[ RadSafe ] ...Disposal site for used nuclear fuel will be at Forsmark, Sweden's SKB announced today.

[Bjorn Cedervall]

There is plenty of relevant information that can be found at the following website:

http://www.skb.se/default____24417.aspx

(check the Research link for instance)

 

In addition I may mention that one of the leading Green Party members recently said that her mission was to make nuclear power more expensive (I don't remember the exact formulation but my interpretation was "as expensive as possible"). The Green party always says "no solution has been found yet". SKB says "we have a solution".

 

I can add that it was my professor in nuclear chemistry (one of the  intellectual giants at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH), Torbjörn Westermark (who passed away about 7 years ago), was a leading brain in formulating the principles behind our nuclear waste handling. This included the ideas of multiple barriers, thermodynamic stability, minimizing any driving forces like galvanic potentials and so on. As I remember his teachings, he was not very interested in doing the calculations himself - that was left for the PhD students et al. Instead his focus was on the concepts and thinking. His lectures included thorough creativity discussions ("the ability to find the unexpected" a formulation that I understand came from someone else) and also many ethics and/or risk assessment and risk philosophy elements.

 

Most students were afraid of his exams because he would give questions, the answers of which would not be spelled out distinctly in textbooks (instead you might have to combine informations from different parts like page 182 and page 743 in the textbook in order to answer) or hadn´t appeared on previous exams... I had three reasons to take his two major courses: First the just mentioned unusual character of his approach. Second the political controversy of nuclear power (I had already been into radiation biology and related sciences and had good reasons to suspect that the "antis" were unfair - I got more evidence of that...). Third, his strong interest in botany (any RadSafer who is interest in this subject can email me directly). That year when I focused on nuclear chemistry we were only two students taking his courses. He was very generous - he sometimes gave us four hours of lectures instead of the two which he was scheduled for each time and the breaks were no breaks - instead he pulled out chocholate bars for us and discussed cancer risks from various foods or whatever - then suddenly he would say - OK - lets go back to the actinides. He gave us tons of applications and contexts of nuclear chemistry that had nothing to do with nuclear power. I apologize for this partly off-topic comment but it is difficult to forget this man who played such an important role in the nuclear waste arena.

 

My personal ideas only,

 

Bjorn Cedervall   bcradsafers at hotmail.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


> 
> Generally, logic and reason have not played major roles in development of nuclear waste management policies. However, in Sweden any policy that might make sense has been particularly avoided.


_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits. 
http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage_062009