The Nuclear Waste Disposal Debate

EnergyBiz recently had a couple of articles exploring the issues relating to the implementation of nuclear waste disposal technology. The first article, written by three scientists, presented the case for using fast reactors.

Currently the United States has no effective strategy for dealing with used nuclear fuel. Plans for disposing of it at Nevada's Yucca Mountain continues to raise doubts as to whether it might pose safety problems some time in the future. Recycling the fuel is considered a better route by some. It would reduce the waste to a much more manageable size and insure that we have fuel for our nuclear power.

President Bush is asking congress to revive research into the use of fast reactors to address the nuclear waste problem. A conventional 1,000 megawatt reactor produces 100 tons of spent fuel a year that still contains 95 percent of its energy and that must be stored up to 10,000 years. A fast reactor of the same size would generate about a ton of fission products that would have to be stored for about 500 years.  The Department of Energy estimates it may cost $13 billion over a decade to develop a fast-reactor and reprocessing capability.

Fast-neutron reactors, which can recycle their own waste, can harvest the vast amount of energy that current reactors leave in their used fuel and can efficiently denature excess military plutonium to make it unattractive for weapons use.  The new process does not produce plutonium that is pure enough for nuclear weapons.

The PUREX process which is being used for commercial fuel in France, England, Russia, and elsewhere, extracts weapons grade plutonium from used nuclear fuel. The major problem with PUREX for commercial reactors, other than cost, is that it involves massive commerce in plutonium that can also be used to make crude nuclear explosive devices. This, for the most part, makes it clear that there is little if any connection between restraint in the US and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Two major breakthroughs have been made in recycling technologies. The first was a way to extract usable materials from used nuclear fuel electrochemically—a form of electroplating called "pyroprocessing.” The pyroprocessed material no value without further processing, and it is very difficult to handle.The second breakthrough was an adaptation of the fast-neutron reactor to use the pyroprocessed product.  Advances in the technology of fast reactors have rendered the design almost invulnerable to safety concerns that beset the early breeder reactors.

Completing the development of this technology, along with testing and demonstration, is possible for a small fraction of the cost of developing and demonstrating the acceptability of a second repository comparable to Yucca Mountain. General Electric has developed a rather comprehensive outline of a fast-reactor recycle system, called Super-PRISM or S-PRISM, which it would presumably be willing to build as a demonstration plant if funding was available.

Russia has had a development program similar to the one in the United States for several decades and it has had considerable success. It appears likely that they will take their technology to the demonstration phase before long.

Today, the driver to deploy this type of system is the current nuclear waste problem. Left unsolved, there will be continued public opposition to nuclear power. The Yucca Mountain repository has limited capacity. A successful recycling program would reduce the volume and hazard of materials that require deep geological disposal by a factor large enough to extend the repository’s useful lifetime indefinitely.

Dr. Edwin Lyman, senior staff scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, raised some concerns about the proposed technology.

The authors (of the previous article) rely on unproven technology that has had no success in the past. Fast neutron reactors have uniformly been extremely expensive to build, challenging to operate, and marred by serious safety problems. The Superphénix fast reactor in France operated with a capacity factor of only 15 percent, for example. The Monju reactor in Japan experienced a serious sodium fire in 1995 and has not yet resumed operation.

The “pyroprocessing” technology promoted in the article has been  failure. A program at Argonne National Laboratories to use this technology to process a small amount of spent fuel from a defunct experimental breeder reactor in Idaho has performed so poorly that the Energy Department is actively seeking cheaper, safer alternatives. Even if the fast reactors and pyroprocessing plants worked as advertised, extracting plutonium and other actinides and fissioning them with a degree of efficiency well beyond what has been demonstrated, the plan would be unworkable. To achieve the increase in repository capacity claimed by the authors, the process would have a price tag of more than $300 billion (according to DOE and National Academy of Sciences estimates), and would require a sustained commitment for more than a century.

Our chief concerns are the nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation risks associated with any process that separates plutonium and circulates it in commercial facilities. The claims that pyroprocessing or other reprocessing technologies under study at the DOE are “proliferation-resistant” are not accurate. Any system that separates plutonium from highly radioactive fission products such as cesium-137, which is the case with pyroprocessing, poses unacceptable proliferation and terrorism risks by making plutonium easier to handle, steal, and process into a nuclear weapon. The safest thing to do with spent nuclear fuel from a proliferation perspective is to store it under strict safeguards until it can be responsibly disposed of in a geologic repository.

Recycling Nuclear Waste -- The Promise of Fast-Neutron Reactors, Energy Biz Online, March-April 2006
Concerns About Fast-Neutron Reactors, Energy Biz Online, March-April 2006

Technorati tags: nuclear, nuclear waste, fast reactor, energy, technology

The Energy Blog: The Nuclear Waste Disposal Debate

Comments

[amazingdrx]

"The Department of Energy estimates it may cost $13 billion over a decade to develop a fast-reactor and reprocessing capability."

Uhh huh. And the Iraq War and rebuilding was supposed to cost US taxpayers 1.7 billion according to administration experts before it started.

Another independent expert estimated 1.9 trillion would be the cost to taxpayers, he made that estimate before the war.

The bill is up to a trillion so far? Oh well. Good thing the red staters are faith based instead of fact based in their voting.

