There’s a lot of talk about nuclear these days, but not so much about what to do with the spent fuel. Both Canada and the US still haven’t built final, permanent repositories. And New Mexico, it turns out, doesn’t want to be home to one.
By the way, there’s still a lot of potential with spent fuel. It can be reprocessed and used again in special reactors. Some people don’t think it’s that big of a problem, because with reprocessing, you can use it again and again.
France’s waste fits inside a single pool at one of their facilities. There is no reason to not reprocess and burn the fuel, other than the design of the reactors, but the process for building them need to sped up
Brian: great point on reprocessing. A circular economy that actually could work. Of course, Fusion will solve the spent fuel problem, if proponents can demonstrate that it works.
Maybe Commonwealth Fusion will have a working pilot.
https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-systems-closes-1-8-billion-series-b-round
Reprocessing is a very viable option except that the same people who don’t want a storage facility also don’t want a reprocessing facility. I still have an article I clipped in the eighties about the things that could be done with waste.
As far as fusion, I’ve been following it for years, there’s always someone on the verge of making it work, and they never do. I’m not optimistic.
PS Naval nuclear engineering background so operations, not design.
Well, reprocessing looks good on paper until you consider that the people doing the meticulous reprocessing are hired based on their sex, sexual orientation and skin melanin content….and not their expertise.
Orson
Or like the white house resident, by his mental competency, or lack there of.
Spent nuclear fuel rods is the biggest non problem in the world. Hysteria sells and with “nuclear” in front of it, it becomes mass hysteria. They are self-contained and require decreasing amounts of shielding over time. There is far more radioactive waste from coal particulates deposited in peoples lungs by the nature of the volume required for the energy produced.
Ohhhh mommmmaaa … but what about earthquakes, and unstable geology!? And which ESG Multinational Insurance companies will insure these repositories?! Ohhhh mommmaaa …
And … what about the non-binary Sam Brinton who will be given dominion over these stockpiles? What happens when he can no longer “afford” his progressive fashions? Will he sell our stockpiles to Iran for some needed cash? Ohhhh mommaaa dadddy
Brinton doesn’t pay for his progressive fashions, he “shops” at the airports that “he” passes through……
Given New Mexico is the home for Los Alamos National Labs, I suspect they generate a good bit of their own nuclear waste, and it probably isn’t just low level stuff. And since most of what was used for above-ground and below-ground nuclear testing in the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s probably originated in New Mexico before it was used in Nevada, Nevada has a reasonable case to argue that anything still making the Geiger counters tick in their state ought to be sent back to New Mexico. Or at least Oak Ridge in Tennessee.
These state’s rights type environmental/energy arguments always come across as hypocritical, given the political leanings of the people pushing them. What are the odds that they don’t feel the same about state efforts to nullify federal gun laws, federal immigration laws, and the like.
The idiocy and ignorance surrounding nuclear fuel was unmatched until the Kung Flu showed up.
I worry.. Nuclear energy is the original retrofit boondoggle that was hatched with cold war propaganda.. Yes they work as long as they sign their own checks.. National pride and weapons grade building blocks.. Its reason to be and its economic viability is not clear to me..
Do they really get out of the red and turn a profit.. If they don’t the economy of scale (France is small) will end up bankrupting either us or our governments.. Just because it appears to work in France with their black military funding doesn’t mean its ready to grow 1000 X larger..
The business plan (what’s that?) never plays out as planned.. How many billion dollar retrofits / bank bailouts can the government handle at the same time?.. The original energy boondoggle..
There is not and never has been any great urgency to deal with used nuclear fuel. For 40 years, the world’s nuclear industries have had a very good method of dry storage of spent fuel. the historic record is that dry storage has had a 100% success rate in containing all sealed radioactive waste materials and prevention of irradiation by any human or impact on the environment. This success rate is why the public doesn’t care in the slightest about this as an issue.
And it’s certainly true that all used nuclear fuel can be used again through a variety of methods. One of the most useful and least expensive is to use enriched used nuclear fuel again in a CANDU reactor. Some of the new SMR technologies can use used nuclear fuel in the same fashion. It should be noted that all of these technologies were demonstrated decades ago.
With the reuse of used nuclear fuel, there is not and never will be any shortage of raw fuel to provide us with a source of electricity.
The Finnish solution to spent fuel, in addition to re-processing when feasible, is the solution, as long as the powers that be quit listening to the laments of the NIMBYs.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/finlands-spent-fuel-repository-a-game-changer-for-the-nuclear-industry-director-general-grossi-says
Fast-breeders.
A new fuel (ANEEL) for the CANDUS will reduce waste by more than 80%. From Forbes – “ANEEL’s burn-up rate of over 50 GWd/t, is so much more than the 7 GWd/t rate of CANDU/PHWR current natural uranium fuel, that the reactor only needs about seventh of the amount of fuel over its life, translating into significant savings and benefits in operations, fuel and waste management costs.”
The new fuel will translate to about $2 billion savings towards the fuel cost, direct disposal of spent fuel and the operational costs over the 60-year life of a reactor.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/07/20/new-nuclear-fuel-can-be-here-even-faster-than-new-reactorsaneel/?sh=13448597cc19
You could launch it into space if space was real. Fire it at the sun. But since space is fake (possibly gay), it can’t be done. It won’t be anyway.
Or you could dump it on the Moon, like they did in that SciFi TV series ‘ Space 1999 ‘.
Although I hear that didn’t go too well.
Likely Ontario will take it.
Canada’s nuclear waste is in the process of being disposed of in novel manner by burying it under farmland near the Great Lakes.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/nuclear-waste-transport-ontario-1.6309561
If it is a safe method with a small footprint, I wonder why it isn’t being located in North York.
The US had a perfectly good repository in Nevada.
Someone didn’t give Harry Reid a big enough bribe.