Nobody builds nuclear reactors for fun anymore
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
(For those who haven't seen one, here's what it looks like when the control rods are blown out of a TRIGA [1]; the reactor runs away momentarily, but then self-moderates when the fuel warms. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orNP1wMmPK4 . The Cherenkov flash is a beautiful blue.)
Nuclear power can provide a safe, well-studied, and effective bridge to solar power. Almost nobody's dabbling in it because there's so much societal opposition. Working on a reactor in an old schoolhouse in a rural area? Someone elsewhere in the county will be willing to speak at every county governmental meeting to shut you down. Their opposition has merit; it's easy to point to Fukushima and Chernobyl as major disasters.
A simple, clear, and publicly-understandable regulatory framework in which both society and innovators can feel comfortable with small-scale nuclear experimentation would go a long way toward driving new startups in the field. Experimenters shouldn't get their hopes up too far: Some forms of radiation are extremely penetrating/hard to shield, and some hazardous isotopes live a long, long time. If you're dabbling in the field, please plan from the beginning to minimize and safely store your waste.
We only get one planet; I'd rather it not be too warm nor contaminated by our litter.
How are simple reactors like the Farnsworth Fuser regulated, or why are they exempt? Are non power generating reactors exempt from regulation? How does that get defined? Is it based on maximum emitted radiation?
To get the official scoop on such things, I'd start with the NRC: http://www.nrc.gov .
If you're at/near a university, many of them have a radiation safety office as a part of their Environmental Health and Safety department. University radiation safety officers are a great resource for timely details regarding rules in an experimental setting. Even if there's no "nuclear science" underway at a school, if there's a medical school or nuclear chemistry at work, there's probably a radiation safety office.
(Front page is dated, see publications tab for more recent work) http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/
The most-important experiment we do is to test the Equivalence Principle [1], the idea that if you drop two things in vacuum, they'll fall at the same rate regardless of what they're made from. Results from our lab have shown that, at 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000 (10^-13), that's apparently true. General Relativity takes the Equivalence Principle as a postulate, and works from there. Many theories of new physics would break the EP at scales of ~10^-15 or so.
My almost-complete thesis research is searching for violations of the gravitational inverse square law at short distances. In short, over distances smaller than the diameter of a hair, nobody knows if gravity acts. It probably does, but you don't know until you check. String theory would suggest that, at short-enough distances, gravity should get unexpectedly stronger. Solutions to the Cosmological Constant problem [2] may suggest that gravity should turn off at distances shorter than the diameter of a hair. Dark Energy/Hubble Constant observations would suggest that gravity might do something interesting at around this same scale.
Our workhorse technology is the venerable torsion balance [4], souped-up with modern experimental readout and data analysis techniques. Our best angle sensors [5] sense a nanoradian's angular displacement in less than a second. For scale, if we shine a laser pointer from Seattle to San Francisco, a nanoradian is equivalent to about a millmeter's displacement of the beamspot on the TransAmerica building.
If you want me to build you an angle sensor or a precision force sensor, I'm interested in hybrid industrial and academic work [6].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_spring#Torsion_balance
I'm surprised to read the statement "over distances smaller than the diameter of a hair, nobody knows if gravity acts" as I thought we were accurately measuring all sorts of interactions at or below that scale (10s of microns).
It sounds like a very interesting field to be in!
That said, the geometry of some of the Texas Instruments DLP MEMS chips has interested some of us for years. The chips are designed to be robust in consumer products, but if they instead designed their mirrors to have very soft springs, we'd be interested in playing with them. Once a year or so, I do a survey of the available MEMS accelerometer chips to see if it's worth building an array from them. They're still a few orders of magnitude away in sensitivity from anything we could put to use.
For the second half of your question: Physicists do indeed measure interactions at scales far smaller than the diameter of a proton. The "trouble" with gravity is that it's so very weak. On a handwavy charge-for-charge basis, gravity is 10^40 (that's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times weaker than electromagnetism. For an experiment that's purely sensitive to electromagnetism (atomic spectroscopy) or other comparably strong forces (particle colliders) to see gravity, it's necessary to resolve the other forces incredibly well in order to see a tiny residual effect from gravity.
