House of Lords on CoRWM Report

They say it's "incoherent." And it is; that's the sad part.

The report does not make any concrete proposals. It recommends that more committees be set up and the issue discussed, saying that the British government is moving too fast.
That's right: telling the British government to slow down. It's difficult to think of a recommendation that lacks initiative to a greater degree.

They also are fixed on geologic disposal and do not seem to be interested in processing beyond the existing PUREX-and-storage instead of recycling or beneficial use of fission products. That's a terrible mistake; these materials can be useful and shouldn't be dumped.

RTGs for Mars

The Mars Science Laboratory will carry a device known as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) that converts the heat given off when radiation is absorbed by metal into electricity, with no moving parts.
All that's required is a piece of radioactive material, sealed up inside metal or ceramic, and a thermocouple. The result is a lot of electricity from a small device that takes care of itself, for as long as the material is radioactive (a slight problem being the fact that the longer the material is radioactive, the less radioactive it actually is--materials that are chosen are the best combinations of time and activity, like plutonium-238 or the "nuclear waste" substance strontium-90). See a post from July 2005 for more.

It apparently wasn't discussed very loudly until recently for political reasons, given the Moon-hoax-theorist level of ignorance surrounding the last major RTG mission, Cassini.

Swedish Problems?

Swedish regulators (who are possibly even less rational than the NRC) ordered a work stoppage effective June 21 (?) for paperwork violations ("failure to provide sufficient evidence" and "insufficient methods").

Notice how no actual problems are involved.

Link.

What About All Those Indigenous Populations That Are Being Used as a Dumping Ground?

An Australian indigenous group has volunteered a part of their land as a low- and intermediate-level waste repository (read: for rubber gloves and used reactor parts, respectively).

Do you think they'll stop using the "environmental racism" argument? Don't hold your breath.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"But the UK has a potential solution. British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) operates a spent fuel reprocessing facility at Sellafield on the west coast of Wales, where it extracts uranium and plutonium. Should Amergen and Entergy become able to ship spent fuel rods from their U.S. nukes to Sellafield, what is now useless radwaste will be worth billions."

-Michael Steinberg

Is there something wrong with separating what is actually waste from unused nuclear fuel? Does making money from it make it bad?

BTW...Sellafield is in Cumbria...and Cumbria is in England, not Wales.

UK Pre-Licensing: Learning from the Lack of US-Canada Cooperation

The AP-1000, EPR, ESBWR, and ACR-1000 have been submitted. The ACR has the advantage of being able to consume waste from the others, as well as some from the British nuclear weapons program; I hope they can come up with a way to coordinate these two fuel cycles. US and Canadian governments take note.

They also seem to be using a design-basis site, which is something we really need to start using in the US.

Link.

"Nuclear Waste Per Capita"

I didn't know it was this easy to get press. Maybe we should pour orange juice into a vacuum breaker and get the NRC's response on video, or make an inflatable of a polar bear hugging a containment structure, or something like that.

How to turn a five-minute calculation into a "major, startling new report":

1. Figure out how much nuclear waste was produced by nuclear power plants in each state from publicly-available numbers. Inflate this figure by a factor of 20-30 by ignoring the unused fuel still left in the fuel rods that are in storage.
2. Get population data.
3. Divide.
4. Give it to your state groups to make a hullabaloo, even if the number is all of two pounds.

That's right. The most nuclear waste that anyone has accumulated per capita around the country is 2.15 pounds. That's something to be proud of--how much carbon dioxide has accumulated in the atmosphere from coal burning, per capita, and how much particulate matter is in people's lungs from coal burning, per capita? And how much of that nuclear waste is in the environment?

Zero.

Perversely, this is being used to justify a subsidy for fossil fuels, paid for by the operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. In Anti-Nuke World, climate scientists have it all wrong: carbon dioxide doesn't cause global warming; nuclear power plants do. Sure.

Talk about social responsibility. Yes, nuclear waste is going to be around for a while; a lot longer if we don't reuse the half-used fuel that poses the biggest part of the waste problem. But so are the Pyramids; the Pyramids have no conceivable use to the generations that have had to live alongside them. Like the Pyramids, there's no way for it to magically disperse itself into the environment. Like the Pyramids, it doesn't require any nannying. Like the Pyramids--and unlike chemical toxins from coal burners--it has a finite lifetime. Like the Pyramids, people regard it as magical and not the physical entity that it is.

Let's cite this study in the future. It looks very useful, not just from the data, but from the source.

More from We Support Lee (plus background on the subsidy here).

Link.

