Divergent views of the same subject...
Jaro
Technology Review - New Nuke Solution.
By David Cameron. 31 July 2002
MIT's Technology Review
Energy
Spent nuclear fuel remains dangerously radioactive for 10,000 years or more-one reason that storing it scares scientists and politicians alike. In a study funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, nuclear physicists from the University of Nevada, New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory and other organizations have concluded that one possible technique for managing nuclear waste could work on an industrial scale. The technique-bombarding waste with high-speed neutrons-would reduce both the half-life of the waste's longest-lived elements, such as plutonium, and the quantity of waste that needs to be stored. The ultimate goal of the Advanced Accelerator Applications Program, as the study is called, is to build a demonstration unit that chemically treats spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium and other long-lived elements-about one percent of the waste. These elements would then be placed in a particle accelerator or a special reactor and bombarded with neutrons, splitting their nuclei into elements that either aren't radioactive or decay in just decades.
The catch: a full-scale demonstration facility could take 20 years to build and cost $4 to $7 billion. But Stanford University physicist Burton Richter, chairman of an independent review board that recently endorsed the project, says the alternatives may cost even more. Even if the national repository under construction in Nevada's Yucca Mountain opened today, he notes, U.S. nuclear plants would fill it by 2015. "For nuclear power to have a future," Richter says, "we'll either need more Yucca Mountains, or a way to decrease the stuff we put there."
David Cameron is a Web editor at Technology Review.
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What A Waste
27 July 2002 The Washington Post
The July 18 KidsPost story "Where Should We Put Nuclear Waste?" gave kids some big-time misinformation. Please tell Fern Shen that used fuel from nuclear reactors is nowhere near as dangerous as she says.
The used fuel would be somewhat radioactive after 10,000 years, to be sure, but so feeble that it would pose no danger at all. Shen could have told the kids that, for example, after only about 1,000 years the waste's radioactivity would be less than the amount of natural radioactivity already in the land near the repository.
"It can eat through flesh and cause cancer and birth defects," she says. Scary. But we safely handle larger quantities of other hazardous materials (such as household lye, arsenic and mercury) that can eat through flesh and cause cancer and birth defects.
"About 3,000 people live and farm in the area, some as close as 12 miles away [from the repository]," she says. Twelve miles is a long way. Realistically those people are not in danger.
"The government has spent about $8 billion so far studying the site," she says. Misleading. That's not taxpayer money. It has been collected by the utilities from electricity consumers to pay for waste management.
Shen says that an accident on the way to Yucca Mountain "would be serious." Nonsense (although many people believe it). She should have pointed out that accidents involving a gasoline tanker can be far worse than what could happen with the incredibly sturdy fuel casks.
She refers to "last summer's big fire in a Baltimore train tunnel, where the containers would have melted, spilling their dangerous cargo." But it will be strict policy, we hear, as well as common sense that no flammable cargo will be near enough to a fuel cask to trap it in such a fire.
Finally, she writes, "Yucca Mountain would be full by 2034." That's true, under current plans. But with good preparations, advanced reactors will be making electricity before then by consuming the plutonium and most of the other long-lived components of the used fuel. Then there will be lots of room down there to store the real waste: the fission products, which will be harmless within 500 years.
-- George S. Stanford
-- Gerald E. Marsh
The writers are retired reactor physicists with the Argonne National Laboratory.
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