The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste [video]
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We're barely tapping the potential of uranium-based nuclear power and have yet to begin with thorium. Zero-emission, cheap, and super-abundant electricity via nuclear has been possible for decades... but politics.
If memory serves, Germany just powered down a significant portion of their nuclear power plants, and those already had the sunken cost put into them, they were built and operating.
We might eventually see a widespread use of nuclear power but climate change will have to kick our ass a little first.
As nuclear has been neglected in recent decades it's cheaper to mine uranium than reprocess, but it's by no means an experimental or prototype technology.
Climate change will probably spur growth in intermittent sources in the short term, since politicians are usually optimizing for the next election cycle, but eventually peak production times will become saturated and the infeasibility of energy storage in regions within the hydroelectric power will become clear. Effectively all countries that have decarbonized their electricity sector have done so through a mix of hydroelectric power and nuclear power.
So now I ask you: what relevance, at all, does the distinction between fissile and fertile material have with respect to magic_hamster's claims about the feasibility of waste reprocessing? That commenter claimed reprocessing was not feasible, I responded with dozens of examples of reprocessing being carried out. What does fertile vs. fissile have to do with this?
First it does nothing to the fission products (which are the bulk of the radioactive waste by mass). Second turning U238, Pu240, Am241, and transuranics other than Pu239 into usable fuel has never happened without being a minor side-product of neutrons from a fissile source, and using the dregs of Pu239 that is <1% of the spemt fuel and <20% ofntue waste does not reduce the radioactivity of the waste, rather it makes it more dangerous because Pu239 is significantly less harmful than the result of putting MOX in a nuclear reactor, as is regular spent uranium fuel.
Pretending otherwise is knowingly disonhest.
Nobody was ever talking about fertile material until you brought it up. Let's re-read the relevant part in the root comment shall we?
> As pointed out in the video re-processing the fuel gets all of the usable fissile material out.
We were always talking about recovering fissile material. "Partially spent fuel" refers to fuel rods that still contain some fissile material. I have no idea where you got the idea that "partially spent material" referred to fertile material, especially when the comment you're referring to explicitly mentioned recovering fissile material.
It does neither.
Stupid semantic games and motte and bailey rhetorical techniques do not change this.
Which you doubled down on twice, before backpedalling and claiming you never meant that the *other* 99% of the waste wasn't waste and "partially spent" actually means "has a few leftover dregs that don't make a meaningful difference".
I'm not sure what the point is in continuing to engage with someone responding to what seems to be an entirely imaginary set of comments. Nobody in the thread is making the wild claims you seem to be trying to refute.
It's a very obvious attempt to spread the myth that reprocessing somehow magically makes the entire mass of SNF fissile and will magically make all the fission products go away.
I'm truly baffled as to how you reached this interpretation. Nobody, ever, suggested that reprocessing somehow made the entire mass of spent nuclear fuel fissile. The comment that called it "partially spent fuel" specifically mentioned getting the usable fissile material out (thus implying that there's other material that's not usable). I seriously doubt a significant portion of people reading this are reaching the conclusion that nuclear waste becomes a source of infinite energy.
There's no gaslighting here. I'm not going to assume it's bad faith, but here and in other comments you've shown a remarkable tendency vastly misinterpret comments and then accuse other contributors of being ignorant or acting in bad faith. So in the future, when you read something that appears to you to make an outlandish or blatantly false claim, I'd suggest you ask the commenters to clarify what they mean instead of calling them stupid and trying to refute claims that nobody ever made.
Wild.
What vitrification can do is put waste in safer form that don't have to worry about escaping or polluting. It ends up as safe, very radioactive, glass.
We need energy, but people as dismissing every source of energy because they are looking at each source one at a time. We should have taught people years ago that there is no perfect choice.
So, what the lady should have said at 4:22 is "The technology is almost there, if we work hard we might iron out all the issues in 10 years. But more realistically in 20."
Once they iron out those issues, they will have a fast reactor that could burn "nuclear waste". In reality, it will turn out that it will be orders of magnitude cheaper to burn freshly mined uranium, and they'll do just that. Why? Because nuclear waste contains all sorts of transuranic elements, like Neptunium, Plutonium, Americium, Curium, and each of them with several isotopes. Some of these isotopes are friendly to being burned in a reactor, but some not. Some are highly radioactive, while regular nuclear fuel is not. Getting reasonably "clean" fuel out of this is expensive.
But even if expense is not an issue, getting the NRC to approve the fuel will be another one. The NRC does not approve only reactor designs, but also everything that has to do with reactor operations, including nuclear fuel. There are currently several applications to approve uranium fuel where U-235 is enriched to a bit higher than 5%. Six weeks ago the NRC gave an approval to Framatome [2] that will allow Framatome to eventually enrich fuel to 8%, however, I think they will need a few more approvals until that fuel will burn in reactors.
It takes many years for the NRC to give an approval to even such a simple thing as increasing enrichment from 5% to 8%, but otherwise keeping everything the same. Imagine how long it would take them to allow someone to burn a fuel that is essentially a random mix of a bunch of radioisotopes.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col/auro...
