The future of nuclear power

[bikerdruid]

This is what worries me. Where is all the waste going to go?

...and be safely stored for a million years?
this worries me too.

 

[Carn]

DC beat me to it. There's no real, effective and permanent solution for the accumulation of nuclear waste.

What about moon or sun?

Permanent yes, efficient depending on how economic space travel can be made and safe depending on how many rockets explode in or near atmosphere.

 

[Dinwar]

how about; your idea was foolish and the waste of time dealing with it should be launched.

How about asking a physicist to address how to capture all the kinetic energy and convert it, from the waste?

None of this has been demonstrated, merely authoritatively stated. Perhaps you understand it, and can see where everything goes wrong, but I certainly can't, and without at least SOME data I can't reasonably conclude that it's not a viable idea.

The first step in mitigating issues is to identify them. The way I see it, there are several catagories of potential problem:
1) Mechanical
2) Weather
3) Astronomical
4) Human

Mechanical includes all of the pieces of the equation (from transport to launch through getting the stuff to its final destination) that can fail. We've become much better at getting rockets off the ground than in the past--the troubles with the shuttles recently have been due to age, which will not be an issue with the rockets I'm proposing. However, beyond that I don't have a good understanding of what's needed vs. what's not to get a rocket to another planet. I know that we have missiles that can hit things in orbit from sealevel platforms; how much more complex does it need to be? Bigger, sure, but would we have to make it more complex?

Weather includes all the potential hazards the rocket could encounter in the atmosphere. These include turbulance, lightning, hail, cold, high winds, and the like. Radiation is a bit difficult to place (do we include the Van Allen belts? Do we CARE about the Van Allen belts? questions like that). Anyway, these can largely be mitigated by launching from areas with relatively low variability in the weather and planning around potentially hazardous weather.

Astronomical hazards include things happening in/from space--things likemicrometeorites hitting the engine and throwing it off course, or radiation damaging flight controls, things like that. I know there's a lot of space junk, but after that it's an open question in my mind.

The human element is always dangerous--you can have all the controls in place, but if someone goes around them they don't matter. Checklists help. There would have to be tight tight TIGHT controls on the materials, both in the rocket and on the ground (communications). In general, good managers would help mitigate this.

Something to always keep in mind: all of this costs money. And companies don't like to spend money.

Is there anything I'm missing?

As for other options, I know there are other, probably better, options. I proposed one myself--finding uses for the material. I'm simply speculating on what can be done with it. If you have a back-of-the-envelope calculation, or an experiment, or something, that can demonstrate the "launch it into space" idea is bad I'll gladly give it up. There's even a reason I know for not using this method that no one has mentioned (we may want to make the planets livable in the future, and nuclear waste will make that more difficult). But I'm not going to shut up merely because someone says, without supporting reasoning, it's a bad idea.

 

[Mark6]

...and be safely stored for a million years?
this worries me too.

I think the whole concept "We must store radioactive waste forever!" is wrong-headed. When I see an entirely serious discussion among scientists how to design warning signs which will be understandable 10,000 years from now when all present languages are extinct, my MOST charitable thought is "They have no imagination".

Either technological civilization will remain, or it will not. If technological civilization remains, they will know about nuclear fission and will have radiation detectors. If they stumble into unmarked cave with obviously artificial caskets, they will figure out what this is quickly enough. And if technological civilization does not remain, then a few dozen or a few hundred death resulting when a tribe of ignorant savages dismantles a nuclear waste site will be the LEAST of humanity's problems. (Not to mention, how deep can non-industrial savages dig?)

I like France's solution. The do not even try to bury their radioactive waste in a "Chamber of Eternity". Instead they keep the stuff above ground, monitor it, replace sensors and filters as necessary, and extract useful isotopes when and if it becomes practical. The assumption is that French civilization remains sophisticated enough to keep actively managed radioactive waste under control. And if it does not... there will be hell of a lot more deaths from other causes.

