Nice numbers Imprimap,

   I'll disregard the personal attack, since you don't really know me, but numbers are interesting.

   Let's take Dr Cohen's 10 billion killed by nuclear power waste IF exposed. HMMM, seems rather high, but it's your figure. Cohen's main point then is , don't worry, that exposure will NEVER happen. Ahh, that is easier to say than to prove, for such a long lived deadly product.

   The feds have tried to force open Yucca Mountain, swearing it will never leak in 10,000 years. That is much shorter time than the nuke waste lasts, so with advice from NAS, the EPA now has to create standards to isolate waste for 100,000 years.

   But don't worry, "creating" standards is an easy math and paper game to the federal government. The USGS water scientists working on Yucca were just busted for an internal email, where one "scientist" admits he made up figures to pretend waste would be isolated stating, "If they want more proof, I'll be happy to make up more numbers."  No joke, this is part of Nevada's law suit to stop the federal insanity - google it.

    I favor terror proof bunkers with retrievableinspectable storage, where it is located. This has 2 main purposes. 1) If and when the barrels rust or deteriorate, they can be safely re-barreled. 2) IF the nuke scientists ever make new reactors that are as foolproof as the breeder reactor press releases overclaim presently, ALL this endless potential energy will be available! That is the pro-science low-risk approach I suggest.

   All the diversion about swimming pools and cars are funny, but irrelevent to the wind power vs nuclear power discussion...

Now here is a better solution than Yucca Mountain.

http://www.energypulse.net/centers/article/article_display.cfm?a_id=1108

How Harry Reid can Save us $80 billion and Fuel $1 Trillion of Electricity





9.29.05
 
Joseph Somsel, Nuclear Engineer

Do you recycle your trash? Aluminum cans, glass bottles, plastics, paper generated in most US households gets separated in the home and sent to a recycling facility where the materials hopefully re-enter the commercial materials streams. With 8,875 curbside recycling programs operational in the US in 2003 (1), it’s a big business and the politically correct thing to do.

Yet, once-used nuclear fuel doesn’t get recycled in spite of its tremendous residual energy potential and economic value. The US policy was decided in the Carter Administration where the recycling of spent nuclear fuel was prohibited by executive order, largely as non-proliferation gesture. A nearly completed recycling facility was abandoned in South Carolina at a cost of almost a billion dollars. The nuclear plant operators didn’t really care since the once-thru cycle was cheaper and less hassle given prevailing yellowcake prices post-Cartel.

After considerable study, the government reached the obvious conclusion; if you don’t recycle it, then bury it. With the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA), a waste “fee” of 1 mil per kW-hr of nuclear electricity was charged to the end-user and assigned to a Nuclear Waste Trust Fund. Like excess funds from the Social Security payroll taxes, the cash not spent goes into the general Treasury while the Trust Fund gets government promissory notes to hold until the day comes when burial costs exceed the fee cash flow. Then the general taxpayer will have to pony up the cash to redeem the promissory notes to pay actual construction costs. As of first quarter, 2005, the federal government has collected over $23 billion. Of that $6.3 billion has been spent (2), so far, on detailed engineering and scientific studies, an exploratory tunnel, a number of tests, and a subsidy to the State of Nevada. That leaves almost $17 billion in collected cash spent elsewhere in the Congressional budgets over the years. A cynic would call it a hidden tax.

The nuclear plant owners were happy to see the passage of the NWPA since the US government promised to take title to their spent fuel while the hidden tax they were asked to collect didn’t make much difference in their power pricing. One mil per kW-hr equals $1.00 per MW-hr where market prices may float around $50 so nuclear’s competitive position was not materially affected. The best part was a promise to begin taking physical possession of the spent fuel by 1998 (3). Of course, that date came and went with the rods still in the power plant’s spent fuel pools where they remain to this day (or in dry casks bought by the utility and resting in the plant’s backyard.) The utilities, of course, eventually sued and won some of the additional storage costs back.

