats got together and socialized a nuclear reprocessing plan should have no bearing on US energy policy. The cost of reprocessing has dramatically raised the kilowatt-hour cost of energy in France,and it would do the same here. With cheaper, cleaner, faster and safer ways to make electricity, only the hard core nukeheads with close ties to industry feel compelled to spin a tale of lies, cover ups and false claims regarding reprocessing. Reprocessing and new nuclear power are not the wave of the future, they are the tsunami of the past that threatens to drown us all, economically, politically and environmentally.
The last writer nailed it - reprocesing can only survive under some form of SOCIALISM. It is quite interesting to see the Savannah River Site "boosters" falling over themselves at the smell of government handouts on reprocessing. That's the name of this game - handouts, subsidies, and big-government programs which would only benefit special interest groups at the harm to the rest of us tax payers.
As far as the amount of foreign spent fuel AREVA has at La Hague. As the figures (of % of spent fuel stored at the reprocssing site) I presented were for the end of 2007, I'd guess that reprocessing of most of it has concluded and there will be no further shipments of foreign spent fuel to La Hague. So, game over for reprocessing of foreign fuel. Game over for the false claim by the big-government crowd that the French are reprocessing for Europe.
Thankfully, the Barnwell reprocessing plant was kiled or South Carolina would be faced with millions of gallons of high-level waste for which there was no storage solution, a la the costly West Valley reprocessing disaster. I'm sure there will be a big fight to stop self-serving politicians and their big-government, big-spending allies from waste dumping in SC in the future.
Oh yeah, here's another angle on the relationship between reprocessing and proliferation.
Every reprocessing plant creates a few thousand people who intimately know to run a PUREX plant. It sustains vendors who manufacture the equipment and materials required to run PUREX. Any of the people who become experts on reprocessing can be targets for espionage or otherwise conspire with people in countries like Iran to help them develop PUREX.
Every time a new country joins the "reprocessing club", like Japan, we've got to consider not only the possibility of that country being a proliferator, but that country contributing to proliferation in either countries, either deliberately (maybe Japan decides to sell reprocessing technology to Iran in exchange for petroleum) or by being a target for espionage.
What happens when Brazil decides it wants to reprocess? Australia? Indonesia?
Prior to 1974, the nuclear industry was naive about proliferation risks. Canada sold producer reactors (yes, CANDU is a dual-use technology) and the US sold PUREX technology to the Indians. Circa 1970, the US sold small-scale PUREX equipment to Iran, which may still be able to produce a few hundred grams of Pu a year.
The general diffu
George -
The strong nuclear force binds protons and neutrons in the nucleus and it is this force that provides the energy when the lower binding energy elements are formed during fission.
Depending on the fusion reaction, either the strong (deuterium tritium) or weak force (proton-proton reaction that occurs in the sun) is the energy provider.
Paul Houle, You greatly exaggerate the proliferation potential of reprocessing technology. Any careful examinations of proliferation issues will show that many nations have the potential to produce nuclear weapons, with far lower cost technology. North Korea was able to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons from an early cold war British reactor design, The design had been made public by the UK government in the 1960's and the North Koreans will sell you a copy and even build a reactor for you, at an amazingly low price. Just asked the Syrians.
South Africa designed and built their own Uranium enrichment centrifuges in the 1970s and 80s. The even built 6 bombs. Nuclear capable nations which can build nuclear weapons from scratch without outside help include Argentina, Australia, Canada, the Ukraine, Japan, Taiwan, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Brazil, Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Spain and other European countries. Given these facts, it is utterly absurd to worry about the proliferation potential of very expensive power reactors and nuclear fuel reprocessing plants.
I am not sure that "socialized" is the right term to describe French nuclear reprocessing. France requires the electricity utility - Areva - to internalize the cost of the full nuclear fuel cycle, including ultimate disposition of any waste. That cost of used fuel management is included in the price Areva charges its customers. France has the cheapest electricity in Europe. Selecting nuclear was a no brainer for France. Unlike the UK and Germany, France has no indigenous energy supplies, so no cheap coal. Instead it import uranium, enriches it, fabricates fuel, uses it in power reactors, reprocesses it and stores any by products - in France. Uranium as a fuel is compact and cheap, it is very easy to stockpile ten year's of supplies.
Actually, US fuel management is more socialized, with the government being the sole supplier of fabricated fuel, and being the owner of used fuel rods. Utilities pay a tax to pay for the management of used fuel, but the government has yet to live up to its statutory responsibility to take possession. This position is actually better than the situation vis a vis fossil fueled electricity generators that discharge significant amounts of waste directly into the environment.