For our work, achieving sensitivity to gravity at the scale of tens of microns isn't that hard. Proving to you that we're not seeing another force/experimental influence (the flip side of that 10^40) is very hard, and is what I spend almost all of my time trying to do.
Thanks for your interest; it's sharing the stoke about this stuff that keeps us going when it's hard (and, if you're a US citizen, you're paying for it! Thank you!).
Sorry, not US, Australian. Although I just checked and QUT in Brisbane are apparently doing some good work in microgravity research.
Time to do some reading!
What's experimental gravity?
Before you jump ship to precision tests of gravity: graduate students' mean time to graduation in our group is >7-8 years. Our experiments take several years to set up, at least a year to execute, and at least a year to analyze.
When a new idea/theory comes up, we can often test it quickly (or rule it out with existing measurements), but our bread-and-butter work is a direct confrontation with hard experimental problems.
For scale, we can choose to be separately sensitive to both the gravitational signal and the tilt of the ground due to a pickup truck parked outside of our lab.
Perhaps the most important function of precision experimental tests (all of them, not just ours), is to provide very tight constraints for new theories. Any successful new theory of physics must ultimately explain more observed phenomena than existing theory. If experiment is more sensitive than existing theories, it can provide a quick checksum for whether a new theory is correct.
Furthermore, if a precision measurement is able to show that existing theory is not quite correct, it can lead the way to better theories.
In the field of precision gravity, Newton's and Einstein's theories have been perhaps frustratingly correct. At present, nobody knows if/how the "Standard Model" and gravity might connect. They're mathematically incompatible.
With respect to any existing literature, most physicists' position might be approximately summarized as, "Trust, but verify."
The disasters are one thing.
The constant lying from authorities, government and assigned experts was another. They were caught pants down telling lies and misinforming in handling the Fukusima accident.
This breaks trust. And for projects like that, that involve billions of dollars (enough to fuel much payola and greed), it's easy not to have much trust in the good intentions of those building and managing them in the first place.
as for the lying part: check the timeline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_I_nu...
Which portions of the article are you referring to?
On August 29, 2002, the government of Japan revealed that TEPCO was guilty of false reporting in routine governmental inspection of its nuclear plants and systematic concealment of plant safety incidents.[1]
(Note that date - 2002!)
As for Fukushima, here's a few links about false statements from TEPCO this year alone:
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201302...
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/07/22/national/tepco-n...
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/07/31/editorials/ye...
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/08/27/national/tepcos-...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Electric_Power_Company#Sa...
"Ideally, in a crisis, a government would communicate effectively to its people and the global community. Risks associated with the crisis and ongoing efforts to manage the crisis would be clearly articulated. Efforts would be made to provide factual reassurances to the international community. All of this would be done with timely information provided by recognized authorities in a coordinated fashion. Fundamental to such effective crisis communication would be adherence to a sound, well-researched accident management plan predicated on coordination and support among government entities and the utility (or utilities) involved and on trust among all parties, including the national and global communities.
None of the above happened with the Fukushima Daiichi accident. The reasons why are not entirely clear. Obviously, the Japanese government; safety authorities; and TEPCO, the nuclear utility, had a stake in the conduct and outcome of the accident, and they, for their own benefit at least, needed to provide reliable, timely information to their stakeholders and constituents. In addition, many other organizations across the globe had a stake in the conduct and outcome of the accident, and they too needed solid information to be provided to them so that they themselves could provide meaningful information to their decision makers, stakeholders, and constituents. What was actually executed was unfortunate for all parties involved."
Anyway, overall, whether the dangers are technical or social, they are still dangers.
My appeal to dabblers was to think through the entire life cycle of an experiment before beginning. If I were to crack open a smoke detector in order to play around with the Americium source, I'd think hard first about whether I actually knew what I was doing, making sure I worked in a clean/orderly environment, that the entire experiment was nicely contained, and that I had a viable plan for how to safely manage the waste I'd created.
Just as with the bathtub ring in "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" [1], once contamination leaves containment, it can wander everywhere, generating lots of low-level waste. You'd rather not eat or aspirate an alpha-emitter.
