Nuclear Power - debate / poll

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Originally Posted by Quiggers

My question is: Given that several other countries have been using nuke fuel for maybe 30 years or more, where are they storing the spent nuke waste, how much stored waste exists and what is its actual and genuinely real danger?
GQ

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JDNSW is right. All waste is currently in temporary storage.
A solution has not yet been found to the problem of safely storing high-level radioactive waste for up to 500,000 years.
Salt domes in Kansas were proposed in the 1970s, but abandoned. In 1982, Congress took responsibiltiy for the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the primary waste repository.
The fact that this carefully chosen site has yet to receive a single shipment of waste highlights the difficulty of providing safe storage.
There are several geological problems which I could outline in the unlikely event that you will want more detail.
Because of the geological problems, the Department of Energy shifted focus from geological storage to designing safe man-made containers, even though the guiding principle had always been "defense in depth"; that is, when the containers fail the geological environment should prevent further radiactive escape.
The DOE is ignoring the geological problems and putting its faith in C22, a nickel based alloy. However since the alloy has only been in existence for a few decades, they don't have reliable data about the long-term corrosion resistance. It isn't safe to extrapolate from a few decades to tens of thousands of years.
Getting a licence for Yucca from the EPA has been a long saga of lowering standards of what is considered acceptable exposure.
An indication of how important it is to devise a safe permanent repository, is that one spent fuel assemby contains ten times the amount of long-lived radiation as that released by the Hiroshima bomb. Yucca Mountain is supposed to store 140,000 of those assemblies.
The problem of safe storage is not an easy one to solve. If there was an easy solution, we would have found it by now.

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Originally Posted by vnx205

JDNSW is right. All waste is currently in temporary storage.
A solution has not yet been found to the problem of safely storing high-level radioactive waste for up to 500,000 years.
Salt domes in Kansas were proposed in the 1970s, but abandoned. In 1982, Congress took responsibiltiy for the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the primary waste repository.
The fact that this carefully chosen site has yet to receive a single shipment of waste highlights the difficulty of providing safe storage.
There are several geological problems which I could outline in the unlikely event that you will want more detail.
Because of the geological problems, the Department of Energy shifted focus from geological storage to designing safe man-made containers, even though the guiding principle had always been "defense in depth"; that is, when the containers fail the geological environment should prevent further radiactive escape.
The DOE is ignoring the geological problems and putting its faith in C22, a nickel based alloy. However since the alloy has only been in existence for a few decades, they don't have reliable data about the long-term corrosion resistance. It isn't safe to extrapolate from a few decades to tens of thousands of years.
Getting a licence for Yucca from the EPA has been a long saga of lowering standards of what is considered acceptable exposure.
An indication of how important it is to devise a safe permanent repository, is that one spent fuel assemby contains ten times the amount of long-lived radiation as that released by the Hiroshima bomb. Yucca Mountain is supposed to store 140,000 of those assemblies.
The problem of safe storage is not an easy one to solve. If there was an easy solution, we would have found it by now.

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Allan, on TV last night there was a news story about a real estate agent finding a box of Nuclear Waste in a box in a garage of a property he was managing, seems he went there to find the Tenant , who has done a midnight flit and left this Waste behind in the garage. Turns out that the errant tenant was some sort of Contractor for wasre removal, or something like that, well anyway this clown has left the country. The cops and the EPA were called and it seems to be medical nuclear waste, now the rub is the homeowner has to pay for the safe removal, treatment and storage, which is done overseas, the Bill for this small amount of waste is $200,000, pays to vet your tenants very carefully, wonder if he can negatively gear that.
Worst thing is though did this contractor take any of this waste with him, to maybe sell to a terrorist for a Dirty conventenial explosive bomb. Worse still why wasn't this waste found to be missing from wherever it was supposed to be, this makes a mockery of nuclear waste security in Australia, wonder if this might be the tip of the iceberg, Regards Frank.

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Originally Posted by Tank

Allan, on TV last night there was a news story about a real estate agent finding a box of Nuclear Waste in a box in a garage of a property he was managing, seems he went there to find the Tenant , who has done a midnight flit and left this Waste behind in the garage. Turns out that the errant tenant was some sort of Contractor for wasre removal, or something like that, well anyway this clown has left the country. The cops and the EPA were called and it seems to be medical nuclear waste, now the rub is the homeowner has to pay for the safe removal, treatment and storage, which is done overseas, the Bill for this small amount of waste is $200,000, pays to vet your tenants very carefully, wonder if he can negatively gear that.
Worst thing is though did this contractor take any of this waste with him, to maybe sell to a terrorist for a Dirty conventenial explosive bomb. Worse still why wasn't this waste found to be missing from wherever it was supposed to be, this makes a mockery of nuclear waste security in Australia, wonder if this might be the tip of the iceberg, Regards Frank.