Susan Corbett, you argue, mostly correctly, that nuclear energy has never stood on "free market legs".
I would ask: "which energy source has EVER stood on free market legs"??
Answer: none. Every major electrical energy source has be highly regulated, subsidized and, in *most countries in the world* totally and absolutely NATIONALIZED.
The Free Marketers are a new religious cult with few historical roots. If you want to see ANY source of energy today, you will find subsidies in the form of tax credits, direct grants, loans (not really a subsidy), preferential regulated marketing etc etc...
All we are arguing here is what form of energy can provide base load power, shuodown dangerous fossil fuel generation and give the world prosperity. This is a societal question, not a market one.
David Walters
As a keen observer of financial markets in recent weeks, I am more and more certain that "the market" is capable of really poor decisions.
Sometimes there needs to be some engineering input on the best technical solution, not the one that is the lowest price today or the most popular by poll results.
Businessmen motivated only by quarterly results would never have developed our current grid with its enviable reliability record. It was built by a combination of public entities and private entities with a legal "obligation to serve" and enforceable standards.
I would hate to live in a place where there was no third party intervention in electricity supply systems. The government plays an important role in that vital commodity supply.
Did you see that Rep. Gresham Barrett (R-SC) has been across South Carolina pushing legislation with yet more subsidies and loan guarantees for the nuclear industry and reprocessing? He even appeared with the head of SCANA, pursing two new reactors (via its subsidiary SCE&G), who also called for more government support.
All this has a big whiff of desperation - that perhaps Wall Street is not stepping up to finance new nukes and the radicals must once again turn to Congress and the tax payers. In this case, maybe "the market" is indeed capable of making a good decision along with those interested in protecting society from the highest-cost (and dirty) nuclear option.
Oh My God - do I hear Republicans out there bashing the free market economy? So you really are closet Corporate Socialists, aren't you? I don't see any private investors rushing out to invest or fund nuclear; but meanwhile, multi-millionaires like Pickens are sinking their money into wind and solar, and its taking place all over. So lets see. . .we can have socialized energy, thats good, but we can't have socialized medicine, because, thats bad? So, its okay for the government to design, fund and implement a national energy plan, but not a health care plan? If new nukes are such a good deal, investors should be jumping over each other to get it going, but we all know they aren't... This is not the path we should be taking. There are better ways to reach energy independence in this country without committing untold generations to babysitting zillions of curies of radioactive waste they didn't make and didn't benefit from.
If you're beating on petrotrolls here, you're not talking to the unconverted.
Atomsmasher:
I am not sure where you get the idea that the pro-nuclear commenters here are conservatives, Republicans, or even free market supporters. Some are, some are not - I happen to be a liberal, free market supporter who has voted Blue during the past two national elections. You need to check your premise.
"Wall Street" decision makers have brought you Fannie and Freddy, Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch.
They have enthusiastically invested in stuff that has turned out to be worthless paper. The flip side of those decisions is that the money lost in those investments is not available to be invested in real infrastructure projects that could provide reliable power for 40-60 years into the future.
Interestingly enough, on January 2, 2008, I was in the office of one of those Wall Street firms discussing an investment in nuclear projects. The banker was very interested but worried - apparently with good reason - about the stability of the company's finances.
Atomsmasher: One more thing - Pickens, though investing a goodly sum of his own money is also asking for substantial assistance in the form of a production tax credit amounting to more than 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour for the first 10 years of operation for each wind mill.
He is also asking for significant subsidies for the transmission infrastructure needed to move the future wind power to market.
Did anyone catch this big lie by NRC Commissioner Klein back on February 25: "Re-using and recycling fuel to minimize the amount of waste requiring final disposition seems to be the approach chosen by most nuclear nations."
See speech at:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/do...8/s-08-
008.html
First, their ain't much "recycling" going on, second, waste volume is maximized by reprocessing and third, just what "most nuclear nations" is he talking about?! At this point there are a maximum of five nations engaged in reprocessing, or better, trying to engage in reprocessing (France, Russia, India kind of, Japan almost, UK kind of, kind of not...).
Why would the top nuclear regulator lie about this serious matter? I don't think he was confused as he has been a reprocessing backer for a long time.
I any event, this does not instill confidence and reveals a basis a regulator must not have.
From the trend I see in this discussion, the pro-reprocessors will make a feeble attempt to shift the discussion to subsidies for alternatives so I don't expect a clear, straight-talking answer. But go ahead and surprise me!
tracker - first you need to check you premises about people here liking the current regulatory policies, statement of the NRC officials and so on. Here people generally favor some different type of fuel cycle with a full actinide recycle.