Nobody wants an unsafe nuclear experiment in the garage next door; it's irresponsible. It's one thing to hurt yourself, but quite another to harm someone unaware of a risk. It's also irresponsible to dispose of a hot source in your garbage can. That source may no longer be able to hurt you, but it's able to harm everyone who comes into contact with it in the future.
Our lab's standard for whether or not something has been cleaned up: any residual activity is comparable to/indistinguishable from background, and any activated waste has been disposed of with someone licensed to handle it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_in_the_Hat_Comes_Back
We're building a road in a semi-arid remote location, on the traditional lands of a small, disemowered, remote indigenous community. At the end of the road, we plan to build a shed with a barbed wire fence. In return for this inconvenience, the local community will see employment opportunities (2 security guards) and compensation (scholarships for their children).
this standard of excellence is possible when you have a society that tolerates institutionalised inequity and cultural genocide, and apartheid style laws that target particular races. None of this should surprise, as this is the same spirit in which a large portion of the world's uranium is mined on traditional lands in Australia. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/08/calls-ranger-u...
Clearly a much better solution is what we do now, where we store all our low and medium grade nuclear waste in random sheds and basements at universities and hospitals all over the country!
it must be nice for you to live in this imaginary world where institutionalised racism, racialist legislation and the exploitation of indigenous land owners is 'garbage', but unfortunately for the rest of us, its your story that is mere invention.
(pete- throw away acct cos I'm away from my creds)
Therefore in the center of France, many, many roads are significantly radioactive. Is it dangerous? Is radioactive matter washed away? What happens to workers doing road repairs? What happens to the rivers, crops and cattle downhill from these roads? Nobody knows and (mostly) nobody cares.
It is very disappointing how constricted the field of nuclear research is, as it is a demonstrably zero carbon footprint energy source. I understand the emotion that nuclear power evokes in people, I think the only way to combat the misperceptions is with improving results. I recognize I am a minority in that regard.
If you read the article you will read about two reactors that are actually fueled by what we consider waste today.
That we don't completely burn the fuel used in a reactor is a 'bug', a misfeature if you will. That was expedient when the initial reactors were being brought online and now is a regulatory pain in the butt. There is nothing in the physics that requires a nuclear reactor complex to generate nuclear waste of any kind[1]. Only in the regulations.
[1] Nuclear incineration of even low level waste can effectively convert anything that was once radioactive into short lived nucleotide. Converting everything burned into its lowest energy stable state. But we don't do that either.
In the case of any nuclear reactor, the vessel and mechanism itself becomes radioactive and must be disposed of (the same process also leads to embrittlement and other issues with the vessel/structure itself). And the resulting fission products are also still radioactive and require disposal, though my understanding is that thorium designs tend to produce lower quantities with lesser radioactivity than other designs. Or at least, that's the PR / theory, as the designs haven't been put into production use.
Nuclear power in general has been a huge exploration of unintended consequences.
Tu quoque fallacy.
No, I didn't say that these weren't.
If you want to know, rather than project on me, my beliefs, you could ask me. As it happens, my view is that humans, as with other life forms, exist to perform the function of exploiting low-entropy energy stocks and flows. The consequences of that ... tend not to be something we consider in advance. We've benefited hugely from fossil fuels, but have put ourselves well beyond the point of sustainability. Even with, say, a practically unlimited energy supply we'd bump into the problems of heat dissipation within a few centuries to millennia at present growth rates. We've simply got to stop growing.
As to what's sustainable? Probably on the order of 500m - 2 billion souls if you want any sort of industrialized lifestyle. Hell, even if not, not much more than that.
The next century or two will be very interesting times. Starting likely within a decade or two, possibly less.
Perturbing systems creates long-lived ripple effects. Humans have been tapping into stored carbon equivalent to a few hundred million years of fossil deposits, and ... that's going to have some really long-lived effects. As to what the future holds, my sense is that we're simply not going to have the quantities of free, abundant, and fungible energy we've enjoyed for the past century or so. There are a few people who've arrived at similar conclusions (Dennis Meadows, one of the original Limits to Growth team is among them).
