Yes We Can - "Dispose" of Nuclear "Waste"

[wtmusic]

[div style="float: left; padding-right: 12px;"]"Last Thursday was an historic day for the Nation. Congress took the first step in adopting a rational and achievable nuclear waste disposal plan that would reverse the catatonic state of our existing nuclear program.

Senators Feinstein (D-CA) and Alexander (R-TN), the leaders of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water, and Senators Wyden (D-OR) and Murkowski (R-AK) Chairman and Ranking Member of Energy and Natural Resources, just introduced the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013 (S. 1240).

The NWAA creates a new and independent Nuclear Waste Administration to manage nuclear waste, construct an interim storage facility(s) and site a permanent waste repository through a consent-based process. All of this will be funded by on-going fees collected from nuclear power ratepayers (the Nuclear Waste Fund)."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/06/30/yes-we-can-dispose-of-nuclear-waste/

"Dispose" and "waste" are words used by journalists and politicians, not nuclear engineers. Permanently burying high-level spent fuel makes about as much sense as burying gold - it can (and will) be burned for energy in 4th gen reactors, reducing its volume by 99% and its toxic lifetime to hundreds rather than thousands of years.

[PamW]

1. It's been difficult to educate the politicians...

wtmusic,

It's been difficult to educate the politicians, but the President's "Blue Ribbon" committee did a good job.

I've been saying for a long time here, that the scientists say there is no reason to bury waste in a "once through" cycle the way Congress mandated in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1984 and Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1987.

As the article sites, if we reprocess / recycle spent fuel, we can reduce the volume of waste that needs to be stored for any time by a factor of 100. Additionally, the longevity of the waste that we do store will by reduced by a factor of 1000 to a life time that is short enough to manage.

Nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till, formerly of Argonne National Lab explains that:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

The people in other countries that use nuclear power, like France, Sweden, Japan... all learned that decades ago. It's about time we caught up.

PamW

[wtmusic]

3. There are a few reasons why U.S. politicians don't want to be educated.

If fuel is reused, less uranium is sold. That creates a conflict for consortiums like URENCO, which delivers 30% of the world's nuclear fuel - without a place to put spent fuel, public sentiment is swayed against nuclear energy. With a place to store it - temporarily - the uranium industry sells fewer of its $1.4 million fuel assemblies. Answer? Bury it forever. And if anyone asks you about thorium, the answer is, "What's that?":

from 2004:

"In the past few weeks U.S. regulators have begun processing an application to construct the $1.8 billion plant, which has strong backing from powerful state and federal officials, including Republican Pete Domenici, who is chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. URENCO , an Anglo-Dutch-German consortium, hopes to build in New Mexico as part of Louisiana Energy Services, or LES, an alliance that includes the big American firms Exelon, Duke and Entergy, as well as Cameco, a uranium mining company and Westinghouse, a nuclear fuel manufacturer. If it is built, the plant would produce fuel for nuclear power generation in the U.S. and abroad.

In the past few weeks U.S. regulators have begun processing an application to construct the $1.8 billion plant, which has strong backing from powerful state and federal officials, including Republican Pete Domenici, who is chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. URENCO , an Anglo-Dutch-German consortium, hopes to build in New Mexico as part of Louisiana Energy Services, or LES, an alliance that includes the big American firms Exelon, Duke and Entergy, as well as Cameco, a uranium mining company and Westinghouse, a nuclear fuel manufacturer. If it is built, the plant would produce fuel for nuclear power generation in the U.S. and abroad."

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,596639,00.html#ixzz2Ub0YkXTh

Urenco got their plant in New Mexico, and as "Louisiana Energy Services, L.P.", Exelon, Duke, and Entergy all got their piece of the uranium pie.

[RobertEarl]

4. Huh? Why not just use more Russian nukes?

There was a thread earlier about how using Russian warheads was providing half of the fuel used in US NPP's. So why are we now, almost 10 years later, still having to mine all the new fuels? Why not just use more Russian nuke fuel, and our own, to boil water? Has there been no real advance in nukes recently? And why haven't they been able to store Fukushima yet? Gawd, what awful news for the nuke industry, eh?

Link to Russian fuel discussion:
In years past, 10% of the electricity produced in the USA came from nuclear power fueled by Russian nukes.

Since the total capacity of the entire US nuclear power reactor fleet is about 20% of the electricity of the USA.

Therefore, that 10% of the 20% represents HALF the fuel used by US power reactors.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112747445#post9

Those ruskies must be laughing there asses off at us. We are a dump for their nuke waste.

[PamW]

5. No more excess Russian nukes to use...

RobertEarl,

The Russians had old nukes that they were either decommissioning to meet arms reductions levels, or old nukes that they were decommissioning because they would be replacing them with new nukes. ( In 2004, then President Putin announced a major upgrade to the Russian nuclear stockpile including new nuclear weapons. This upgrade has been on-going for almost a decade now. )

So the Russians had surplus nukes. The USA bought the excess Uranium that was in the excess nukes. However, the Russians only had a limited number of excess nuclear weapons with excess Uranium. We bought and used the ALL that Uranium. The reason we can't do that again is that the Russians no longer have excess nuclear weapons.

Again you clearly don't understand. The Russians are NOT laughing their asses off, since the material we bought is NOT nuclear waste.

The material the USA bought was Uranium - NOT waste. It's Uranium that was mined from the Earth and enriched.

Such Uranium is NOT waste - in fact it is VERY VALUABLE stuff.

PamW

[CreekDog]

2. why do i sense tribes are going to get screwed as with Uranium mining?

In this bill, the NWA Administrator is given tremendous flexibility in negotiating compacts with state, local, and tribal governments. Governors become the primary state officials responsible for entering into agreements with the NWA.

any effect on the tribes or any attempt to pay off the tribes to take and hold our nuclear waste needs to be opposed. fate will not treat this country well if we add another injustice upon our tribes.