AW: [ RadSafe ] Global Warming

[Franz Schönhofer]

Thank you George for this comment or rather your information about fast
reactors and their future possibilities. (We ground an axe some months
ago.....) I hope that I will have time to check the literature links you
gave. 

Everybody may have a vision for the future - even nuclear engineers and
scientists - but one has unfortunately always to take politics (and
economics) into consideration. The "vision" you sketched is quite
reasonable, but not acceptable by politics within the next years or decades.
Only when oil supply will exhaust and it will be world wide accepted that
the dream of so-called renewable energies are by far not enough to supply
the energy hunger of the world and especially not that of the underdeveloped
world there might be a drastic change in the acceptance of nuclear power. A
slow change in Europe I reported some time ago on RADSAFE - following
accuses of a well known US-hardliner on RADSAFE that I am anti-US. 

Best regard from the "nuclear free" ("atom free") Austria!

P.S. My friend Peter Bossew is right. Especially I-129, Tc-99 or even C-14
are of much concern about long term cumulative doses to the population and
should not be neglected. This has been (among many other issues) the topic
of several international conferences on "Migration". Again we see that a
very interdisciplinary approach is necessary for questions in radiation
protection and clinging to one single graph like in the RADSAFE climate
debate is not acceptable. Potential doses are not negligible after decay of
tranuranics - if the radionuclides would be able to reach the human sphere
and - if humans would still exist then........ 

Best regards,

Franz


Franz Schoenhofer, PhD
MinRat i.R.
Habicherg. 31/7
A-1160 Wien/Vienna
AUSTRIA


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl] Im Auftrag
von George Stanford
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 09. Dezember 2009 02:36
An: Jean-Francois, Stephane
Cc: radsafe at radlab.nl
Betreff: RE: [ RadSafe ] Global Warming

Stephane:

      You ask, "But can anyone here tell me that 
we have improved the radwaste aspect in 20 
years?"  The answer is yes, we certainly have.

      Most of today's reactors (CANDUs and LWRs) 
are "thermal" -- the neutrons are moderated 
(slowed down) before they cause their 
fissions.  Thermal reactors are inherently unable 
to utilize more than a percent of the energy in 
the mined uranium -- usually less -- and their 
"waste" (which really is slightly used fuel) 
contains the long-lived transuranic isotopes 
(TRU) that give people heartburn when they start 
imagining terrible things happening 10,000 years 
down the road, if the stuff should happen to dissolve in the ground water.

      So, enter fast reactors.  Because of their 
better neutron economy, they are able to consume 
all the actinides -- uranium and transuranics, 
including plutonium -- and therefore can function 
in comfortable symbiosis at the back end of the 
thermal-reactor fuel cycle.  Arguably, the best 
fast-reactor design is the Integral Fast Reactor 
(IFR), developed at Argonne National Laboratory 
in the 1980s and '90s, in a program that was 
cancelled for non-technical reasons by the 
Clinton administration in 1994 -- just as it was 
getting ready for a commercial demonstration.  At 
present there is a growing movement to proceed 
with that commercial-scale demo.  Meanwhile, 
India and China, for two, are pushing ahead with 
their own fast-reactor programs.
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