The problem with nuclear waste for me (and others -- Hyman Rickover's criticisms of nuclear energy are revealing) is that the stuff is of such a concern for such a long period of time -- literally longer than written history. How the hell do you create a warning iconography that's going to be comprehensible in 10,000 years, or even 2000? Spoken and written English of even 700 years ago (Geoffrey Chaucer) is barely comprehensible today. And structures to contain it? The very oldest intact buildings we know of are massive stone monuments and even they are both heavily weathered and have long since been plundered (pyramids and other archaeological sites).
The primary problem with oil and coal are simply the quantities we've been consuming of them. If human populations hadn't grown, and they simply substituted for the biomass which was being consumed in their stead prior to the Industrial Revolution, they'd be far less consequential.
I should try figuring out how large a population could be supported at, say, 50% of US rates of energy consumption...
Even a language change, if accompanied by a technologically advanced civilization, would remember to change it's signs.
Whereas, it is much more likely that if we don't use nuclear power, we'll create catastrophes that lead to that problem to begin with. I'm much more concerned with what happens over the next 10,000 years then at the end of it.
It's possible to retain a knowledge of what nuclear waste is (at least in a mythic sense of "very bad juju") while 1) losing track of where that waste is and 2) being unable to detect or determine where it is.
Humans have no senses which detect radioactivity (one possibility is that such a sense evolves, though I suspect this is unlikely and would take a very long time). Radiation detectors require some level of technology -- silver nitrite films which fog on exposure, cloud chambers, Geiger counters, exposure badges. It's fairly easy to lose track of where radioactive products are; there's already history of radioactive decay products being incorporated into building materials and otherwise going astray (the Mexican truck hijacking this past week is only the most recent of many civilian-use accidents).
So: a future civilization, which does have a written or oral history of nuclear waste and its hazards, but no means of determining what is radioactive, could definitely have some issues going on. What the outcomes of that might be are an interesting question. It's possible there could be a civilization reboot, or humans could make a long-term slide to obscurity and/or extinction.
The fact that a reactor is fueled by waste doesn't mean it doesn't create waste or have a waste-disposal aspect.
There is nothing in the physics of building nuclear reactors that prevents us from building a reactor that does not leave behind any waste that is either chemically reactive, or even modestly radioactive. No currently implemented reactor designs do that, but it is possible to create one that is both fueled by current reactor waste, and has no waste disposal aspect.
It is unclear if we could ever license such a reactor given the current climate.
First I've every heard of any such proposal. How exactly would you go about stabilizing every last decay product to the level of background radiation?
Your statement is equivalent to noting that there's nothing in chemistry which prevents us from building coal-fired power plants which capture all CO2 and toxic pollutants (mercury, sulfur, particulates, NOX,, radioactives, etc.) as well. However it's economically and thermodynamically infeasible. Not that emissions haven't been drastically reduced from early designs, but it turns out that that's still not good enough.
Even closed cycle systems generate low level radioactive 'waste' in the sense that things get activated by exposure to radiation. Traditional incineration, like these guys (http://www.nukemgroup.com/fileadmin/pdf/Brochure_Incineratio...) propose, reduces bulk and chemical reactivity, using ionizing radiation from a gamma source (another small reactor like the TRIGA) can move the radioactive byproducts along their decay cycle into short lived isotopes and then inertness.
Nucleotides are the fundamental component of a DNA molecule.
Nuclides are the differentiated nucleuses of the common atomic elements, some of which are regarded as isotopes, of which some isotopes are radioactive
Now, the waste that needs long term storage is more dangerous than the dispersed uranium from coal, but most of the spent fuel can also be reprocessed at least once, and at least India is looking into reprocessing spent fuel multiple times to reduce the amount of high level waste that actually needs to be stored rather than reused.
The resulting storage volume is miniscule, and while it needs to be dealt with, it takes a lot for it to be a significant risk. E.g. plutonium is nasty in some ways - you really don't want to breathe in particulate. But it mostly emits alpha particles, which can be blocked by not much more than cardboard (I remember physics class when our teachers demonstrated with an alpha source, a geiger counter and cardboard...).
Large scale dispersal of plutonium particulate would require a large explosion, so the challenge with plutonium (and uranium) storage is largely to ensure there's no risk of reaching critical mass. But that's "simple" enough to do just by diluting the material enough. There is a security aspect (you don't want people to have an easy way of mining plutonium from waste to produce weapons) but the main storage problem is down to fear.
