Re: Where do we stand on transmuting nuclear waste into shorter lived isotopes?
From: Uncle Al (UncleAl0_at_hate.spam.net)
Date: 07/10/04
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Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 13:35:56 -0500
Mike wrote:
>
> Yucca Mountain came up in the news this morning (Washington Post, "New
> Plan Ordered for Yucca Mountain") and it got me thinking about options
> for nuclear waste disposal. I recalled that the DOE was doing some
> work on transmuting long-lived isotopes. I then did a Google search
> and found:
>
> "Advanced Accelerator Applications (AAA):Transmutation of Waste",
> URL http://apt.lanl.gov/atw/
>
> "Laser transmutation set to simplify nuclear waste disposal",
> URL http://www.jrc.cec.eu.int/download/press/releases/pr_laser%20_transitu200308.pdf
That is insanely awful. Laser photons are remorselessly
expensive. Diddling a microgram of isotope surrounded by PhDs is
not indistinguishable from treating kilograms of isotope that
must be excrutiatingly purified from the total waste stream by
high school graduates. Did you think they shone a light into the
storage vat and all the bad stuff magically disappeared?
> and
>
> "Nuclear waste disposal: A safer solution?",
> URL http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-06/TAU-NwdA-1806101.php
"10^20 W/cm2 – the equivalent of focusing the entire energy
output of the sun onto an area of just 0.1
mm^2." here's a hint, boy - you don't want to pay the monthly
power bill for 10^20 W/cm^2 over a square meter, 8 hrs/day 20
days/month. You don't even want to pay the attendant cooling
costs.
> Turning a million year containment problem into a couple hundred year
> containment problem is a good thing.
>
> Where do we stand on these technologies? How many years away are we
> from a commercial demonstration?
It's irremediable bullshit, pure and simple. The energy
necessary to transmute nuclear waste would approximate the net
energy generated by its fission in the first place. Google
"Kilkenny cats." It's as flat out stooopid as deep burial of
carbon dioxide. /_\PV is an energy term. Recovering and
compressing the crap is 30+% of the energy released by burning
coal, oil, or methane. If you are a Swedish North Sea gas well
with lots of CO2 in your obtained product, you have to scrub it
out anyway - and local energy is FOB the wellhead. If you are a
powerplant, you'd make more bottom line money flipping off the
switch, selling your pollution credits, and going home. The
E*L*E*C*T*R*I*C car made perfect sense if you carpooled at San
Onofre - electricity is free. It worked for about six months. A
half-year of daily deep discharge and sizzle recharging left the
lead-acid batteries with maybe a third of nameplate capacity.
Misting during charging ate away the car. None of this was a
surprise to anybody except the users.
The answer to nucear waste is idiot simple: Use a civilian fuel
cycle.
The military fuel cycle is to have a clean recovered transuranic
stream for weapons and discard a short half-life, very hot
beta-stream contaminated with long half-life alpha-emitters.
This mix must be stored forever - 10,000+ years. It can decay
into a critical mass if it is raw waste. Recovered transuranics
are a very politically correct "terrorist target." Homeland
Severity loves you.
A civilian fuel cycle has a clean recovered very hot beta-waste
stream. It cannot decay into a critical fission configuration.
It goes harmless in relatively short order (a few centuries).
The transuranic stream for reactor recycle is contaminated with
gamma-emitting beta-decays. It is useless for military weapons.
If you steal it you die.
-- Uncle Al http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/ (Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals) http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
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