After a show of considering alternate sites for the burial spot, Yucca Mountain in Nevada was chosen by Act of Congress. While Yucca Mountain has numerous technical attractions such as trivial rainfall, excellent rock, and existing federal land ownership, our cynic might note that the fact that Nevada has the smallest Congressional delegation of any of the considered sites may have had something to do with it. Located adjacent to the Nuclear Weapon Test site, Yucca Mountain overlooks Jackass Flats, site of the nuclear rocket engine test in the ‘60s which is in turn just over the hill from Yucca Flat, site of almost 1,000 nuclear weapon tests, both underground and atmospheric. It’s difficult to imagine a more God-forsaken spot on the North American continent. ANWR is Maui in comparison.

The design of Yucca Mountain has been a challenging problem. The original design called for a 10,000 year retention criterion but a recent court ruling allowed the EPA to extend their radiation dose rules out to one million years. The spent rods are to be enclosed in high quality stainless steel inner casks with two inch walls, all within an outer cash made of an exotic material called Alloy C-22, essentially stainless steel without the weakest link - steel. The casks will be located tunnels 1,000 feet underground. To prevent dripping water from falling on the C-22 casks, a titanium “shed” will cover each cask. (4) A wag could call it the most expensive brick outhouse since the Great Pyramids. A cynic might say the challenge was in how the bureaucracy could spend all that money. Frankly, it has been a very impressive effort by some of our country’s best minds.

The official 2001 estimate was that it will cost $57.5 billion in 2000 dollars when it’s all over (5) but it had jumped from $45.8 billion just two years before. Many in the industry and the opposition privately expect the final price to reach $100 billion and I agree. To be fair, about 10% of the waste tonnage at Yucca Mountain will not be from civilian nuclear power plants but from Cold War defense programs. The general taxpayer, rather than the utility ratepayer, will have to kick in for that portion of the bill.

So why does it cost so much and why must we design for so long? The answer to both questions is one word – “actinides.” A spent fuel rod has four constituents. First is zirconium cladding, a metal much like titanium, neither radioactive nor toxic. Inside the cladding are the fission products and “heavy metal.” Fresh fission products are intensely radioactive, so much so, that each fuel assembly can put out as much heat as 118 one hundred watt light bulbs at time of burial, a decade after its removal from the reactor. Twenty minutes leaning up against a fully packed cask will get you your 50/50 death dose of radiation. (i.e. 500 rems). The GOOD news about fission fragments is that they decay fairly rapidly so that only a short retention time is required for their containment. Plus, they decay to stable, non-radioactive elements.

The heavy metal is the real meat of the design and there we find the challenge and the opportunity. Most of the heavy metal is uranium and plutonium, both recyclable back into new fuel for the reactors. By my back of the envelope calculation, the current 70,000 metric tonne Yucca Mountain content could make ten times the electricity, if recycled, as could the Strategic Petroleum Reserve if SPR were burned to make electricity (unlikely, I realize.) That’s a TRILLION dollars worth of electricity at wholesale and enough to fuel the current US nuke fleet for 10 years or, given the additional reactors, make all our electricity for 4 years. (6)

The real bad actors at Yucca Mountain, the stuff that drives the long-term maximum rock temperature and ultimate radiation doses out beyond 10,000 years, are the actinides. These are the radioisotopes beyond plutonium on the Periodic Table - Americium, Californium, Curium, etc, formed after a neutron is absorbed by uranium-238 without fissioning and the resultant plutonium in turn absorbs further neutrons without fissioning. Surprisingly, one of these, Americium-241, has saved thousands of lives as the active ingredient in home smoke detectors that no doubt grace your bedroom.

The solution, just like the solution to municipal waste, is segregate, recycle, and incinerate. Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is an established technology, dating back to the Manhattan Project. France, Russia, Japan, and Great Britain all do it. In the classic process, one chops up the fuel rods, dissolves them in nitric acid and separates the uranium/plutonium in one liquid stream, the fission products in another, and the actinides in a third (the zirconium cladding “husks” don’t dissolve.) The uranium is still relatively enriched in uranium-235 compared to natural, so is “blended up” to reactor fuel standards. The plutonium is mixed with uranium to become what’s known as “mixed oxide fuel” or MOX. MOX is every bit as good as reactor fuel as what our plants run on today, albeit a bit more hassle for the utilities to handle.

