Thursday, April 1, 2010

Nuclear waste problem

With Nevada’s Yucca Mountain facility out of the picture as a nuclear waste repository, government nuclear experts say interim measures might be needed for a very long time. 2,700 industry executives, nuclear regulators and other experts recently gathered for a nuclear energy conference in Washington. The goal was to discuss and determine just how many centuries such fuel can be safely stored above ground, and how they should come up with a policy that would not require amendment for many years. The commission currently allows reactors to operate and accumulate waste under a “waste confidence” policy that anticipates that the federal government will have a repository in place by the 2020s. But with the demise of the plan to bury the waste at Yucca Mountain, the commission is working on a new policy. The commission said that nuclear waste can essentially be held safely for a long time above grounds, but this statement is unclear as whether it can be stored for 50 years or 400 years. The Energy Department convened a “blue ribbon commission” to evaluate all options, including new kinds of reactors that could run partly on waste from the old ones, and convert some of the most toxic and longest-lived materials into less troublesome materials. But there is no clear path forward at this point. A new policy should not predict when a repository will open, but show what the limits of safe and secure storage of fuel are. Fuel is now stored in dry casks which are basically steel-lined concrete silos that require no liquid cooling or forced ventilation and those are licensed for 20 years. Metal parts of such casks can begin corroding in weeks if salt hits them. Whether this happens depends partly on the temperature of the cask (it is heated by the waste) and the humidity in the air. The engineer who headed the Yucca program under the Bush administration, Edward F. Sproat III, also attending the conference, said, “you can’t keep that stuff in those canisters forever. They’re not designed that way.” Overall, as global population and energy consumption increase, new solutions need to be implanted, whether it be new reactors which produce less waste and run off old waste, or completely new and environmentally safe methods of disposing of the nuclear waste.

12 comments:

  1. Definitely an important issue as each nuclear reactor (about 100 operating in the U.S.) produces more waste each year. Some above ground casks are, however, suitable to hold high-level nuclear waste for over 1000 years (curious how engineers prove this capacity). Many other countries, like Canada, support the need for a central underground storage facility of waste, but it is an issue of political disagreement and determining an appropriate location that doesn't force anyone to live near a large concentration of nuclear waste.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nuclear power plants currently seem to have more positive connotations than in the past four to five decades. Given that the nuclear fission processes produce substantially fewer greenhouse gases than other predominant energy technologies,it may be wise to pursue more nuclear power in the near future to slow the exponential growth of anthropogenic perturbations on the climate through energy production. Of course, the NIMBY argument becomes a major issue in the opening of new nuclear plants.

    ReplyDelete
  3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Vitrification

    here is more information on the vitrification process used to store radioactive waste above ground

    ReplyDelete
  4. FROM JUDITH:
    This is obviously a problem that has been unsolved for decades. With more and more universities ending their nuclear engineering departments, where will an answer come from regarding “safe” (whatever that will mean in 1,000,000 years) waste storage or use. My main concern with this type of problem is always that the government will subsidize storage in an underdeveloped country without full disclosure of all of the problems…

    ReplyDelete
  5. Why did the Yucca Mountain plan fail, was it cost related? I remember writing a paper last on the subject and believe Yucca mountain was still in the works less a year ago.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Would the Rocky Mountains give any alternative to storing the nuclear waste? Maybe the abundance of sandstone could help contain the nuclear waste's off-products? Could it be possibly stored underwater? Due to the recent signing of the offshore drilling bill, maybe underwater technologies could someday save us from the most hazardous material ever known to man. I agree with Judith about the possibility of our government outsourcing the storage of nuclear waste to an underdeveloped country...what if we gave incentives for countries to take on our waste?

    ReplyDelete
  7. I know that there are a lot of concerns about nuclear proliferation and such but if properly regulated and secured I think that reprocessing the spent fuel rods to reduce waste could be an intriguing solution to the waste problem. France has severely reduced its waste this way but also, they have been associated with proliferation problems.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Next generation nuclear reactors offer a promising solution for nuclear energy. The waste is relatively harmless compared to current designs, but the costs of the technology are very high. Also, should we make large capital investments in an energy source(uranium) that will run out in a relatively short time?

    ReplyDelete
  9. It seems like there is alot of room for error in this situation, and the effects of an error could potentially be very disasterous. There needs to be some serious research and design that goes into this policy. It seems that the most appealing option would be to reprocess the spent fuel rods, that way some of the waste already generated is resused. It will be interesting to see how this technology changes in the future.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The one problem I see with transporting nuclear waste to Yucca mountain is that the routes via Yucca are posted on the internet. You can view all the routes in which they have deemed safe areas to drive nuclear waste through. What if terrorists got a hold of these routes. This threatens the safety of American citizens in a few different ways.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Yucca mountain represents a glaring example of wasted taxpayer money. Now that Yucca mountain has been recently determined as-yet-unsuitable for nuclear waste storage, we have no choice but to abandon nuclear energy programs until we figure out how to dispose of radioactive waste properly.

    ReplyDelete
  12. To me nuclear power is one of the most promising forms of alternative energy and is relatively green. If a method could be designed to render the nuclear waste produced by nuclear power plants harmless then we would have a viable long term efficient method of producing green power something that we will as a world are eventually going to have to do.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.