Paul Houle -- I seriously doubt anyone here likes or favor the current PUREX or other *REX, advanced nuclear fuel cycles are either uranium cycle in IFR-like reactors with electromatalurgic PYRO process (closing PWR/BWR/TRISO/... used fuel cycles), or thorium cycle in MSR-like reactor with vacuum distillation to separate fission products and useful fuel. None of them allows the traditional (the simplest & easiest, and well understood) proliferation method - PUREXing low burnup low natural uranium.
ANyway, your worries about many people "learning about PUREX" is completely unfounded, as the method is well described in literature (actually even on Wiki), and anyone who wishes so can reproduce it. THe issue is that an individual would be promptly caught by authorities, thus one needs a sanctity of a state. If any state decides to make some nukes, there is very little technological challenge to repeat 60 years old and well documented processes. As was demonstrated by the starving North Korea indeed.
Thus worrying about possible proliferation of a cycle even harder to abuse than the contemporary one, while a method infinitely easier is out there, is just not warranted.
Why do you assume a nation has to have (and use) their reprocessing facilities onshore? I know Australia has sent SNF from the original Lucas Heights reactor to France to be reprocessed.
For that matter, NRC Tracker, why do you seem to assume that the American NRC has regulatory authority over the rest of the world outside the US?
My question to everyone who talks about conservation and renewables, do we have any evidence that we can meet base load demand. I work for a renewable company, I love what I do, I believe in it, but I have yet to hear of a medium term solution to demand growth and we have stable population growth in the US. Give me some answers I can argue to the legislature, please.
Andrew:
Very good question. Here is an interesting intellectual exercise - try to find a single village, city or other defined geographic area in the US that has proven the ability to operate on a grid supplied by the politically correct renewable energy supplies like wind, solar, and "run of the river" hydro. Then add in biomass (normally wood) and waste to energy. I would bet that you still find that propane, diesel fuel and/or natural gas are necessary.
Of course, the exercise gets a much different result if you include large hydro and nuclear in your definition of clean, sustainable, renewable fuel sources.
Conservation is terrific, but you cannot conserve your way to zero energy use, so you still need to be concerned about the source of the energy use left after taking reasonable measures to reduce use.
My problem with renewable power salemen like Amory Lovins is that they believe that it is perfectly acceptable to use coal, diesel and natural gas as much as necessary to fill in the "bridge" that remains when conservation and their limited definition renewable sources are fully used.
I disagree - it would be better to fill that bridge with emission free nuclear power, even if it costs a bit more than "cheap" coal.
The amazing thing is that fission power costs less than coal power TODAY. Existing nuclear plants produce power for an average cost of 1.76 cents per kw-hour, existing coal plants produce it for an average of 2.47 cents per kw-hour. Most of those existing coal plants cannot meet current emissions standards and would be subject to vast cost increases with any carbon limits at all. (Source - 2007 statistics compiled by Global Energy Decisions)
Nuclear fission power will remain cheaper in the future as well, especially if nuclear power producers do not have to accept the imposition of useless limitations and do not have expend resources to fight against illogical opposition.
Question for all those who favor nuclear plants and reprocessing.
How much is reprocessing going to cost?
What are you going to do with all the waste that it will produce? Look at SRS before you answer that one. When all the waste in those remaining 49 tanks has been really cleaned up, then you can begin to figure part of the cost of reprocessing.
Don't forget to add in the cost of new reactors. GNEP says you'll need to build breeders without the plutonium blanket to burn MOX fuel produced from reprocessing. Be sure to include their costs in your final figure.
In case you haven't read the MOX EIS, Areva expects to do the same thing with waste from the MOX facility that they are doing with it in France, just not in the same place. In France, reprocessed waste is piped into the ocean. At SRS, liguid waste from the MOX facility that will be operated by Areva, is proposed to be piped into a creek. How can you calculate the cost of contamination to your water supplies. Where does that creek flow, and who depends on it for their drinking water?
Also, inhalled and ingested radiation is not included in calcualated worker doses. The first of the 3 part MOX processing plants is not included under NRC jurisdiction, and the EIS states that it will release "small quantities" of gaseous Plutonium. How far will the wind carry it? Who besides the workers will inhale it? How much Plutonium does it take to cause cancer? Have you figured the cost of the health care and lose of income from the people who will suffer from ingestion of plutonium in your cost of reprocessing?