[2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/NRC-approves-use...
The technology discussed here was invented by the US in 60s. None of this is new. The US pioneered reprocessing, separation and everything. This technology is still used in the government space - but the government lost its appetite for the risk of the commercial industry producing potential weapons materials. This Pyro solution may be the ticket for allowing commercial reprocessing without producing potential weapons materials.
And yes Uranium is/was cheap because we bought it from Russia - now it's maybe not so cheap. We have one domestic mine and it's not that cheap. And regardless - it may be cheap but USA HAS NO PATH for dispositioning all this fuel. So you can't say it's cheaper if it's no storage solution or anything. The cost for housing this spent fuel for forever practically in a Yucca or whatever is WAY more expensive over centuries than any cost to do this work. I'm not a fan of the economics argument when every spent fuel bundle is just sitting in a dry cask outside every reactor in the country and no one has a solution where to store it. Every commercial company only has plans for 50 years - not how to store it for 200,000 years.
I guess we are saying the same thing, aren't we? We have the NRC, and the NRC is conservative in giving approvals, precisely because we don't want a Chernobyl. I'm happy about that, and I do think the NRC is doing a good job, so a Chernobyl in the US is extraordianarily unlikely. But if we didn't have an NRC, then we'd have a Chernobyl in due time. Why are you saying "pump the brakes on a Chernobyl comparison"?
> The technology discussed here was invented by the US in 60s. None of this is new. The US pioneered reprocessing, separation and everything.
All this was before Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The technology exists and it may even be used in a research setting, but without the NRC approval it is as good as nonexistent for civilian reactors.
> USA HAS NO PATH for dispositioning all this fuel.
That's not because of any technical difficulty. The US is disposing of military nuclear waste at the WIPP facility [1]. I just read in the book "Energy" by Richard Rhodes that the US could dispose of all the spent fuel it can burn in a thousand years at the same place. It's not a technical problem, it's a political problem. If it's a problem that is personally bothering you, you should write to your representative. I am personally not that worried about storing the spent fuel on site. It is not a huge amount.
Plus, in a hundred years, if we make progress with the nuclear technology, then it might become easy-peasy to reprocess spent fuel, and do what the Oklo guys are saying. I don't think we are quite there yet, and we won't be for 20 years, but I think it's entirely possible to get there in 50 years or 100 years. Why bury what something that holds the energy of hundreds of billions of tons of coal?
[1] https://www.energy.gov/em/waste-isolation-pilot-plant-wipp
I say pump the brakes because even Russia has fixed its regulatory program and not had another Chernobyl in decades of operations - or anything even close. Hundreds of reactors operate around the world safely. Another Chernobyl won't happen. Bringing up that this could be Chernobyl is to me at least pushing on fear rather than realizing it's risk as incredibly small. Oil spills occur far more frequently but we still approve oil drilling even though it's incredibly damaging. Just because we want to use different technology doesn't mean we all of a sudden risk a Chernobyl.
> All of this was before Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima.
In the commercial US space maybe. But several countries with just as rigorous of technical regulations as the NRC utilize this. Japan, France, Russia etc. NRC, to me, can get there to successfully approve these projects but the government doesn't have the political will to push this.
And I'll note that none of these accidents were at a facility like this. Just saying not all nuclear facilities have the same accident possibilities.
> That's not because of any technical difficulty. The US is disposing of military nuclear waste at the WIPP facility.
Very true - and a WIPP like solution is feasible. But the state of New Mexico has to want that. WIPP (it's in its name) was supposed to be a pilot plant which obviously no longer is. They may not want everything coming to their land. And it hasn't ever supported spent fuel receipts because it wasn't designed for it. That's what Yucca was supposed to do but can't get built. So it's just more political issues to go that way too.
But that's not an economic argument - it's a government one. So saying it's cheaper to just burn fresh fuel depends on there being a government solution to disposition. I'm just saying the "cheaper" argument is applying free market theory to something that's obviously heavily intertwined and depends on the government. As it should.
> I am personally not that worried about storing the spent fuel on site. It is not a huge amount.
Sure for now - but just like other political issues we are just kicking the can down the road and saying "future us will figure it out"!
Oklo's design is new. It's a fast reactor; out of about 400 reactors in operation worldwide, maybe 5 are fast reactors, all others are thermal reactors, the majority pressurized water reactors. NRC's experience with fast reactors is in consequence much more limited than their experience with PWR. A new Chernobyl type of accident for a radically new design is not at all inconceivable.
Even if the NRC did analyzed every single conceivable angle, a Chernobyl episode could still happen, because they are not aware of new angles, which would be discovered after years of operating the new type of design.
But one thing is needed: the applicant needs to commit every possible effort to show how the risk can be mitigated. And that's exactly what Oklo did not do. They submitted a 19-page document [1], which the NRC found lacking [2].
The NRC then appropriately gave them a failing grade, and told them to go home and do better next time.
What point are you trying to argue? That this design is safe anyway, because another Chernobyl is out of question?