 

[Dinwar]

So "find a use for the stuff" is a viable alternative--France is using it. Cool!

 

[ellindsey]

So "find a use for the stuff" is a viable alternative--France is using it. Cool!

Nuclear waste contains a wide variety of isotopes, many of which are never found naturally. Some of these are quite useful for applications such as radiation treatment for cancer or RTGs for space probes or other remote long-term power requirements. There are also some rare earth elements that might actually be profitably mined from nuclear waste, being very scarce in natural ores. Spent fuel rods are also mostly made up of still-usable fuel, which can be reprocessed and put right back into a reactor. The French already do this.

Launching nuclear waste into the sun or otherwise permanently disposing of it would be a terrible shame, this stuff can be profitably reprocessed and recycled. The problems with dealing with nuclear waste are financial and political, not technological.

 

[Eddie Dane]

I understand that spent fuel can be re-used to generate power.

It is this issue I'm particularly interested in.

Is this technology already available? Or is it in a theoretical phase?

 

[Wowbagger]

that was what people thought of horse, at one time.

That was before nuclear power was discovered. And, internal combustion, for that matter.

If all that mass is life threatening just to heat water, i think your efficiency measure is a weee bit whacked.

I think your ideas about efficient power systems are naive.

Useable power does not merely come from heat. The type of electric power we use in the grid originates from spinning turbines. Heat, alone, can not spin them. It takes the force of something like stream to do it.

There might be other ways to generate electric power, but unless you've studied energy systems sufficiently to come up with more efficient solutions (which I doubt), your comments seem nothing more than naive assumptions.

That is what cracked me up on your post. Heat from the physicists point of view is just fast particles, why the heck cant the idiots make a better glove, versus trying to heat water?

ie..... heat is the product of morons. tO HEAT WATER is but a small range within the spectrum of em.

One could make a similar argument about automobiles: Any idiot can get a few wheels to roll around on a surface. Why waste all that gasoline to do it? It's trivial to just use our own arms to turn some cranks, right?
There is a lot more to the story than what you seem to realize.

 

[Delvo]

...and be safely stored for a million years?
this worries me too.

If you re-use it, not only can you get multiple times as much energy out as the first single use gets, but the remaining radiation is severely weakened in intensity and duration.

What about moon or sun?

Getting that specific about where to put it if it's off of the Earth is pointless. Off of the Earth is off of the Earth. Getting stuff to the sun, in particular, despite serving no purpose, would call for rather extraordinary effort. To get from orbit to the object that you're orbiting, you need to cancel out the forward momentum that you have at your orbital speed, which means a vehicle leaving Earth to go to the sun would need to be aimed back along the Earth's orbital path at the same speed that the Earth is moving forward along it. That speed just happens to be several times faster than our space vehicles ordinarily go or even can go, which makes it also several times faster than necessary to just get away from here.

But sending the stuff out to space isn't a viable idea anyway, with the number of pounds/tons of matter in question. The scale is like expecting a colony of the world's strongest ants to remove the sand from a beach.

 

[Hindmost]

The radioactive waste from commercial reactors is highly radioactive for only a few years. Afterwards, the fuel will not generate much heat and can be stored in dry casks. This is what is being done in the US. France...as has been pointed out... has a monitored storage system and also reprocesses fuel to reuse the plutonium and uranium.

Most of the waste will decay to stable elements in about 300 years. Plus, there just isn't that much waste considering due to the energy density of uranium--a lot of energy for very little material. A few isotopes have long half-lives which are a different problem. The U238 and U235 were already here, so it is not much different. Plutonium and other transuranics will be around for a long time but can be placed in a fast reactor and fissioned. Reprocessing fuel to remove plutonium and uranium is expensive and not exactly easy, but the technology does exist. Since uranium is relatively plentiful right now, there really isn't an economic insentive to reprocess fuel. France has a long term outlook and has kept the technology viable.

