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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
bycrazyvortex ( 9942666 ) writes:
Excellent findings!
However, I'm worried that the economies that drive innovation in nuclear power will favor convenience and short term cost over long term sustainability.
bybeachmike ( 724754 ) writes:
You resort on one of the usual enviro-wackjob phrases: "long term sustainability." There's nothing UNSUSTAINBABLE about radioactive waste. One of the best solutions we had for radioactive waste in North America was Yucca Mountain Repository, which corrupt liberal Democrat Senator Harry Reid shut down after the federal government spent nearly $20 billion developing. Many types of radioactive was can also be recycled while being used as fuel. Many other repositories, underground or inside mountains, can be de
bydrewsup ( 990717 ) writes:
One of the best ideas for disposal is reprocessing and reuse.
bycrunchygranola ( 1954152 ) writes:
One of the best ideas for disposal is reprocessing and reuse.
Only at the level of "sloganeering" like you are doing.
There is a strong resemblance between "plastics recycling" - an idea pushed by the petrochemical industry, and which turns out to be 97% BS (just 3% of plastic put into the recycling stream gets reused) - and "reprocessing and reuse" as a great idea for disposal.
Reprocessing does not reduce the fission product waste at all. This should be obvious, but people pushing this always talk as if it did. It also does not reduce the actual volume of the waste at all either, since the spent fuel rods coming out of the reactors are already a highly compact and stable form of waste that is easily managed now by dry cask storage. The chemical processes produce a much larger volume of chemically complex waste as a result of the extraction process, compared to the spent fuel rods.
The only improvement in the waste situation that results is the separation of plutonium which would otherwise be a long-lived waste component. There are other long-lived waste components though, so this is only a partial reduction in long-lived activity. That is to say, the waste still needs tens of thousands of years of isolation though it has less total radiotoxicity. So in practical terms - there is no improvement in the waste situation at all - no lessening of storage requirements (at least for some tens of thousands of years).
The extracted plutonium, if reused as MOX fuel, modestly extends the fuel supply situation, by about 10% so is only a minor contributor to supply, and does so at an exorbitant cost. The fuel is much more expensive than low enriched uranium fuel and you must pay utilities to take it as the handling cost is much higher (unlike fresh LEU fuel, it is significantly hot and hazardous to handle). The only reason that reprocessing and MOX fuel has ever been used at all is that governments have paid the cost so that industry does not have to.
And all reprocessing plants operated to date have been problem plagued failures -- see the British THORP plant shut down in 2018, and the Japanese Rokkasho plant that has been under construction for 30 years now at a cost of $30 billion and still has not operated.
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