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RE: GAO Challenges Yucca Plans
I most
emphatically agree with this thread.
Now,
why is U233 such a bad beast? easier chemistry than Pu, no colloids... Is it the
daughters? In Brazil they are doing a good job at U233
recovery.
Separation (partitioning, whatever) is IMHO not so massively
difficult either, but I will agree, if that will get us funded... salt
electrolysis is a fashionable way to make it complicated.
Deep
ocean burial is indeed the logical thing, but there is an international
convention to prohibit it, and it may make sense to accept it, else everybody
and his cousin will start throwing out to sea their kitchen
waste.
Half
of Europe has salt layers below, millions years old, water never got in, and
with care and attention never will. Gorleben.
There
is an interesting bubble being created around transmutation: take long lived
fission products (and/or actinides) and hit them with neutrons, gammas, protons
or whatever you have at hand to convert them into something shorter lived or
altogether dead. Far from me to insinuate that this may be a way for our
friends the physicists to hitch a ride on the nuclear waste gravy train. I do
like the photon driven Cs137 (g,n) Cs136 transmutation idea.
Actinide burning inside reactors is technologically and economically
feasible - the number of people dying, of railway accidents in the transport of
the process chemicals, has been calculated and is modest: but then again, what
have Am and Np done to be treated so badly?
marco
Jerry Cohen,
you are not alone. I, for one, tend to agree with your positions.
My reasons are that in the very long run, we cannot depend on natural
gas and oil for electric power production. There is an enourmous amount
of coal, but much of it is pretty hard to access. There is a reasonable
amount of uranium and U-235, but that is limited also. The only long
term solution to the energy problems of the earth are nuclear power breeders
and those require plutonium or the thorium cycle and U-233, a real nasty
nuclide. I believe these solutions are inevitable aside from the local
politics of the USA. The world may well be smarter than any one of its
countries.
The reason that this is necessary is that we must
have fuel for fast reactors, not thermal reactors and this means that Pu works
and U-235 does not. In my opinion, we need to move fairly quickly to
uranium/thorium fueled HTGR type reactors such as the unfortunate Fort St.
Vrain reactor or the very small Peach Bottom reactor design. We also
need to research the fuel recovery and separation processes for these
reactors. This is massivly difficult chemistry, by the way.
This
means to me that the spent fuel strategy should be to recycle fuel, then
dispose of the more long lived fission products. These should be
disposed in deep ocean burial where they will be moved into the sub-tectonic
plate areas essentially forever.
Best wishes to all on Radsafe, even
Norman.
John Andrews
Knoxville, Tennessee