3 ms·

Every time the question of nuclear waste disposal comes up, someone is sure to say, “Why not shoot it into the Sun?” It seems so obvious. Or we could get over

Every time the question of nuclear waste disposal comes up, someone is sure to say, “Why not shoot it into the Sun?” It seems so obvious. Or we could get over our stupid fear of recycling. The stuff's only hazardous because we haven't taken all the energy out of it yet. Nuclear fuel reprocessing is performed routinely in Europe, Russia and Japan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

maxerickson 12y ago
Japan doesn't seem to have a plant online at the moment (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Rokkasho-start-up-delayed-to-2016-0311144.html http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Rokkasho-start-up-delay... ). La Hague apparently has 1/2 of the global light water reprocessing capacity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COGEMA_La_Hague_site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COGEMA_La_Hague_site That Wikipedia table is interesting, but it is hard to understand who is currently doing what from it. I think Japan is mostly sending their spent fuel to France.
btilly 12y ago
One of the downsides of reprocessing is that it makes plutonium easy to separate out in a form that is good for making nuclear bombs. Therefore it represents a nuclear proliferation risk.
- cjslep 12y ago
  There's potential (no pun intended) in pyroprocessing to allow extraction of uranium only, leaving behind plutonium with the rest of the HLW that is hazardous to try to steal or be sneaky with. For clarification, it's traditionally been PUREX (chemical separation) that is considered a proliferation risk.
- opo 12y ago
  None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their plutonium from nuclear waste because there are much easier ways to get weapons grade plutonium. Form the wikipedia page: "Ordinarily (in spent nuclear fuel), plutonium is reactor-grade plutonium. In addition to plutonium-239, which is highly suitable for building nuclear weapons, it contains large amounts of undesirable contaminants: plutonium-240, plutonium-241, and plutonium-238. These isotopes are extremely difficult to separate, and more cost-effective ways of obtaining fissile material exist (e.g. uranium enrichment or dedicated plutonium production reactors)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste As the wikipedia article points out a very good approach to deal with nuclear waste would be burn the waste in pyrometallurgical fast reactors like the proposed Integral Fast Reactor. (For background on the Integral Fast Reactor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor) Trying to throw the waste in the sun would be one of the worst possible imaginable ways of dealing with nuclear waste.
  - mahranch 12y ago
    > None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their plutonium from nuclear waste Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the future. You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not.
    - tbrownaw 12y ago
      You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not. So which is worse for that, having a fuck-ton of seriously nasty stuff sitting around forever, or concentrating the nasty stuff to a much more manageable volume and then fairly quickly shipping it off to be destroyed (in a way that just happens to provide useful energy out of the deal).
    - regularfry 12y ago
      Plutonium makes a rubbish dirty bomb, it's too heavy to disperse.
    - opo 12y ago
      >Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the future. It isn't random chance that no one has developed nuclear weapons using nuclear waste from a commercial reactor. It is because it would be far more expensive, a far bigger engineering challenge and far more difficult to hide than any of the other ways to create a nuclear bomb. >You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not. I didn't talk about dirty bomb because the original statement I was replying too was saying that reprocessing akes plutonium easy to separate out and was a nuclear proliferation risk. It is impolite to criticize me for not bringing up a different issue. In the case of a dirty bomb, it would be many times less dangerous than a nuclear weapon would be and there are many, many potential sources of material for a dirty bomb that would be much easier to obtain and work with than the waste from a commercial nuclear reactor. As I said before, a very good approach to deal with nuclear waste would be recycle it.
dkbrk 12y ago
In particular, pyroprocessing (http://www.cse.anl.gov/pdfs/pyroprocessing_brochure.pdf http://www.cse.anl.gov/pdfs/pyroprocessing_brochure.pdf), which can separate out all actinides forming the bulk of nuclear waste. The actinides can continue to be used as fuel in an appropriate reactor, leaving just small amounts of short-lived (<1000 years), highly-radioactive "ash" as nuclear waste. Importantly, non-fissile isotopes such as U-238 are continually recycled so that no energy is left unextracted. This was nearing completion in the form of the Integral Fast Reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor) at the Argonne National Laboratory, until it was cancelled in 1994 at the behest of President Clinton and John Kerry. The reason for its cancellation? The belief that any nuclear reprocessing is bad for "nuclear proliferation". I cannot even comprehend the mental gymnastics required to justify shutting down vital research which didn't even produce isolated plutonium when the country possessed thousands of nuclear weapons and tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium. How the fuck would this have any affect at all on "nuclear proliferation"?
- hga 12y ago
  Note also that civilian reactor "waste" brewed for more than a month has a mix of plutonium isotopes that makes it entirely unsuitable for practical nuclear weapons. Yeah, you can get a bit more than a squib if you're e.g. able to dissipate 100kW of heat (!) from the Pu-238 that's used for deep space probes, but the Pu-240 that made Hanford reactor plutonium unsuitable for the planned "Tall Man" gun assembly bombs strictly limits the potential yield. This is cargo cult science at best, call it an allergy to anything "nuclear". Sort of like how the government collects a huge tax on reactor "waste", used it to build the Nevada Yucca Mountain repository (temporary construction jobs are always popular, as is "free" money), but just somehow never is going to get around to actually using the place. Well, that might change when Harry Reid retires, we'll see (heh, never considered that he was roughed up so badly he lost the use of his right eye due to eeeevil corporate nuclear power types, instead of his brother or "the mob").