Without production of MOX fuel, why bother to reprocess anyway? Since the MOX facility is way behind schedule and way over budget, how can you calculate the cost of MOX fuel production, for your total cost of reprocessing?
Be sure to figure in the cost of nuclear war. Reprocessing will make more plutonium available for nuclear weapons. Encased in spent fuel, plutonium is not a proliferation threat. Once reprocessed, it is more easily stolen or traded. How much is unaccounted for already?
Tell me also, how you expect the federal government to pay for all the loan guarantees on new nuclear plant construction? Would you be willing to support 6% points, up front cost paid by the utilities for the loan guarantees, plus 3% interest added to a monthly mortgage payment for the protection?
When you nuclear promoters are willing to look at the total cost, and figure out how they are going to be paid, and by whom, perhaps you will have more credibilty than your chant of "jobs baby jobs."
By the way, what ever happened to the 3,000 or so sick workers at SRS who were denied benefits under the program that was suppose to compensate sick nuclear workers or their surviving spouces $150,000?
How many more sick nuclear workers will you have who will qualify or be denied this compensation if GNEP is
built? Don't forget them in you cost
Jeannine:
I do not accept your assumptions, so it would be kind of pointless for me to delve into the computations.
First of all - please tell me what your alternative to increased use of fission power is. Without knowing that, it is impossible to compute any kind of cost comparison.
I support a general policy of "reduce, reuse and recycle" and believe that it is appropriately applied to nuclear fuels like uranium, plutonium and thorium. I do not favor unmonitored or unregulated emissions of dangerous materials into our common environment. I favor fission power after spending quite a bit of time comparing it to all other available alternatives including coal, natural gas, oil, biomass, wind, solar, geothermal, and even doing without.
Diffusion of technology is a big deal. Take the example of the URENCO Centrifuges: these are one of the greatest innovations in peaceful nuclear energy.
Proprietary details of the centrifuges were stolen by the Kahn gang and they've diffused to Pakistan, Iran, Brazil and who knows where else. The centrifuges are definitely a "dual-use" technology. Even if Iran were entirely sincere about using their centrifuge fleet to produce LWR fuel in the short term, they'll have the option to produce weapons-grade uranium whenever they want: 1/5 of a centrifuge cascade that can produce an LWR core in a year can convert an LWR core into 100 nuclear weapons.
This highlights the real problem with nuclear energy: many of the developments which will make nuclear power safer and more economical will also make nuclear weapons more accessable.
Sure, the basic principles of PUREX are in the open literature. However, we don't see the Japanese developing an indigenous system, instead they're buying a mature technology from the French. A lot of the knowledge required to run a reliable and effective PUREX plant is proprietary. Potential proliferators such as Japan, Iran and Brazil may be interested in developing nuclear weapons capability from the long term, rather than doing an occasional underground test to intimidate their neighbors.
Countries that are interested in developing deliverable nuclear weapons are going to be more interested in Pu239 than in U235. The weapons are an order of magnitude smaller. Iran, in particular, would benefit from tactical nuclear weapons that would deter ground war and allow force projection over the Persian Gulf. Ten years from now they're going to be fretting about they're running out of uranium and arguing with the IAEA about building a PUREX plant.
As for other reprocessing systems, I don't see anything much better proliferation-wise. UREX+ is just as dirty as PUREX and can mean just about anything. (UREX+4 produces a pure plutonium stream) There's not much of a legitimate market for "Uranium Recycle" since U236 has a way of building up in and neutron poisoning thermal reactors.
The single-fluid MSBR produces weapons-grade U233 in it's normal operation. After all, it separates protactinium so it can decay outside a neutron field... No chance for U233 to neutron spallate to U232, so no U232 contamination.
The short-term product of US work on Pyroprocessing is to develop a new generation of fast producer reactors that produce supergrade plutonium (with a bit more environmental responsibility.) Sure, they produce a U+Pu+Ac stream, but you're not going to get significant amounts of >Pu239 actinides with low burnups, and you can always get very pure U out by fluoridation.
Paul:
You are knowledgeable and sincere. Like you, I believe that nuclear war is something to be avoided at all costs.
I just cannot agree that the best way to avoid it is to abandon the only power source that provides the clean, reliable energy that the world's humans need for improved living standards.
I am not talking about Hummers in every driveway, just things that many take for granted like electric lighting, refrigeration, clean water, occasional air conditioning, heating, communications, and materials processing. I have tried living with just the power available in the sun and wind - I do not recommend it and do not believe that many people would accept the limitations if there are available alternatives.