LaCrosse RPV Heads to Barnwell; Crackpots Up In Arms

Part 1 of this anti-nuclear email alert as well as the entirety of this one are devoted to complaining about the decommissioned LaCrosse nuclear power plant's reactor pressure vessel (a tank of pressurized water that the reactor's fuel rods were once suspended in) heading to the Barnwell low-level waste site. They inaccurately call it a "core" (the core is the fuel rods and associated structure to hold them in place) and say that Barnwell will close in 2008 (it will close to low-level waste from all states except those in the Mid-Atlantic Compact).

New NIRS Transportation Report

This one is a set of maps showing how YOU WILL BE VICTIMIZED under GNEP, assuming a facility at the Savannah River Site. It's apparently going to come out tomorrow; if we had a PR organization to speak of, maybe we could have done something about it.

Link to email alert.

More on Indian Point from The Journal News

Well, what is a spent fuel pool?

Most people's experience of "fuel" is gasoline. Thus, the image that comes into most people's heads when you say "spent fuel pool" is somebody draining spent nuclear gasoline from the reactor and pouring it into a spent fuel pool. Unsurprisingly, this image is far enough from the reality of what a spent fuel pool is that the general public does not understand how we can say that a leak from a spent fuel pool is irrelevant.
Spent fuel pools look very much like swimming pools, but with a rack at the bottom. That rack is used to store fuel rods that have already been through the reactor and are awaiting long-term storage, disposal, or the recovery of unused energy. Hence, a spent fuel pool.
The term "spent fuel pool" does not accurately describe what it is. It is more correctly described as an "underwater rack"--so why can't we call it one?
Easy. Because we don't. We always do what we always have done, simply because we always have done it; accordingly, we haven't changed our approach and the industry hasn't changed its products since about 1975. If someone had decided in 1975 that it was a violation of professional ethics to speak languages other than Romanian, nuclear engineers all would have said "OK," learned Romanian, and conducted every meeting, hearing, and public briefing in Romanian. When the public shows up to an NRC hearing and listens to two hours of rapid-fire Romanian, they (a) don't understand anything and (b) start throwing eggs at those onstage.
We can't please the loons. But we can communicate to the public in a way that they can understand; the packaging is independent of the content and there is nothing more ethical than transparency.

More important, I suppose, is "why does the industry insist on calling it a spent fuel pool?"

I agree with the article in that leaks aren't convincing. They're a lot less convincing when we're unwittingly misleading people about what's leaking.

As usual with The Journal News articles, the comments section is more encouraging; the article is a better barometer.

Link.

NRC Approves New Nuclear Waste Rule

"Nuclear waste" has been redefined to include material produced in accelerators, radium, and anything else the NRC feels like regulating.

Challenging it in the courts isn't really an option: this was mandated in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"The toxic wastes from atomic power systems will poison planet Earth for thousands of years to come. Our soil and water are being poisoned by the widespread burying of nuclear waste on land and sea! Atomic energy is always in conflict with all Life, because the very nature of 'atom-splitting' is destruction not construction. For this reason, it can never be used for peace or peaceful activities. How can peace be achieved by that which is by nature unpeaceful? Splitting atoms disrupts the flow of force through them."

-'infinity2' (hat tip: Freedom for Fission)

Wow.

You know, I'd rather not swing in a tree. But nuclear power sure has a knack for ticking off anti-science crackpots.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"They still don't have a way to store the waste which stays toxic for ... it has a half-life of 4.5 billion years."

-Diane Beeny, Union County New Jersey Peace Council

It's been stored for 50 years and hasn't even gotten out, much less harmed anyone. There's no reason why the systems currently in place (dry-cask storage) can't work until the waste decays to the level of radioactivity of the natural uranium that was mined. That will take about 500 years.
So what's the 4.5 billion years from? 4.5 billion years is the half-life of the fuel, not the waste! The actual "waste problem" is the partly-used fuel--plutonium--which still works as fuel for advanced reactors, if only Congress would legalize reuse of the 95% of nuclear fuel that is not used by today's nuclear power plants.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Nuclear power would actually contribute to global warming. It uses a lot of fossil fuels to mine uranium."

-Diane Beeny, Union County New Jersey Peace Council

...when nuclear energy is not available to do those same functions. Are they saying that nuclear power isn't nuclear enough?

And who says we have to mine uranium to use nuclear power? We have huge stockpiles of it, mainly the unused uranium in nuclear waste.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"California must not abandon our state's responsible moratorium on siting new nuclear plants until the considerable problem of highly radioactive waste is solved."

-Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility

As it currently stands, the "moratorium" also prohibits solving the waste problem by any other means than the federal government taking the waste somewhere and storing or dumping it. The ban even outlaws more-efficient reactors that can run directly on the "waste" (which in this case is only 3%-5% waste, the rest being perfectly good fuel).

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"A coalition of eight powerful utilities is desperately trying to construct a radioactive waste dump on the remote Skull Valley Goshute Reservation in Utah. A handful of brave and committed tribal members are resisting in an effort to protect what remains of their ancestral lands."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

...resisting against the majority of their fellow tribal members, who want this "dump" (which is actually a parking lot with casks full of 5%-used fuel rods sitting on it).

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Reactors are filling up with spent radioactive fuel and there is no safe place to put this deadly waste."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

Reactors don't "fill up" with waste. A nuclear reactor of the type in use in the United States today is an arrangement of uranium rods in a tank of water; the waste is the atoms that have already split, which stay in the fuel rods. After a fuel rod is about 5% used, it is taken out of the tank of water and placed in either an underwater rack (of course, in a different geometric arrangement so it doesn't go critical) or a steel and concrete cask. At that point, the 5% of the rod which is waste can be separated and the rest reused (usually in a more advanced reactor that we unfortunately haven't built), or the rod can be stored indefinitely. Currently, all 5%-used fuel rods in the US are stored indefinitely at nuclear power plants, and have been for 50 years.
Sounds like a lot of unused fuel, doesn't it? Turns out it's a 500-year supply, even if uranium mining stopped today. If there's no place to put it, they should want to stop uranium mining and start using up the unused fuel that we're going to have to store anyway--which also includes half-used fuel, like plutonium, that poses the greatest long-term threat. Yet they're also against recycling.

Gee, if you just read their website, it might give you the impression that their objective is to find someone to blame instead of solving problems.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Nuclear Waste + Native Lands= Environmental Racism"

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

Everything's a native land. Does that mean that nobody can ever do anything anywhere, because almost every square inch of inhabitable land on the planet (except, obviously, Antarctica) has been stolen from someone at some point? NIRS staff even own houses built on land stolen from Native Americans in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
And no, there is no "racism" in selecting a repository site that is suitable for a repository--the racism is on the part of 19th Century governments forcing Native Americans to live in areas suitable only for nuclear waste repositories.

That said, Yucca Mountain is not a good idea. It's suitable for a geologic repository, but we don't need one. The industry wants to get nuclear waste off its hands, because it is unfair to expect them to store it all while the fossil fuel industries can dump everything they make into our air and water. The answer, we think, is to tell everyone to store their waste or put it to good use--or not make it in the first place.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"8,000: Cubic feet of out-of-compact waste advocated by Studsvic lobbyists as more "moderate" approach. In reality, this restricted quantity favors Studvic's processing faciliy in Tennessee which could reduce the volume of the nation's 40,000 cf of waste generated annually by 5 times. Radioactivity is not reduced, however, meaning that 8,000 cf would be equally as hazardous as 40,000 cf. "

-Don't Waste South Carolina

So what? If you're complaining about low-level waste volume (which they are), why not use a process that compresses it?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"98: Percent of the nation's commercial Low Level Waste curies were buried at Barnwell in 2006. "

-Don't Waste South Carolina

Note: curies. Curies measure the number of particles radiated, not their strength or their effect on tissue. Curies certainly do not measure the volume of waste, or how much of this "nuclear waste" is actually radioactive.
It also doesn't measure how much of that low-level waste production was unnecessary, spurred by regulations that required disposable shields to protect plant workers from doses equivalent to a vacation in the Rockies. Those end up as "nuclear waste"--at least the US doesn't have the strange rules in place in the UK that order everything from a nuclear power plant (up to and including coffee cups from the breakroom) disposed of as nuclear waste, irrespective of any actual radiation output.
And it also doesn't mention that hospitals, with their life-saving nuclear medicine departments, are prodigious producers of low-level "nuclear waste" in the form of used radiation sources, shields, gloves, and other equipment. Their campaign has very little to do with Barnwell and a lot to do with a desire to stop nuclear power--with no regard for what might happen to the critically sick who need nuclear medicine.

Gentilly 2 to Expand Dry-Cask Storage

It will allow a major life extension (Canadian reactors are not relicensed for 20 years like American ones but rather allowed to operate in two-year increments until they fail to meet regulations). This life extension program will also involve the replacement of other components (mainly the pressure tubes that hold bundles of fuel rods in Canadian reactors and the steam generators), which will require a fairly long outage beginning in about 2010.

Link.