The economics of MOX fuel are difficult to calculate today. In the US, about half of our reactor fuel comes from scrapped Russian nuclear warheads, fueling perhaps 10% of all US electricity. This uranium source should continue to enter the market for some years and will probably expand to the burning of plutonium warheads too. Yellowcake, raw commercial-grade uranium oxide, has recently jumped in price due to rumored bidding from China anticipating a big expansion of their civilian nuclear power program but the market price could easily decline, with the opening of new mines. Remember, yellowcake is a commodity and hence is subject to the price volatility typical of commodities. It is fair to say that reactor fuel using recycled MOX will be more costly than the current once-through fuel cycle, but not significantly so for the end price of nuclear electricity. But then, I’m charged extra for my recycling program for home waste too. According to the American Enterprise Institute, household recycling costs 35% to 55% more than simple disposal (7) yet we do it in almost every urban area.

The interesting part of this proposal is how to handle the actinides, once separated. The market for home smoke detectors is already well served, so the particular Americium-241 to be buried at Yucca will need another fix. While actinides are not fissile enough in current plant designs to be considered fuel, one can design and build a reactor where they would come pretty close. In other words, we could take the pesky, expensive actinide wastes and make electricity from them!

I’ve come to realize over the years that few people appreciate the beauty of molten metal cooling as much as we nuclear engineers do. Sure, it sounds scary, but heat transfer between a hot metal fuel rod and molten metal coolant is exceptionally high, higher than any other practical method. We nuclear engineers like our reactor cores small and compact and intense, the better to lower capital costs – liquid metal cooling is a great way to do that. Of course, the designers of gasoline engines for Porsche, Mercedes, SAAB, and Corvettes appreciate liquid metal cooling too since engine exhaust valves for these power plants are hollow and half filled with molten sodium, the better to transfer excessive heat in the exhaust valve metal to the engine’s cooling systems.

The actinide “burners” would be fast reactors, using the neutrons fresh and unslowed from the initial fissioning process. What is needed, given the nuclear physics of actinides, is a very “hard” neutron spectrum (hard = fast), the harder the better. Cooling would be molten lead (in most designs, molten fluoride salts in some) avoiding the issues we saw with molten sodium in fast breeder reactor designs in the past. Useful heat would be produced as a result of the burning that could make perhaps 100 to 200 MW of electricity as a by-product (8).

Of course, no one has built an specific actinide burner yet but our researchers think it not an impossible task. Preliminary designs have been sketched out in several countries, as have preliminary fuel cycles and fuel designs. In some concepts, alternate reprocessing methods are combined with actinide burners to increase proliferation resistance.

So how does Harry Reid save us all this money? As senior senator from Nevada and Senate Minority Leader, he has fought Yucca Mountain for years and shows no sign of rolling over any time soon. So what if we suggested an alternative? With Senator Reid’s leadership, Congress could instruct the US nuclear power industry to adopt recycling. We could still use Yucca Mountain but it would then contain a tenth of the volume of waste that would be toxic for a thousandth of the time, in a waste form (fission products in pyrex glass matrix) ten times more resistant than spent fuel rods. For a rational constituent, that should sound like a great deal, making Mr. Reid a hero plus aiding America’s energy independence by substantially increasing our domestic nuclear fuel supplies.

The basic price tag for recycling of the 63,000 tons of spent civilian fuel planned for Yucca Mountain would include roughly $10 billion for reprocessing plants and fission product glassification facilities and another $10 billion for R&D and construction of perhaps two actinide burners (my preliminary estimates based on a wide review of the literature, some of it proprietary). Fuel fabrication plants for MOX fuel are coming in any case, just to deal with Cold War plutonium surpluses - $5 billion would more than do in case one wanted to assign that cost too. Yucca Mountain would still need some work but the design and construction effort required to complete it as a depository for fission products only would be trivial given the billions we’ve already spent on characterizing the site. In fact, one could open up the option of walking away from Yucca Mountain altogether and finding a new site, given that the design requirements would be so much easier – but that would be a political question!