In the US, nuclear provides about 20 percent of the electricity needs. This will likely stay flat or possibly increase a small amount. What will limit nuclear is the expense along with lack of needed industrial capacity around the world. These things are just not that easy to build and we have had too long of a downturn. We are playing catch up and it will take some work over the next decade.

glenn

 

[Philip]

For the thread about scientists and politics, I started to compose a reply about unscientific arguments against nuclear power. One of those arguments is when a politician says "Science still hasn't found a solution for nuclear waste." That's a lie.

Scientists and engineers have found solutions to the problem of nuclear waste that satisfy any reasonable expectations of safety. The reasons there is no central repository for spent fuel in the US are entirely political.

No state wants to be the location of a permanent repository. People are irrationally more afraid of a truck with a spent fuel transportation cask that can survive being slammed into a concrete wall at 90 miles per hour than they are of a thin-walled gasoline tanker going to their neighborhood gasoline stations.

Last February when there was an explosion at a natural-gas-fired power plant that killed five workers, not a single news report I saw on TV mentioned that it was a gas-fired power plant and none of the online articles mention gas or gas-fired in the headline, but, if there's a radiation leak at a nuclear power plant that exposes the closest worker to one billionth what he'd be exposed to in a year from background radiation anyway, the news media will mention loudly and prominently that it was a NUCLEAR power plant.

I was disgusted by a recent All Things Considered report on the development carbon-free electric power generation to combat global warming that made no mention of nuclear power.

The right denies that anthropogenic global warming is happening, and the left opposes the only source of power with a demonstrated capability of replacing a large fraction of fossil-fuel power plants.

In the US at least for the foreseeable future, we'll have maybe a few new nuclear power plants and lots of small alternative energy projects that will total a few hundred MW, but mostly we'll continue to burn fossil fuels to produce our electricity, especially coal.

 

[Roboramma]

I'd be interested in hearing ideas. I don't think it's possible.

Here's an idea, don't use rockets, use cannons. The fired projectile won't explode because it isn't explosive.

It would still have to be made structurally sound enough not to break up from the extreme g-forces (both in the cannon and also after being fired) but I imagine that's a problem orders of magnitude simpler than making a rocket that won't ever explode.

See this wiki article on space guns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun

A space gun, by itself, is generally not capable of placing objects into stable orbit around the planet, unless the objects are able to perform course corrections after launch.

Luckily we don't need a stable orbit, so long as it's launched beyond earth orbit, and at least into a path that won't potentially recross earth orbit. I don't know how difficult that is, however.

Here's another link from wiki with some other possibilities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch#Projectile_launchers

 

[Bishadi]

I think your ideas about efficient power systems are naive.

Useable power does not merely come from heat.

from Nuclear power, that is all it is, Heat that the industry is using

The type of electric power we use in the grid originates from spinning turbines. Heat, alone, can not spin them. It takes the force of something like stream to do it.

that is cute.

There might be other ways to generate electric power, but unless you've studied energy systems sufficiently to come up with more efficient solutions (which I doubt), your comments seem nothing more than naive assumptions.

I assume heat is what scientist are using from the fission of nuclear reactions. Just to heat water, to turn the generators.

ie... splitting the atom, to enable momentum to h2o (that is your nuclear process, then it gets electrical)

And for 'the rest of the story'............................


it is funny.........the fission process, uses fast particles to heat water but the science has no idea what to do with the fast particles left over after the use of the utter fast particles (heat)


the efficiency issue is, all the waste left over is produced and the 'community' doesnt know what to do with it.

My suggesting was make a better glove to catch the fast particles left over to load a spring, then turn a wheel with that spring.

dat's smaught, wright?

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

Waste management is far easier than nuclears opponents want you to know:

# All the spent nuclear fuel from power plants and other sources since the beginning of nuclear power in the US 50 years ago is so small in volume that it could all fit in a single CostCo stacked to a depth of 9 feet. All the spent fuel generated in the annual operation of a single power plant reactor would fit in the bed of a standard pickup truck.