Most of the gamma emitters have short half lives. I grew up in Norway, and remember the massive fear after Chernobyl relating to Caesium contamination for example (fallout making it into the soil caused Cesium to get picked up in various plants that were eaten by sheep, deer, elks etc. in the highland regions). While it was a public health concern, Caesium-137 has a half-life of "only" 30 years, and a biological half-life in the human body of a few months, and there are plenty of "workarounds" in the case of a major accident (deep ploughing; screening the riskiest food sources; fertilizing with potassium) that helps reduce Caesium uptake until it's radioactivity has sufficiently diminished and/or it has been spread enough to not be a problem any more.
That's not to say we shouldn't take nuclear waste seriously, but it's not a big deal compared to a lot of other hazardous waste we don't think twice about.
Yes, if only it didn't have any other footprint...
It is my understanding that the nuclear waste can be stored safely without too much cost. It is also my understanding that there are ways to re-use the already used fuel rods, effectively 1) making them radiate less 2) getting "leftover" power from already consumed fuel.
Psychological footprint fueled by ignorance however... Well, that borders religiousness. Maybe education and awareness helps.
Say what you like about the strength of the evidence linking burning of hydrocarbons and climate change, but it doesn't carry the risk of a meltdown leaving a footprint so big and dangerous that cities have to be abandoned. I don't think it's "ignorance... that borders religiousness" that keeps the field of nuclear research heavily constrained and very expensive.
A honest question, because I am under an impression that with modern regulations and reactor designs the chance of a meltdown or less severe nuclear disaster are infitesimally small, granted that 1) regulations are being followed(which they weren't in Chernobyl) 2) safety of operation is being maintained and that the plant itself isn't faulty(which again wasn't case with Chernobyl).
The relevance that Chernobyl was too promoted as safe, like "modern power plants" are.
Plus the relevance that power plant contractors and governments STILL bullshit people all the way to the bank, with friendly experts paid to downplay the dangers.
Just watch the misinformation and lies told by the Japanese officials on the Fukushima distaster in order to cover up their failings.
I trust in science as much as everyone else.
Building a nuclear reactor is not science alone.
It's business (e.g contractors cutting corners whenever they can make money), it's politics, it's marketing, it's trust on certain things not happening (e.g a huge earthquake or a tsunami as in Japan's case, or maybe an attack), it's faith in the human operators and the software used, and tons of other factors.
I'd rather not put faith in all those coinciding happily when the outcome can be potentially lethal.
e.g a huge earthquake or a tsunami as
in Japan's case, or maybe an attack
...
faith in the human operators
1. deliberate procedural over-complication in the name of job security (political hazard)
2. disgruntled operator sabotage (political, but maybe that qualifies as an attack?)
3. operator error
4. operator laziness
5. operator incompetance
6. operator experimentation (experimentation was the cause of Chernobyl, after all)
In line with this notion, I am reminded of automobiles. Automobiles of yesteryear were more dangerous and significantly more polluting (causing serious health problems for the residents of Los Angeles). But of course we clearly cannot point to a '57 Chevy with no seatbelts or catalytic converter and say, "Clearly cars are too dangerous and noxious to allow".
I don't think many experts are that happy with the current spent-fuel story. They vary in why they're unhappy, ranging from environmental worries (more common on the left) to theft/terrorism worries (more common on the right). But overall there is just way too much nuclear waste hanging out in suboptimal interim storage.
However, the Wikipedia article for Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository seems to mention that the cancellation was for political rather than for technical reasons. Wouldn't this imply, that the opposing forces aren't technological, but rather political? As in, if there's will, the problem can be at least partially solved?
Fixed that for you. Coal plants aren't doing so well, either. President Obama has stated many times a major policy goal is to destroy the coal industry - lack of viable alternative not mattering.
Regarding storing spent fuel only in temporary ways, that's just a sad artifact of neither side being able to agree on any long term solution, so no real long term solution gets implemented, and the can gets kicked down the road. It's lunacy not to face reality.
If you had a power source that killed X/100 people. But to implement that power source, congress would have to introduce a bill in which every single person who had to die was named.
Could that power source be implemented in any democracy?
