Yucca Mountain seen as possible reprocessing site

[wtmusic]

"A devastating blow last week to a plan to bury nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain has bolstered another controversial idea: reprocessing nuclear waste at the same location on the Nevada Test Site.

Several Republican candidates -- including leading U.S. Senate candidates Danny Tarkanian, Sue Lowden and Sharron Angle -- have expressed support for studying or experimenting with reprocessing, a method of extracting useful fuel from radioactive waste.

Two Republican gubernatorial candidates are also open to the idea, despite steadfast opposition from the Nevada political establishment that stymied the plan to store waste at Yucca Mountain."

<>

"Even as Reid and other incumbents celebrated three recent bureaucratic maneuvers they say killed the nuclear storage plan once and for all, reprocessing advocates stuck to their guns. For them, the fear of radioactive accidents is offset by hope for high-paid, high-tech jobs."

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/national/west/view/20100208yucca_mountain_seen_as_possible_reprocessing_site/srvc=home&position=recent

Poll: Reid's re-election numbers don't add up

CARSON CITY -- Nearly half of Nevadans have had enough of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as the powerful Democrat heads into his re-election campaign, a new Las Vegas Review-Journal poll finds.

"About a third of the state's voters would re-elect Reid if the 2010 election were held today, according to the poll, but 45 percent say they would definitely vote to replace him. Seventeen percent would consider another candidate."

http://www.lvrj.com/news/45387987.html

Is Reid stubborn enough to let a Senate supermajority slip one vote farther into oblivion?

[napi21]

1. A friend of my son's took a job a a nuclear plant as an engineer.

He said we could burn nuclear waste to get rid of it andproduce electricity with it at the same time. I have no reason to think he's wrong.

It is the advanced liquid metal reactor or ALMR. Such a reactor would basically use waste from conventional nuclear reactors and use molten sodium instead of water to circulate through its core. The hot sodium would then heat water to drive a turbine.

http://www.lvrj.com/blogs/mitchell/What_to_do_about_nuclear_waste_Burn_it_to_generate_electricity.html

[NNadir]

2. There are many fluid fuel nuclear reactors which are superior to the ALMR, although the ALMR

is a very good reactor.

It was cancelled however in the United States in 1994.

An even better reactor program was cancelled in the 1970's although it has been revived worldwide as an element of the Generation IV nuclear program. It is the MSR, or molten salt reactor.

This reactor type can be used to consume all important actinides and fission products.

[napi21]

3. Have you heard anything about bringing this technology back?

I realize sometimes I'm a dreamer, but could that bbe the reason Obama told the Pubs he was willing to compromise with them on nuclear?

[bananas]

4. No, it's too expensive and dangerous.

As explained in the 2003 MIT report "The Future of Nuclear Power":

Waste. Geological disposal is technically feasible
but execution is yet to be demonstrated
or certain. A convincing case has not been
made that the long-term waste management
benefits of advanced, closed fuel cycles
involving reprocessing of spent fuel are outweighed
by the short-term risks and costs.
Improvement in the open, once through fuel
cycle may offer waste management benefits
as large as those claimed for the more expensive
closed fuel cycles.

Note that Obama's science advisor John Holdren participated in that report, it's unlikely he would advise Obama to pursue a closed-fuel cycle.

[wtmusic]

5. There is ongoing research

The University of Ohio and University of Wisconsin at Madison receive millions of dollars annually from the DOE to research molten salt reactors (MSRs).

They're not a focus of the NGNP (Next Generation Nuclear Plant) research initiative; I don't know exactly why. There may be other similar technologies which show more promise. In any case, they wouldn't come online until at least 2025.

http://www.ne.doe.gov/neri/neneriresearch.html

[NNadir]

7. UC Berkeley has under Per Petersen is a very prominent group involved in this technolgy.

He's the master of the molten salt FLINAK (fluorine, sodium, potassium eutectic salts) designed reactors.

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/People/Per_Peterson

His approach is different than other approaches, but there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of approaches out there.

The MSR is not just one reactor; it's a series of reactors built around the same idea, fluid phase.

Actually Per's model is not a strict MSR, but a kind of hybrid reactor. But rest assured, he's vastly smarter than people lying by the swimming pool swilling beer and day dreaming about their solar pool lights when not cowering with the thought that a tritium atom might be in the pool.

