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How do you dismantle a nuclear submarine?
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoCarefully.
- brandmeyer 11y agoThe defueling process is pretty slick. On a 688-class submarine, they remove a semi-cylindrical section of the hull around the reactor compartment (RC) before landing a temporary building on the RC. One tricky bit is the fact that the spent fuel is so radioactive that it still makes a significant amount of heat. The thermal power is low enough that sinking it away from the fuel isn't difficult, but if such measures were not in place, the fuel would heat up until (redacted) Something Bad Happens. So every step along the way has either timing and/or heat sinking requirements involved.
- brandmeyer 11y agoSpent fuel will be dangerous on time scales much greater than recorded history. However, the old reactor compartments primary source of radioactivity is Cobalt-60, with a half-life of about 5 years. So on time scales on the order of our national history, we should be able to recycle them.
- caf 11y agoIn case anyone is wondering, the Cobalt-60 is produced from Iron by multiple neutron capture and beta decay, in particular Iron-58.
- brandmeyer 11y agoAlso Cobalt-59, which is a commonly used hardening agent in ferrous alloys. In the old days, valve seat wear products were a strong source of radioactive cobalt.
- burger_moon 11y agoWhen I was in the Navy I was stationed at Puget Sound and got to watch the yard workers dismantle a submarine. Every day I would walk past the dry dock on my way to my ship and check out the progress. It's pretty cool seeing a sub in dry dock getting cut apart section by section.
- WalterBright 11y agoShould store it at the south pole. It's inaccessible to anyone that is not very well-financed, the cold will slow down decomposition of the containers, anything liquid will freeze and stay put. Any leaks will also be thousands of miles from anything important.
- fiatmoney 11y agoOne big problem is that the longer the transit, the greater the window of vulnerability. That and mutated super-penguins.
- WalterBright 11y agoI thought the penguins only hung out on the coast. Antarctica is, after all, a continent, and a big one.
- Roboprog 11y agoWell, they did, but during the winter months they like to warm their flippers around the rosy glow of this new place :-)
- WalterBright 11y agoI'd be impressed if they were willing to leave their food supply and waddle a thousand miles to get there.
- CamperBob2 11y agoThey can call the screenplay 2101: A Penguin Odyssey. Humans have nuked themselves into oblivion, making room at the top of the intellectual food chain. Then, the first few penguins stumble upon the abandoned waste site...
- jotm 11y agoAnd you propose we haul nuclear waste somewhere on the continent? With our helicopters and trucks in -30 -40 degrees weather and on ice/snow? I doubt anyone would like to try that :-)
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoIf only it were cheaper to send things into space. It'd be nice if we could blast spent nuclear fuel into the sun.
- CamperBob2 11y agoTwo problems with that approach: 1) rockets are too unreliable, and 2) depending on how nuclear-energy technology develops, someday we might want that fuel back. There is still a lot of energy in "spent" fuel.
- sampo 11y agoEarth's orbital velocity is 29.78 km/s, and the escape velocity from the Solar System, at Earth's distance, is 42.1 km/s. Of you want to get rid of something, it would be energy-wise cheaper to shoot it out of the solar system, than to slow it down completely so that it would drop into the Sun.
- ghshephard 11y agoIf you shoot it out of the solar system though, then you are littering the region outside our solar system with nuclear waste that future generations might stumble across as they start exploring the galaxy.
- nitrogen 11y agoSpace is a pretty big place.
- ghshephard 11y agoIt's pretty big inside the solar system - I can't even begin to imagine how large a space nuclear fuel capsule shot on a solar-system escape velocity would have to itself.
- smegel 11y agoWhen I read the first half of this the image that popped into my head was a sub with booster rockets strapped to the side taking off like the space shuttle!
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoMy father was a civil service EE at mare island naval shipyard in vallejo, on north-east san francisco bay. He told me that when they drain the reactor cooling water, there is a flange where they cut the hole in the hull, with a pipe running to there to a cement mixer. They make concrete out of the radioactive water, then haul the concrete and the mixer to hanford, to bury it. But one time they neglected to bolt the flange together. When they pumped out the water, it poured down on a shipyard worker who was standing on the floor of the drydock. While he was not injured, he exceeded his lifetime maximum dose of radiation. At the time Dad told me this story, the guy still worked at Mare Island but was no longer permitted in the nuclear yard.
- brandmeyer 11y agoNormal reactor coolant isn't nearly that radioactive. However, there is a continuous filtration system that gets flushed from time to time, and it is extremely nasty stuff. Its possible that the yard worker was actually doused with filter media.
- mpyne 11y agoI actually don't think it's possible. If I remember my OPWACHEM course correctly, if the media you're thinking of did wash onto the yard worker he'd have been severely injured by radiation exposure, and not just quickly bumped up to his maximum lifetime allowable exposure. It is indeed extremely nasty stuff.
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoI would expect it to be full of tritium.
- Evolved 11y agoWould a solar furnace be hot enough to incinerate the nuclear waste so that it is much safer to dispose of?