Japanese Town Votes Out Pro-Repository Mayor

Guess it's not receiving the reception that it did in South Korea, eh?

That's probably good in the long run, though: they're not going to need one for at least a couple of hundred years, and by then, the stable fission product daughters could be extracted and sold as e.g. industrial catalysts. Most of the research on how to do that is happening in Japan, and it really needs to continue.

Link.

Nuclear Waste From Oil?

Turns out that geological formations that are stable enough to trap oil and natural gas are stable enough to trap radon. It also turns out that since radon is inert, when it is found with gas it can't be trapped by chemicals. Thus it tends to be emitted from oil rigs at a decent rate.

Why is this coming up? Well, NIRS has decided to ignore the fact that the oil industry's nuclear waste is dumped into the environment, and their meaningless (and incorrect) soundbite that they "estimate that the reprocessing plants at La Hague and BNFL’s Sellafield release up to 90% of the world’s artificial aerial radioactivity" has come up in a discussion at Know_Nukes. Take note; it sounds like a useful response.

More About Nuclear Power and Global Warming

It has appeared in the LA Times (and has previously appeared on this blog here and here).

This really highlights the importance of having a media-friendly (not incorrect or oversimplified, but just media-friendly) response to every anti-nuclear argument we can find--the media is not out to get us and does not have an agenda most of the time, but is rather simply interested in ratings. In other words, there's a hype bias: we must make things appear important, and this task is made quite a bit easier by the fact that what we do is important (especially as opposed to things like the private lives of celebrities). There is no reason that arguments like "the coal-fired power plants used to power enrichment facilities emit greenhouse gases" or "nuclear power plants are terrorist targets" should be allowed to stand. Good, quick, common-sense, accurate responses can be crafted; I would suggest:

"If a nuclear plant were there instead of a coal-fired one, there wouldn't be any greenhouse gases, so don't blame us."

"The notion that nuclear power plant operators should be obligated to protect their facilities against military attack by enemies of the United States is patently ridiculous."

The waste argument was of course mentioned, and beyond my continuous comments about how we can defuse this in a number of ways, I'd like to suggest that the use of the phrase "opponents point out" means that the reporter thinks that these things are undisputed facts. They aren't, and we need to make that clear; not with the NEI-style pat on the head, but by cutting to the chase and telling people how the technology actually works.

Obviously, also, if they were really confident in their projections of the cost of nuclear power, they wouldn't want to ban it for "economic reasons." If the argument goes that it's good but expensive, let it fail in the market. And the related argument that nuclear power is ineffective because the plants built in the 1980s took many years to go online and were expensive to build is just a self-fulfilling prophecy--if they hadn't acted to delay the plants, they wouldn't have taken as long to build, and if they hadn't taken as long to build, the high interest rates of the early 1980s wouldn't have had as much of an effect on the capital costs. The industry doesn't need more money; it needs a functional and consistent regulatory system.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Despite the claims of proponents, reprocessing is not "recycling" and will not help the nation’s waste problem--it will only spread the radioactive waste over a greater volume of waste streams."

-Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

1. Reprocessing is a part of recycling; reprocessing recovers material from spent fuel, and those materials must be reused to complete the recycling process. For instance, Britain reprocesses (using an old former military facility designed to extract plutonium), but they don't use any of the products, instead simply storing them separately. Details, details.
2. The aforementioned old military facilities were intended to separate weapons-grade plutonium from Chernobyl-style plutonium production reactors' spent fuel. Commercial utilities don't need weapons-grade plutonium and don't want the added expense and costs of both the old approach to reprocessing and Chernobyl-style reactors. As such, when a cheaper option is available that better suits the needs of their much-less-picky nuclear power plants, they would greatly prefer it over military-surplus facilities (unless those facilities are available for free from the military, that is). GNEP is such an option.
3. "Waste streams" means that people handling plutonium at the old facilities would occasionally get plutonium dust on their rubber gloves, which were then disposed of as low-level nuclear waste.

May 2007 Popular Science Runs Article on GNEP

They confuse it a bit with PUREX and don't explain the advanced fast reactors or pyroprocessing components, but it's a decent treatment. And they don't mention that the plutonium even if extracted, wouldn't work in bombs, or that the proposed facility (while not really eliminating any risks) doesn't get you any closer to separated plutonium; you'd still need a military plutonium-extraction facility.

A link isn't online yet, but I'll post it when it's available.

A Different Kind of Nuclear Hydrogen Production

A question for nuclear engineers: how much tritium does a 1000-megawatt light water nuclear power plant that doesn't use gadolinium burnable absorbers produce in a year at, say, 90% of capacity?

