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Re: LLW status according to AP: a fair




On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, H.Wade Patterson wrote:

> b.	Assume that U is mined, turned into reactor fuel, irradiated to usual
> burnup, waste extracted and Pu removed for use as a reactor fuel.

	--Such calculations assume that the uranium is also removed.

 Next,
> assume the remaining waste is returned to the original U ore location;
> and there guarded and watched for 300-500 years. After that period it's
> less toxic than was the original U in place (by the measure of the
> quantity of water needed to reduce the toxicity of the remaining waste
> to drinking water standards.
> c.	Thus, if one wishes to cleanse the Earth of deadly radioactivity, one
> should follow the above prescription.

	--It is much better than that. The uranium that is dug out of the
ground to fuel nuclear reactors will eventually turn into radon which,
according to linear-no threshold theory, will eventually kill about 500
people per GWe-year. That makes nuclear power a tremendous life-saving
enterprise. In the U.S. alone, it is saving 50,000 fyture lives per year.
	 But you don't want to put it back in the ground. One disposal
method is to burn it up in breeder reactors. Another is to dump it in the
ocean. One might worry that this contaminates the ocean, but all uranium
in the ground will eventually end up in the ocean anyhow (by erosion
processes). Uranium stays in the ocean only about one million years before
it settles permanently into the bottom sediment, so it doesn't matter
whether it gets into the oceans now or sometime later. For details,
see my paper in Health Physics 40, 19-25; 1981