As I 'mature', it has struck me hiw complex and interwoven is life on Earth, as is our technological civilisation.
I watched part of "Life After Man" (2005?) awhile ago and noticed that they said nothing about what would happen to the Nuclear Electricity generators ... after man. Would they leak? explode? weather?
What about the NuclearWaste that must be buried for 300,000 years, and the steel & concrete for 10,000 years? Windscale, Chernobyl & Fukushima are examples of this problem. Only Finland has planned ahead: documentary "Into Eternity".
What would happen to the wild creatures and vegetation? Would they be destroyed? Or would the radiation evolve their DNA into dramatically different species?
Spent nuclear fuel is intentionally pejoratively called nuclear waste. It's actually valuable 5% used fuel. The unused fuel is dangerous for 300,000 years but a better idea than pretending it can be hidden is to turn it into electricity and fission products.
Caesium and strontium constitute 9.26% of fission products. They produce 99.4% of radiotoxicity and need custody for 300 years. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. Fission products are produced at the rate of 989 kg/GWe-year, so caesium and strontium are produced at the rate of about 92 kg/GWe-year. We could handle that, if only….
Spent fuel must be processed to separate unused fuel from fission products, but Jimmy Carter banned commercial processing by executive order. Breeder reactors can consume all the heavy metal, but Jimmy Carter vetoed funding for the Clinch River commercial-scale demonstration. Then the Cliton Administration destroyed the 20 MWe engineering-scale Experimental Breeder Reactor II. The Nuclear Waste Act of 1982 imposed a 0.1¢/kWh fee on nuclear power plants, and explicitly forbade any of its now-almost-$50 billion Fund to be used for spent fuel processing — it has to be spent on Yucca Mountain, which is a dead duck. The Act must be amended to permit its fund to be used for spent fuel processing.
Spent fuel processing coupled to breeder reactors, the Integral Fast Reactor concept, eliminates Lorne's concerns.
USA has 90,000 tonnes of spent fuel and 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium. With breeder reactors and spent fuel processing, that's enough to power an all-electric all-nuclear 1,700 GWe American economy for 500+ years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy? A Comprehensive Quantitative System Engineering Study of the Relationship between Climate, Science, and Technology." Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
As I 'mature', it has struck me hiw complex and interwoven is life on Earth, as is our technological civilisation.
I watched part of "Life After Man" (2005?) awhile ago and noticed that they said nothing about what would happen to the Nuclear Electricity generators ... after man. Would they leak? explode? weather?
What about the NuclearWaste that must be buried for 300,000 years, and the steel & concrete for 10,000 years? Windscale, Chernobyl & Fukushima are examples of this problem. Only Finland has planned ahead: documentary "Into Eternity".
What would happen to the wild creatures and vegetation? Would they be destroyed? Or would the radiation evolve their DNA into dramatically different species?
-/-
I look forward to learning of the work of UCOR.
Spent nuclear fuel is intentionally pejoratively called nuclear waste. It's actually valuable 5% used fuel. The unused fuel is dangerous for 300,000 years but a better idea than pretending it can be hidden is to turn it into electricity and fission products.
Caesium and strontium constitute 9.26% of fission products. They produce 99.4% of radiotoxicity and need custody for 300 years. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. Fission products are produced at the rate of 989 kg/GWe-year, so caesium and strontium are produced at the rate of about 92 kg/GWe-year. We could handle that, if only….
Spent fuel must be processed to separate unused fuel from fission products, but Jimmy Carter banned commercial processing by executive order. Breeder reactors can consume all the heavy metal, but Jimmy Carter vetoed funding for the Clinch River commercial-scale demonstration. Then the Cliton Administration destroyed the 20 MWe engineering-scale Experimental Breeder Reactor II. The Nuclear Waste Act of 1982 imposed a 0.1¢/kWh fee on nuclear power plants, and explicitly forbade any of its now-almost-$50 billion Fund to be used for spent fuel processing — it has to be spent on Yucca Mountain, which is a dead duck. The Act must be amended to permit its fund to be used for spent fuel processing.
Spent fuel processing coupled to breeder reactors, the Integral Fast Reactor concept, eliminates Lorne's concerns.
USA has 90,000 tonnes of spent fuel and 900,000 tonnes of depleted uranium. With breeder reactors and spent fuel processing, that's enough to power an all-electric all-nuclear 1,700 GWe American economy for 500+ years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy? A Comprehensive Quantitative System Engineering Study of the Relationship between Climate, Science, and Technology." Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.