[NNadir]

6. This technology is part of the Gen IV nuclear initiative and WILL be part of the energy future...

...should humanity survive climate change, which is hardly a sure bet.

It is amazing how much has been written about this reactor concept in the scientific literature in the last year.

The concept is generating a lot of way over due excitement.

The reactor concept is so superior to any other energy technology that it is impossible to imagine that wise countries will not use it.

There is not one type of reactor involved. Seen properly fluid phase reactors are actually an almost infinite series of kinds of reactors which can be adopted for many missions.

The design issues have been simplified by advanced computational power to address certain issues in phase systems - essentially solubility issues - neutronics and modern advances in materials science.

The main reason that the technology was not scaled up was the low price of uranium, the pernicious influence of anti-nuke mystics with very poor understanding of and contempt for science, and of course, openly paid off fossil fuel greenwashers like say, Amory Lovins.

The people who object to this technology are precisely the people who know nothing about it. The rule has been that only nuclear need be perfect, and every other form of energy can kill at will and generate no attention.

Nuclear need not be perfect to be better than everything else. It merely needs to be better than everything else, which it is, and has been for more than a generation.

[NNadir]

8. By the way, Yucca Mountain isn't a particularly good place to do this.

I would love to see it done in New Jersey, but then again, I actually understand nuclear fuel reprocessing chemistry.

France has been doing this work at La Havre for years. They aren't using the best possible process, but they have nonetheless avoided any huge external costs in a fairly populated area.

[Massacure]

10. What places do you propose are better than Yucca Mountain, and why?

It doesn't seem like a bad site. Yucca Mountain has a lower risk of natural disasters than other areas of the country and is relatively far away from population centers, which should cut down on the NIMBYism a bit.

[NNadir]

11. I don't see much risk associated with these plants no matter where they are located.

It is desirable to have access to cooling water, suggesting an ocean front site.

This is particularly true of fast recycles with short cooling periods, something I favor for technical reasons because of my appreciation of plutonium's 241 isotope.

My state, New Jersey, would be fine from my perspective.

NIMBY is not a good reason to not do things. Nobody wants anything near them, when you get right down to it, but since it has less of a land use problem than anything else, the public would be wise to welcome nuclear facilities.

Some people do you know. I would be thrilled to have reactors built in my area, particularly since garbage burning and dangerous natural gas burning are practiced near here and I believe these toxic practices should be phase out.

Nobody in this state has much of a problem swimming near Oyster Creek. I've done it myself with my family. The beaches are usually packed.

For contrast, when I was growing up on Long Island, if you went to the beach in Northport, frequently your car paint was dissolved by ash from garbage incinerators. This was a real issue. People did avoid Huntington Township beaches for this reason.

In my life time, I have seen a sea change on nuclear issues - indeed in the last decade there has been a sea change. I expect that the trend will be toward more change, particularly as the wolf arrives at the door.

We lost 30 years to stupidity, but stupidity has had its day.

I would think that if we displaced the ugly natural gas and oil tanks and refineries near Elizabeth, NJ with a clean nuclear recycling facility, our quality of life would be much better. It would be a very productive industry, producing significant wealth and tax revenue.

[Strelnikov_]

9. Or . . .

Norway's 'Doomsday Vault' holds seeds of survival

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/norways-doomsday-vault-holds-seeds-of-survival-786773.html

The name alone makes it sound like a relict from the Cold War or something out of a Bond film: it is referred to as the "Doomsday Vault" and housed in an icy steel and concrete bunker, more than one hundred metres deep inside the mountain permafrost
of an Arctic archipelago. Yet the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is man's latest attempt to create a latter-day Noah's Ark, or insurance policy, for the planet in the event of a catastrophe such as devastating climate change induced by global warming.

After decades of planning and construction work, the vault will officially start operating tomorrow. As the world's first global seed bank, it has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all the known varieties of the planet's main food crops.

The vault cost €6m to construct and has been built to withstand nuclear missile attacks and even dramatic rises in sea levels
that would result from both the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves melting simultaneously.

The vault aims to make it possible to re-establish crops and plants should they disappear from their natural environment or be wiped out by major disasters. Cary Fowler, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which set up the project together with Norway's Nordic Gene Bank yesterday described the vault as the "perfect place" for seed storage.

[wtmusic]

12. We need the same. using frozen DNA, for endangered animals nt

[kristopher]

13. Another wonderful Republican solution to our energy problems...