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This is exactly the sort of thing I was referring to above, although I did not see your case. And it has exactly nothing to do with nuclear power generation. Very few people would like to see the end of nuclear medicine, yet currently this generates the largest radioactive waste problem in this country after smoke detectors. Although there is no real "final" solution to this problem, the number of people killed or injured, even slightly, by this waste is almost zero compared to other forms of toxic waste, which don't have the emotional word "nuclear" attached to them.

The problem is that because anything "nuclear" is regarded as so arcane, once a piece of nuclear medical equipment gets out of the hands of the experts (as when it is replaced by newer equipment) nobody else recognises what it is, and this is where the problems start.

John

Sometimes the views of a "person" completely removed from the "local" debate can be quite interesting.

On one of those airline / airport tv programs about a month ago, there was an English couple travelling to the Ukraine to donate money and equipment to a kids hospital.

All the kids were around 8-13 years old and suffering from radiation induced illness - from Chernobyl in 1986.

Do the sums. Whatever your preference is for our future energy needs, this is something else to think about.

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Originally Posted by Quiggers

Why not pack it on rockets and send it to the sun?

GQ

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That would be an ideal solution except that rockets occasionally crash. :eek:

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Originally Posted by JDNSW

This is exactly the sort of thing I was referring to above, although I did not see your case. And it has exactly nothing to do with nuclear power generation. Very few people would like to see the end of nuclear medicine, yet currently this generates the largest radioactive waste problem in this country after smoke detectors. Although there is no real "final" solution to this problem, the number of people killed or injured, even slightly, by this waste is almost zero compared to other forms of toxic waste, which don't have the emotional word "nuclear" attached to them.

The problem is that because anything "nuclear" is regarded as so arcane, once a piece of nuclear medical equipment gets out of the hands of the experts (as when it is replaced by newer equipment) nobody else recognises what it is, and this is where the problems start.

John

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John, it was about the Security of Nuclear Waste (in all forms) and about the Massive cost of the Safe Storage of Nuclear Waste, most of which comes from Power Generation and that has everything to do with Nuclear Power and Waste Generation, which of course has to be paid for by we, the end-users, if it ever gets the go ahead, Regards Frank.

Is it possible to 'store' the nuke waste in liquid nitrogen, given the freezing point is soo low and by 'inertia' the activity of nuke particulate would be slowed or stopped as activity, particle activity wise?

radioactvity exists and is measured at sea level and at the common earth temp of 22º, if the store was a liquid nitrogen temp of -170º then the radioactive matter would have a difficult escape, being inert?

GQ

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Originally Posted by Quiggers

Is it possible to 'store' the nuke waste in liquid nitrogen, given the freezing point is soo low and by 'inertia' the activity of nuke particulate would be slowed or stopped as activity, particle activity wise?

radioactvity exists and is measured at sea level and at the common earth temp of 22º, if the store was a liquid nitrogen temp of -170º then the radioactive matter would have a difficult escape, being inert?

GQ

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Temperature is a measure of the random motion of complete atoms, not the particles within the nucleus. Temperature has exactly zero effect on nuclear processes (until the velocity of motion of the nucleus gets high enough to initiate nuclear reactions, and we are talking millions of degrees). So the radiation remains the same even if at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, or for that matter at absolute zero. This is why radioactive dating works - it doesn't matter what the temperature does, unless it gets high enough to allow the radiation products to separate (melt, usually).

John

Okay,

thanks John.

GQ

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Originally Posted by JDNSW

Temperature is a measure of the random motion of complete atoms, not the particles within the nucleus. Temperature has exactly zero effect on nuclear processes (until the velocity of motion of the nucleus gets high enough to initiate nuclear reactions, and we are talking millions of degrees). So the radiation remains the same even if at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, or for that matter at absolute zero. This is why radioactive dating works - it doesn't matter what the temperature does, unless it gets high enough to allow the radiation products to separate (melt, usually).

John

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One of my greatest pastimes on this site is reading Johns' posts

He explains it so well

He reminds me of Mr Jones on Bob Dyers "Pick A Box"