maxerickson 12y ago

Japan doesn't seem to have a plant online at the moment (http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Rokkasho-start-up-delayed-to-2016-0311144.html http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Rokkasho-start-up-delay... ). La Hague apparently has 1/2 of the global light water reprocessing capacity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COGEMA_La_Hague_site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COGEMA_La_Hague_site That Wikipedia table is interesting, but it is hard to understand who is currently doing what from it. I think Japan is mostly sending their spent fuel to France.

btilly 12y ago

One of the downsides of reprocessing is that it makes plutonium easy to separate out in a form that is good for making nuclear bombs. Therefore it represents a nuclear proliferation risk.

cjslep 12y ago
There's potential (no pun intended) in pyroprocessing to allow extraction of uranium only, leaving behind plutonium with the rest of the HLW that is hazardous to try to steal or be sneaky with. For clarification, it's traditionally been PUREX (chemical separation) that is considered a proliferation risk.
opo 12y ago
None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their plutonium from nuclear waste because there are much easier ways to get weapons grade plutonium. Form the wikipedia page: "Ordinarily (in spent nuclear fuel), plutonium is reactor-grade plutonium. In addition to plutonium-239, which is highly suitable for building nuclear weapons, it contains large amounts of undesirable contaminants: plutonium-240, plutonium-241, and plutonium-238. These isotopes are extremely difficult to separate, and more cost-effective ways of obtaining fissile material exist (e.g. uranium enrichment or dedicated plutonium production reactors)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste As the wikipedia article points out a very good approach to deal with nuclear waste would be burn the waste in pyrometallurgical fast reactors like the proposed Integral Fast Reactor. (For background on the Integral Fast Reactor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor) Trying to throw the waste in the sun would be one of the worst possible imaginable ways of dealing with nuclear waste.
- mahranch 12y ago
  > None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their plutonium from nuclear waste Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the future. You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not.
  - tbrownaw 12y ago
    You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not. So which is worse for that, having a fuck-ton of seriously nasty stuff sitting around forever, or concentrating the nasty stuff to a much more manageable volume and then fairly quickly shipping it off to be destroyed (in a way that just happens to provide useful energy out of the deal).
  - regularfry 12y ago
    Plutonium makes a rubbish dirty bomb, it's too heavy to disperse.
  - opo 12y ago
    >Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the future. It isn't random chance that no one has developed nuclear weapons using nuclear waste from a commercial reactor. It is because it would be far more expensive, a far bigger engineering challenge and far more difficult to hide than any of the other ways to create a nuclear bomb. >You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not. I didn't talk about dirty bomb because the original statement I was replying too was saying that reprocessing akes plutonium easy to separate out and was a nuclear proliferation risk. It is impolite to criticize me for not bringing up a different issue. In the case of a dirty bomb, it would be many times less dangerous than a nuclear weapon would be and there are many, many potential sources of material for a dirty bomb that would be much easier to obtain and work with than the waste from a commercial nuclear reactor. As I said before, a very good approach to deal with nuclear waste would be recycle it.

dkbrk 12y ago

In particular, pyroprocessing (http://www.cse.anl.gov/pdfs/pyroprocessing_brochure.pdf http://www.cse.anl.gov/pdfs/pyroprocessing_brochure.pdf), which can separate out all actinides forming the bulk of nuclear waste. The actinides can continue to be used as fuel in an appropriate reactor, leaving just small amounts of short-lived (<1000 years), highly-radioactive "ash" as nuclear waste. Importantly, non-fissile isotopes such as U-238 are continually recycled so that no energy is left unextracted. This was nearing completion in the form of the Integral Fast Reactor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor) at the Argonne National Laboratory, until it was cancelled in 1994 at the behest of President Clinton and John Kerry. The reason for its cancellation? The belief that any nuclear reprocessing is bad for "nuclear proliferation". I cannot even comprehend the mental gymnastics required to justify shutting down vital research which didn't even produce isolated plutonium when the country possessed thousands of nuclear weapons and tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium. How the fuck would this have any affect at all on "nuclear proliferation"?

hga 12y ago
Note also that civilian reactor "waste" brewed for more than a month has a mix of plutonium isotopes that makes it entirely unsuitable for practical nuclear weapons. Yeah, you can get a bit more than a squib if you're e.g. able to dissipate 100kW of heat (!) from the Pu-238 that's used for deep space probes, but the Pu-240 that made Hanford reactor plutonium unsuitable for the planned "Tall Man" gun assembly bombs strictly limits the potential yield. This is cargo cult science at best, call it an allergy to anything "nuclear". Sort of like how the government collects a huge tax on reactor "waste", used it to build the Nevada Yucca Mountain repository (temporary construction jobs are always popular, as is "free" money), but just somehow never is going to get around to actually using the place. Well, that might change when Harry Reid retires, we'll see (heh, never considered that he was roughed up so badly he lost the use of his right eye due to eeeevil corporate nuclear power types, instead of his brother or "the mob").