(not to say nuclear is exactly like this, just to say nuclear has a bit of this kind of problem and this kind of problem is very hard to solve)
Might not be where you live, but there's a real world evacuated zone in Chernobyl, with a 20 mile radius were "even today radiation levels are so high that the workers responsible for rebuilding the sarcophagus are only allowed to work five hours a day for one month before taking 15 days of rest. Ukrainian officials estimate the area will not be safe for human life again for another 20,000 years.".
Oh, and: in the United States alone, the Department of Energy states there are "millions of gallons of radioactive waste" as well as "thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material" and also "huge quantities of contaminated soil and water."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
>It is my understanding that the nuclear waste can be stored safely without too much cost.
That'd be what we call a misunderstanding.
The typical and most reliable procedure for managing radioactive waste is vitrification: creating a purified mixture of molten glass and then introducing an evenly distributed non-critical ratio of hot waste material into the glass, and allowing it to harden into a solid glass object. The radioactive glass object is then carted off to a repository, for permanent storage, in accordance with the half life of the waste, which might be centuries or more. Vitrification is a safe way to prevent accidental criticality, so that all the waste stays cool and is easier to shield.
Generally underground storage sites are the most desirable locations for the final resting place of vitrified waste. This provides a simple barrier to the penetrating radiation that the waste may emit.
Security is essential to the storage of radioactive waste, since unaccounted waste means there's some nasty stuff floating around. This adds effort to maintaining a site.
Ventilation is necessary, since ionizing radiation produces an accumulation of fee oxygen and hydrogen by catalyzing moisture in the air. This means offgassing equipment is needed to ventilate the natural accumulation to prevent explosion hazards. This adds complexity to storage.
Degradation of construction is a long term pest, in that the site must be constructed of high quality, durable architectual members, equipped to last centuries, and not collapse within decades. This adds expertise and expense requirements.
Site selection should be a no brainer though. Consider that Ukraine can make some decent income off the tragedy of Chernobyl, given that they have an unusable sector of their territory relegated to the reactor sarcophagus. Yeah, the sarcophagus is impossible to manage above ground, but what about digging underneath it and excavating a massive permanent waste repository, and charging money for depositing waste there? Nobody wants anything to do with Chernobyl. It's a ghost town. Seems like a chance to employ the site as a massive underground waste repository.
Same goes for Fukushima. Take a geological survey of the site, design durable, earthquake-proof architecture for an underground repository, and charge money to dumpwaste there.
After construction completes, your budget mostly comes from staffing qualified nuclear engineers and security personnel. Little else is necessary. A nuclear reactor and research lab can provide power to the site and provide an intellectual basis to attract new staff. Doesn't this sound like a sustainable plan?
In America there has been this massive battle over Yuka Mountain. It's politically hazardous to store waste underneath otherwise uncontaminated land. The protest generally stems from the not-in-my-backyard philosophy. There are tons of superfund sites, that are doomed to contamination for decades because of simple bureacratic laziness. Most of them are pretty close to cities. I think America could probably find sites, but they usually get locked up in legal messiness that blows any deal. I think there are probably places that could accept waste, and there's no rational reason to care, but people fight it anyway, because everyone seems to enjoy irrational litigation as political sport as a sort of clerical version of new-deal make-work contruction projects. But I digress.
There are reasonable ways to confront the challenges of radioactive waste storage. Obstinate people use this objection as an example of an insurmountable challenge simply because they're stubborn.
However, I share your opinion on dealing with radioactive waste. It's not a technical challenge, but a political one.
Fukushima is situated on the coast line, and already leaks into the ocean, but Chernobyl is near the Pripyat river, and is a tributary to the Dnieper River, which empties into the Black Sea. The Pripyat is contaminated within the exclusion zone, but it would be bad news to disturb and agitate any contamination, and make things worse.
Given that it's already a bad situation, and that natural leeching is already taking place by doing nothing, any engineering project would have to approach the site carefully so that leeching is not accelerated.
Yucca mountain is located in the southwest desert, so that mitigates water seepage, but Yucca mountain isn't a disaster site (yet), so that technical challenge can be tackled before it arises.