If we have abundant nuclear fission derived energy, I think that the world will be a more peaceful place. It is not as if we live in an age with few weapons only in the hands of stable, freedom loving people.
The world we currently inhabit is a dangerous, resource-constrained place where there are already tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and hundreds of thousands of people with pieces of the knowledge necessary to build more if really desired. My self appointed mission is to make them less desirable.
The only known way to dispose of fissionable materials is in a fission reactor. Reactors can also denature the material to the point where it is not very useful as a weapon ingredient. Those neutron poisons - like U-236 and Pu-240 - that you mention that build up with increased recycle do not stop controlled, steady chain reactions in operational reactors, as long as there is sufficient excess reactivity available. They do, however, make it very difficult to achieve an explosive chain reaction.
Paul - if you want PUREX for weapons, you develop it on your own. Even *North Korea* did that. Doing difficult tricks with other cycles, such as separating Pa stream from salts, which would be obviously extremely complicated in a production system (and difficult to hide), is a very complicated and thus elusive option, as there are easy ways out there.
Accept that the knowledge is out, no way to turn the time back or hide knowledge in a diamond chest.
The issue of nuclear proliferation is purely an issue of (international) politics, separated from nuclear power generation.
Paul, Actually American weapons designers agree that the prefer working with U-235 to Pu-239. Both Pakastan and South Africa preferred developing uranium enrichment technologies. South Africa seems to have designed their own centrifuge technology. Your assertion that LWRs can produce weaponizable plutonium is very questionable. No one has ever tested a a device, let alone a weapon that was made with LWR Plutonium derived from a LWR. Doesn't that make you wonder. It is not clear that any true reactor grade plutonium device has ever been tested. Don't you wonder why? Of the outcome of 2 British and 1 American test using fuel grade plutonium, none were considered entirely successful, and the devices were never developed into weapons. Does not that raise any question for you?
Why would anyone even want to extract plutonium from from LWRs when graphite piles are so cheap and easy to build, and produce superior plutonium for weapons purposes?
Reprocessing technology may be expensive and dirty, but it does not increase the likelihood that rogue states will acquire nuclear weapons.
Fuel recycling is against US policy and that's not likely to change. US nuclear policy is too in bed with the NRC, who are always fighting tooth and nail to prevent anything innovative or useful. Think they're EVER license a fuel reprocessing program? FAT CHANCE! No, that ain't in the cards because NRC policy favors activists and gives them unlimited opportunities to stonewall anything like that.
There's only one way that I can see that there could be recycling of US nuclear fuel would be to contract it out - Ship it to Le Hague or to Russia or to Stelfield. That would be out of NRC jurisdiction so they'd have a very hard time stopping it, although they may be able to stop the new fuel from being reimported back into the US.
Perhaps the military could get involved and refine the fuel under the auspices of fuel for military reactors. They're immune to the NRC so it might work that way.
drbuzzo
You wrote:
Perhaps the military could get involved and refine the fuel under the auspices of fuel for military reactors. They're immune to the NRC so it might work that way.
Actually, the US did recycle fuel for military reactors for many decades. Once the US slowed its building program to the point where we did not build a submarine for several years and now only build one per year, and where we only build one carrier every 3-5 years, we stopped recycling.
We had plenty of inventory of the material available and there was also some resistance to continuing the practice on the part of the host state - Idaho. Interestingly enough, that state's resistance and political attitude towards nuclear has evolved a bit.
There might also have been some relationship between the fact that all those factors came together during the very anti recycling and pro natural gas Clinton Administration.
It would be useful if commenters who are in favor of reprocessing would state whether or not they have or anticipate any financial interest in fast reactor or reprocessing research or deployment. Likewise for those opposed - do you have connections to other energy industries?
Concerned, you did not indicate what your associations are, so why should we. This is a blog, where people feel free to offer their views. We do not discount the views of people based on their personal balance sheet. Investors are often well informed, as are investment advisors, I deeply resent the implication of your statement, which suggests an attitude which has no place in free and open debate.
Concerned - Like Charles, I think you have asked an unfair question since you are not even using your own name and have provided no information about your associations with the energy industry.
However, if you are interested in finding out more about my financial interests in energy production you can just search around on this blog, on Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. and at the Atomic Show Podcast. Heck, just search around the web - I make no secret of where I get my current income and why I hope to eventually benefit financially from a growing nuclear energy industry.
Pyroprocessing (as developed for the IFR project) uses chemical reprocessing which is a lot more proliferation resistant, and which yields a lot more burn up of fuel.
PUREX is obsolete technology.
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