# If an American got all his or her lifetime electricity solely from nuclear power, that person’s total share of the waste would fit into one soda can. Of that, only a trace is long-lived. In France, where nuclear fuel is recycled, waste is drastically reduced, so that the lifetime total for a family of four would fit in a single coffee cup.

http://cravenspowertosavetheworld.com/nuclear-energy-faq-mainmenu-30/13-what-about-nuclear-waste

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

I understand that spent fuel can be re-used to generate power.

It is this issue I'm particularly interested in.

Is this technology already available? Or is it in a theoretical phase?

Partially spent fuel from a reactor can be re-used as much as 20 times over.

And no, the technology is not theoretical. It was in fact first developed back in the 1940s.

 

[Sword_Of_Truth]

For the thread about scientists and politics, I started to compose a reply about unscientific arguments against nuclear power. One of those arguments is when a politician says "Science still hasn't found a solution for nuclear waste." That's a lie.

Scientists and engineers have found solutions to the problem of nuclear waste that satisfy any reasonable expectations of safety. The reasons there is no central repository for spent fuel in the US are entirely political.

No state wants to be the location of a permanent repository. People are irrationally more afraid of a truck with a spent fuel transportation cask that can survive being slammed into a concrete wall at 90 miles per hour than they are of a thin-walled gasoline tanker going to their neighborhood gasoline stations.

Last February when there was an explosion at a natural-gas-fired power plant that killed five workers, not a single news report I saw on TV mentioned that it was a gas-fired power plant and none of the online articles mention gas or gas-fired in the headline, but, if there's a radiation leak at a nuclear power plant that exposes the closest worker to one billionth what he'd be exposed to in a year from background radiation anyway, the news media will mention loudly and prominently that it was a NUCLEAR power plant.

I was disgusted by a recent All Things Considered report on the development carbon-free electric power generation to combat global warming that made no mention of nuclear power.

The right denies that anthropogenic global warming is happening, and the left opposes the only source of power with a demonstrated capability of replacing a large fraction of fossil-fuel power plants.

In the US at least for the foreseeable future, we'll have maybe a few new nuclear power plants and lots of small alternative energy projects that will total a few hundred MW, but mostly we'll continue to burn fossil fuels to produce our electricity, especially coal.

A-frakking-men to that, brother.

 

[Bishadi]

Waste management is far easier than nuclears opponents want you to know:

If an American got all his or her lifetime electricity solely from nuclear power, that person’s total share of the waste would fit into one soda can

http://cravenspowertosavetheworld.com/nuclear-energy-faq-mainmenu-30/13-what-about-nuclear-waste

how many coke cans are at chernobyl?

Can we recycle it?

 

[Safe-Keeper]

I was disgusted by a recent All Things Considered report on the development carbon-free electric power generation to combat global warming that made no mention of nuclear power.

It's quite the irony that the environmentalists are so concerned with everyone else "considering alternative sources of power with an open mind"... while they themselves condemn nuclear power without studying it for a second.

"Please keep an open mind about my opinions, because I'm 100% convinced they are true and will not even consider alternatives".

Can you spell "hypocrites"?

 

[Wowbagger]

My suggesting was make a better glove to catch the fast particles left over to load a spring, then turn a wheel with that spring.

dat's smaught, wright?

Hindmost's post addresses this. The technology exists. But, it is not economically viable.

The amount of fuel one would obtain would not be worth the cost of implementing "better gloves", right now.

 

[macdoc]

It's quite the irony that the environmentalists are so concerned with everyone else "considering alternative sources of power with an open mind"... while they themselves condemn nuclear power without studying it for a second.

That is a ridiculous broad brush....indeed there are some Nimby tree huggers that oppose nuclear power but almost no climate scientists nor those that realize the thread of AGW oppose it.

Hell the founder of Greenpeace now works for and is an advocate of nuclear power.

To me that statement sounds like an ill informed right winger venting.....