One serious objection that we’d be sure to hear from former President Carter and the environmentalist groups is that we’d now making plutonium an article of commerce. The risks for diversion into the hands of nuclear terrorists will increase, above that poised by our allies’ recycle programs. My counter argument is that with current plans, we’re really building a future plutonium ore body. In 300 years or so, someone could tunnel into Yucca Mountain and pull out the spent fuel rods with their bare hands (9), chemically separate out the reactor grade plutonium and manufacture a creditable nuclear explosive. Note that there are 25 nuclear waste repositories planned world-wide. The answer to this objection is really, aren’t we just pushing the nuclear proliferation issue off on unborn generations by building Yucca Mountain? Why not deal with it now with recycle and actinide burners?

So on one hand we have the anticipated $100 billion to complete Yucca Mountain against $20 billion for reprocessing plants and actinide burners. We’ll call utility costs for burning MOX and new MOX fabrication plants a wash against future yellowcake savings. If Harry Reid wanted to get behind this, there are surely sensible Republicans and Democrats that would support it too. We’d save money, solve the nuclear waste issue, and increase domestic electricity fuel supply.

What’s not to like?

References:

(1) http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/msw99.htm

(2) http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/pm/budget/monsum_feb2005.pdf

(3) http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=2&catid=63

(4) Yucca Mountain Science and Engineering Report, DOE/RW-0539, May 2001

(5) http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/pm/pdf/tslccr1.pdf

(6) Roughly 63,000 tons of spent fuel at 3% fissile content (uranium + plutonium) fueling a 1,250 MW reactor that uses 1 ton of fissile material a year. Total electric consumption per EIA for 2003 at $50/MW-hr wholesale.

(7) http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17823/article_detail.asp

(8) Most preliminary estimates call for a pair of 300 MW(th) reactors which should yield 100 MWe each. Note that lead cooled reactors (or a lead-bismuth mixture) have been used by the Russian Navy for submarine propulsion.

(9) http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/thyd/peterson/papers/Repository.pdf

The doctor stated in a previous post: "...that also means I use radioactive materials, like x-rays, and bone scans"

As I have explained before, x-rays and bone scans are NOT radioactive materials. Radiation for bone scans may be generated by radioactive materials; the scans themselves are NOT radioactive materials - they are SCANS. X-rays are not generated (usually) by radioactive materials; however, x-rays are radiation.

I NEVER stated that the doctor does NOT use radioactive materials. In fact, that he has the authority to use such materials gives me nothing but the shivers especially given that he cannot understand simple distinctions such as what is printed above.

I agree with 10kBq Jaro. Just about every week or so there is another US NRC Event Report detailing how some hospital, physician or other medical staff erred in the use of irradiators or radioactive sources and over-dosed patients, in many instances to hundreds of times the dose typically received by a radiation worker in a nuclear power plant.

That being said, I do not believe that Doctor Stungun's spread of fear and hysteria over nuclear power plants is warranted at all. The following article explains why. Perhaps Dr. Stungun would realize greater benefit by concentrating on his own area of expertise (whatever that may be), and helping to correct medical industry mistakes with regard to the use of radiation treatments, than waxing so whiningly about Pu-238 for RTGs, the ATR, Yucca Mountain, etc. But I suppose that when one may not have full competence in one area, the easiest way to deflect criticism is by pointing out apparent errors elsewhere to take the focus off one's own mistakes.

Washington Post, 17 September 2003, Internet: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15666-2003Sep15.html

Radiation Chicken Little

by Theodore Rockwell
The writer has many years' experience in nuclear engineering. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a founding officer of the engineering firm MPR Associates.

I was recently invited to observe and offer advice during a revealing drill, spearheaded by the National Academy of Engineering, that tested how well information might be communicated to the public if a "dirty bomb" exploded in Washington. As I watched the interaction of real-life government officials and media decision-makers, I was struck by a glaring discrepancy: The rules for radiological emergencies are wholly inappropriate for such an event. They can change a relatively harmless incident into a life-threatening emergency. These rules apply not only to dirty bombs but also to any casualties involving nuclear power plants or their fuel.