Once stablised as synroc it is simply a matter of storing the waste. Storing above ground (i.e. in a shed) seems to me to be a better solution than pursuing geologic disposal, given the waste is now stable, and can be easily monitored.
I still think nuclear power has its place for example having nuclear reactors on warships let them stay out to sea as long as they have food. They make their own electricity and water from the reactor. Just not for widespread power plants.
I think the future is going to move away from power being generated in one place.
But realistically, there is no extant electricity supply that has zero carbon costs over it's lifecycle. At least that I am aware of.
There were two main issues that caused the company to decommission the reactor. 1) replacement of the californium source would have been prohibitively expensive. 2) Because the neutron source also contained isotopes that could have been weaponized (with great difficulty,) we had to maintain 24x7 security - at great expense. The press reported on the removal (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/kodak-nuclear-react...)
During my tenure as "next door neighbor" to this, I was more concerned about falling on ice in the parking lot during the winter than any concerns from the reactor. The staff in the NAA lab were well-trained scientists who were quite careful and they monitored constantly for activity.
For example: EXFOR (Experimental nuclear reaction data https://www-nds.iaea.org/exfor/exfor.htm) is an international collection of more than 20000 nuclear reaction experimental results dating back to the discovery of the neutron.
ENDF (Evaluated nuclear data library http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/endf/b7.1/) is the current best evaluation of the most up-to-date data available for many nuclear reactions that have been seen experimentally.
FLUKA (http://www.fluka.org/) "is a fully integrated particle physics MonteCarlo simulation package", partially developed and used by CERN.
Beware that all of these require some knowledge of nuclear physics to use and understand (obviously!), and can be somewhat archaic in data formats and computer languages used (think FORTRAN).
But it is truly wonderful how you and I have such easy access to such high quality and complete data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862240
I've got my own thoughts and doubts over the ultimate viability of nuclear energy and of the net potential of technology, but brakes on creativity itself, whether introduced or intrinsic to the system, are of concern.
These are a few examples of the idiocracy taking root. MBAs running companies into the ground because they fundamentally do not understand the domain in which their business operates. Police incompetence manifested as an increase in paramilitary actions coupled with a decline in common sense. And what about the TSA?
Another datapoint: a recently posted (here?) interview of Richard Feynman, shot only a few weeks before he died. What really got me was the mischievous nature he displayed: constantly smiling and joking. Einstein was somewhat similar. God may not play dice with the Universe, but each of these two was, I think, toying with it.
The Boy Who Played With Fusion
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played...
You're very unlikely to invent a new nuclear reactor improvement in your basement (50 years ago it would have been plausible).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-R...
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170482802/are-mini-reactors-th...
The submission title for example can be reinterpreted in two slightly different ways. The first is the way that you interpreted. The problem is that -nobody- out of the general population chooses to make nuclear reactors as a recreational activity of some sort.
The article however poses it in a different way. It rather seems to mean that nobody goes into the field of nuclear engineering with the expectation of experimentation and "having fun" while working. It has nothing to do with expense, danger, illegality, working with universities, doing it in your basement, or any of that. It has to do with commercial interests not supporting their engineers in experimenting with possible designs.
For cities or countries (or large ships) that can't afford a full-scale nuclear reactor there are smaller and cheaper ones that can replace fossil-fuel power plants.
I'm sure most people go into the nuclear field to experiment, few people expect to sit around with a checklist and watch a dial.
This company is working on similar goals: http://terrapower.com/
In life, usually when the pendulum swings to an extreme in one place, there is another place where the pendulum heads in the opposite direction, and in nuclear reactors it would not be surprising if Russia is the place where nuclear innovation is happening these days.
http://jimsanborn.net/main.html#museuminstallations
I got the impression from his talk that he was more worried about DHS than NRC cracking down while working on it.
It wasn't ever turned on while it was in the museum, but just getting near the device probably left me with a greater sense of awe than even the Apollo 11 capsule. On the shoulders of giants, certainly, but one guy built this.
There's quite a lot of work being done on small-scale alternative reactor designs. I wrote up a bunch of them here: http://www.climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestI...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hmn56/iama_teenager_wh...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xd19t/iama_an_incoming...
http://harpers.org/archive/1998/11/the-radioactive-boy-scout...
VC-backed, too!