That is why these "new improved safer" reactors will be built in the southland.

And if we wait ten years to find out these reactors are a deadly dangerous boondoggle costing 100s of billions instead, before acting to halt global climate disaster? Why then the nukers will claim we have spent too much money and it is too late to change course.

Sounds kinda like the rationale to continue the Vietnam War and now this latest war doesn't it?

I still like this compromise anyway...

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/2/9/1752031.html

...but make nuclear plant owners pay for the waste processing research reactors and put them in a spot like Yucca moutain or Hanford, that is already contaminated.

With ratepayers rushing to buy clean wind power instead (the demand is so fierce in texas because wind is less expensive that wind electric power is being raffled off to consumers)only those who are forced to pay extra high rates for nuclear power will accept it, rather than have no power at all.

[Robert McLeod]

Amazingdrx, you really need to stop blog whoring, it's impolite and it won't attract me to visit your site.

[amazingdrx]

"...it won't attract me to visit your site."

That's a shame.

[Gent]

I appreciate this blog precisely because the author is not a ranting ideologue. Rants do not have as much value as level headed analysis.

[brother_bones]

He doesn't need to rant. Amazingdrx rants enough for 5 people.

It seems to me that the technological promise of fast-breeder reactors coupled with RTG's answer the environmentalist call of the three R's (reduce, reuse, recycle) perfectly.

I'm not sure why anyone would be against pursuing this technology.

[Cervus]

DRX:

Take your political rants elsewhere. This is not the place for them.

[JesseJenkins]

Thanks for reposting these two articles. I have been meaning to spend more time looking in to nuclear power and associated waste disposal/recycling options. Haven't had too much time to go looking for anything so thanks for posting these here. Cheers...

[phlapjaq]

Is this the same technology as the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) that was brought to the prototype stage in the late eighties to early nineties?

[amazingdrx]

Or is it the same technology used in Paducah, Kentucky at the main nuclear reactor fuel processing plant?

http://www.sprol.com/?p=43

The one that is contaminating the groundwater with plutonium at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers.

[phlapjaq]

Well Dr. X (I reserve judgement on the amazing part) I can tell you from personal experience that it is not the reactor designs that cause contamination. It is the lackadasical way in which many of these facilities were originally operated. At least for the utilities that I have experience with they have learned that cleaner and safer are also more profitable. I would encourage you to compare the mess created by the civil nuclear program (not weapons stuff) to the mess created by fossile plants.

[amazingdrx]

That's not really very comforting flapjak. Considering that this is only one of countless contamination events, covered up for decades and still going on. With zero government response.

And this facility produces fuel for power plants, not material for weapons. That excuse doesn't cover it in this case.

Besides which, the dire emergency that compelled the Manhattan project has been over for awhile. All those facilities like rocky flats, hanford, oak ridge and on and on are yet to be cleaned up.

The contamination is still migrating through groundwater towards the related river systems.

Clean up the messes the nuclear industry has already made, then and only then should we the people consider permitting more nuclear power.

[phlapjaq]

I think perhaps you misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that contaminating the surrounding environment is okay. What I am saying is that a civil nuclear power generating facility does not contaminate the local environment by design and any fossile plant does. So whether you are burning coal, natural gas, or nuts & twigs you are spreading carbon far and wide. And, in the case of coal you are emitting more radionuclides than a nuc station. So unless you want to go back to squatting in a cold dark cave I think we should choose the design with the lowest impact and if the companies/governments that operate these plants contaminate the environment now or in the past they should be held to account for that.

[amazingdrx]

"I think we should choose the design with the lowest impact"

Me too. And that is wind, solar, wave power, electric vehicles, geothermal heat pumps, and other renwable technology. Not nuclear power.

Nuclear power may not be designed to emit more radiation than other sources (that is debatable), but it does.

Unless/until some majical new regulation of nuclear power that actually works to clean up the messes already made and contamination ongoing at the present moment, that somehow beats the cost of windpower at 2 cents per kwh, the US ought to abandon nukes in favor of renwables like wind,just as Germany is now doing.

The cost of the cleanup added on to the present cost of nuclear power would make it cost 50 cents per kwh? Maybe more.

Who knows how severe the contamination really is with the decades of industry/government coverup.

[Nucbuddy]

Dr. X,

Nuclear power actually cleanses the earth of radiation.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter12.html

When uranium is mined out of the ground to make nuclear fuel, it is no longer there as a source of radon emission. This is a point which has not been recognized until recently because the radon that percolates out of the ground originates largely within 1 meter of the surface; anything coming from much farther down will decay away before reaching the surface. Since the great majority of uranium mined comes from depths well below 1 meter, the radon emanating from it was always viewed as harmless. The fallacy of this reasoning is that it ignores erosion. As the ground erodes away at a rate of 1 meter every 22,000 years, any uranium in it will eventually approach the surface, spending its 22,000 years in the top meter, where it will presumably do great damage. The magnitude of this damage is calculated in the Chapter 12 Appendix, where it is shown that mining uranium to fuel one large nuclear power plant for one year will eventually save 420 lives! This completely overshadows all other health impacts of the nuclear industry, making it one of the greatest lifesaving enterprises of all time if one adopts a very long-term viewpoint.