A few minutes into the simulated exercise, a leader of the drill pleaded for some action, warning that radiation was killing people and hospitals were being overwhelmed. This bothered me, because it is well documented by all our official agencies that the radioactivity in dirty bombs is unlikely to seriously hurt anyone. People not injured by the conventional explosion itself could walk away and be out of danger. If concerned about possible contamination, they could remove their clothes and take a shower.

I made this point publicly to the participants, but they said they're getting a different story from the regulators and their scientists. The rules require a hypothetical, squeaky-clean condition, scrubbing the ground and sidewalks down to far less than the natural radiation background of God's good green Earth -- less radiation than millions of people get each year from routine medical procedures. That's the kind of thinking behind statements that the city would have to be evacuated for years after such an attack and that cleanup would cost billions. But these requirements are inappropriate. We don't treat other spills and leaks so fearfully.

If your aim were to remove a public health hazard, you would flush any residual radioactivity down the drain with hoses and be done with it. Would that contaminate the Chesapeake Bay? Not in any practical sense. It would add insignificantly to the bay's overall natural radioactivity. Expensive instrumentation might detect it for a while, but it would not create a public health hazard.

Several participants objected that experts might agree on that, but that the public would panic nonetheless, and that's what we should plan for. At this point, an expert on human behavior got up and said flatly that if you tell people there is no danger, and they have no reason to disbelieve you, they will remain calm. (They did so during the recent blackout.) But if you keep telling them you expect them to panic, they will oblige you. And that's what we're doing.

When I raised this issue with a Nuclear Regulatory Commission official years ago, he replied in horror that if he bought my reasoning, he'd have to ask what he was there for. He should, and so should the contractors and scientists devoting their careers to detailing thousands of unrealistic "what-if" scenarios. When pressed, they justify their actions by saying, "We're just trying to ensure safety." But pushed to such extremes, we're not safer; we're just wrong. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, Nils Diaz, has asked that more realistic premises be used to evaluate safety -- not looser, not lower, just more realistic. That's a good start. Real safety is based on realistic premises.

On that basis, we should ask why our emergency planning calls for evacuating millions of people around nuclear power plants. Certainly such a mass evacuation would be a mess. (If you really thought the air was full of fission products, would you want to order people to go mill around in it?) The question is, could any realistic damage to the plant warrant such evacuation? The answer, as described in the Sept. 20, 2002, issue of Science, is that one can do nothing to an American-type nuclear power plant or its fuel that would create a serious public health hazard. You might produce a meltdown, as occurred at Three Mile Island, but that event caused no human or environmental injury. Even if the containment structure were also compromised, physical tests and analyses of spent fuel show there would be little dispersion, so there would be few if any radiation injuries. By assuming otherwise, we create unwarranted terror, and the terrorists win.

Common everyone--please let's stop the emotionally inflammatory personal attacks. That's not what this board is about.

I think most everyone agrees that x-rays are probably used too often--as Stun says 'as a revenue generating tool', rather than the often lifesaving diagnositic that it is. Sad, but all too true--such abuses exist.

However, I think that what 10kBqJaro and Iprimap also have pointed out in that past is that radiation and radioactivity are all around us--all the time--despite anything humans have ever done. The potassium in your bananna in your lunch--is partially radioactive. The peanut butter in your PB&J is radioactive, because the soil where the peanuts are primarily grown, that of Geogia, is rich in radon producing actinides--naturally. There have been no major spills of radioactive waste in Georgia--the soil is just naturally rich in these substances. Its not that radiation exposure is unnatural, harmful, or mutating, it's that it is always there. Always has been. Always will be.

The question is magnitutde of exposure.

Look at the history of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--as terrible as those attacks were, and considering the death and destruction that was caused by two comparatively 'small' atomic bombs, those cities are now healthy, inhabitated. At present, radioactive contamination from those attacks is all but nill. The fallout after the terrible tragedy of Chernobyl, which did displace hundreds of thousands of people, and as heavy as that fallout was, did not promulgate the biblical level of mass death and suffering that was initially reported. As terrible of a disaster as it was, we are still here. Many of us are quite healthy (although some--such as myself--could stand to lose a few pounds!)





-- Edited by GoogleNaut at 02:12, 2005-10-09