From an energy perspective, it's a non-trivial amount of tritium and helium-3 for whenever fusion ends up working. Has anyone ever thought of storing it?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"I 1988 I came to comprehend the significance of the nuclear dumping allegation(s), Allegations, that had first been relayed to me, in 1971. The personnel making the allegations had, allegedly, been employed in 1968 to decommission ‘nuclear facilities’ at Shell Research Limited’s-Thornton Research Centre, Cheshire, England."

-'John Alfred Dyer'

"Allegations, allegations, allegations. Where are all the alligators?"

-Former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley

USA Today Publishes Interesting Collection of Nuclear Opinions

One of them is the infamous form letter from Gerry Wolff on Concentrating Solar Power, two are decent, and one is from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

1. The plant pictured is Browns Ferry, not Three Mile Island.
2. If you think that "building nuclear power plants is not cost-effective," you should have enough confidence in your projection to not push for political restrictions. Let 'em fail in the marketplace if you think they will, and if they don't, then all the better for the planet.
3. There doesn't have to be a long-term geologic waste storage site if we can get more energy out of the fuel than we already do (i.e., reuse the "waste" that is in fact 95%-97% fuel in more efficient reactors). There is in fact enough unused energy in nuclear waste to provide all of America's electricity for 500 years. That gets to #4:
4. Reprocessing nuclear waste to recover useful material is not dangerous, a proliferation threat, or a security threat. They're in fact talking about military facilities that recovered plutonium for bombs!
5. Being a terrorist target is a good thing; it means that you have value and are worth defending. Asking nuclear power plant operators to defend their facilities against military attack by enemies of the United States is not only ludicrously unreasonable, but is a structural subsidy for the ever-so-socially-responsible coal industry.
6. The US government's nuclear regulations themselves are micromanaging, inconsistent, and miss the point. They have a standard for everything but how to stock the breakroom refrigerator, and this missing-the-forest-for-the-trees control freak approach not only failed to prevent Three Mile Island but was its major institutional cause.

Link.

Yucca Emails Update

Apparently three guys complaining about quality control procedures is not evidence of data falsification, just that "the nuclear culture" (?) isn't in place. Well I'll be.

And, generally, if you say that you have smoking-gun evidence of falsified data in an email, it should mean that you have an email in which someone states that they have falsified data or in which someone orders someone else to falsify data, preferably with an affirmative response and/or a record of the original data. Emails in which people say that the paper trail cannot prove that something wasn't done incorrectly do not, in fact, count.

Link.

Attempt at Overturning California's Reactor Ban

Practically everybody has commented on it now (Atomic Insights, Energy from Thorium, NEI, We Support Lee, Advanced Nanotechnology), and here are my belated two cents.

1. It's clear to all involved that the bill has no chance, and that the idea of passing the bill is not the point. The idea is to make people think.
2. It is my sincere belief that even an old British MAGNOX reactor running on natural uranium that produces many times more waste than a modern reactor would be better than burning coal in Wyoming and Utah, for the simple ethical reason that coal waste ends up in the environment and nuclear waste doesn't. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the California legislature does not have jurisdiction over Wyoming and Utah, but they do have the power to internalize their waste production to make those coal-fired plants unnecessary. If they refuse to lead, someone could also make a fortune building a fleet of nukes in Utah.
3. I would like to see something pass, not this year, but in the near future. Such a bill would not necessarily even have to remove the basic idea that no more nuclear waste is to be produced in California, the existing reactors excepted. Reactors and processes exist today that did not exist in 1976; today, it is now possible to take an American reactor's long, square spent fuel assemblies and remanufacture them into short, round Canadian ones, then directly use them in a more-efficient Canadian reactor. If a Canadian reactor were built near Fresno instead of the currently-planned EPR, it would meet the spirit but not the letter of the current statute. I believe that this needs to be clarified so that only reactors that do not produce spent fuel are allowed--which can hardly be said to weaken the statute!
4. If waste-eating reactors were allowed in California, perhaps someone could sit down with the Fresno Nuclear Energy Group to persuade them to drop the EPR. There is no advantage to them in ordering a reactor that is not certified for use in the United States as opposed to other ones which are also not certified in the United States. It will take long enough to get the associated permits that any waste-eating reactor that they select will be ready in time for construction. The cost difference between a waste-eating reactor and the EPR would be easily made up by charging the Diablo Canyon, San Onofre, Rancho Seco, Vallecitos, and Humboldt Bay owners to take their spent fuel off their hands. Do they have any idea how much someone would