What Do You Do About the Waste? Recycle and Reuse.
As a long time proponent of the increased use of nuclear energy, I have been involved in thousands of conversations on the topic. (Trust me, I am a boring guest at a cocktail party and a real pain around the water cooler.) Nearly every one of them eventually included the comment that sounds like a question but is usually offered as a trump card aimed at stopping the conversation - “That sounds pretty good, Rod, but what do you do about the waste?”
That is the point where - if the person that I am speaking to has not totally run out of patience or simply cannot wait to get another drink - the conversation gets really interesting. You see, “the waste issue” is the best news that there is about nuclear power. I am not alone in that feeling; many of my long time colleagues like Ted Rockwell, author of The Rickover Effect, How One Man Made a Difference, believe that the byproducts that remain after producing energy with fission are valuable raw materials that should not be considered to be waste products. (See, for example, Why Throw Away a Priceless Resource?)
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In our current commercial nuclear power plants, operators remove about one third of the core every 18-24 months, move around the remaining fuel elements and then add fresh fuel bundles to make up for the ones that were removed. The fuel bundles that were removed, despite having produced large quantities of clean, inexpensive heat for 4-6 years, still contain about 95% of their initial potential energy. In the US, we currently store that material in pools or in licensed, tough, highly engineered storage containers. 
In other countries - like the UK, Japan, Russia, and France - the removed fuel is recycled to recover the uranium and plutonium that can be put back into the fuel cycle so that they can later be split (fissioned) to release heat. Those components of used nuclear fuel are also the ones that have long half lives, ranging from a few thousand years in the case of some plutonium isotopes to several billion years in the case of the uranium-238 that is a major component of the material.
Currently, the used fuel recycling regimes in operation still consider the lighter parts of used fuel to be a waste material that needs to be put into long term storage, but there are some very bright people who believe that even that material is far to valuable to throw away. NNadir, a diarist on Daily Kos has written extensively on this issue in commentary like Profile of a “Dangerous Nuclear Waste,” Cesium, Part 5.
The US used to have a plan to recycle our fuel as well, but a great deal of marketing and pressure by people that do not like the idea of using plutonium as a source of commercial heat resulted in President Ford issuing a presidential order to temporarily halt nuclear fuel recycling in 1976. President Carter, a man who claimed to be a nuclear engineer, made that ban permanent in the hopes that forcing US companies to avoid fuel recycling would cause others to abandon the very logical idea.
That effort did not work as planned, but the people who had invested large amounts of time and money into building three recycling plants in the US only to have them shut down with the stroke of a pen decided “once bitten, twice shy.” Though President Reagan removed the ban, President Clinton essentially reinstated it and no commercial company has been willing to build a facility and risk having it turn into a white elephant after an election.
The US is now back to considering the idea that used fuel should be recycled, a concept that makes a world of sense. That is especially true since it looks like there will be a number of new reactors under construction soon and they will provide a ready market for the recycled fuel.
That fuel is a bit more expensive than fuel made from fresh uranium because the recycled material has to be handled a bit differently, but the cost increase is on the order of 20-40% over the cost of fuel made from virgin materials. That is not unusual for a recycled product and like other recycling programs the case needs to be made that there are benefits that may not have been considered in the initial cost analysis.
The great thing about this whole concept is that ALL of the used fuel has been carefully stored away in a form that is easy to control and easy to keep segregated. Unlike some other materials that get mixed into the environment and require a lot of effort to recover, used nuclear fuel is just sitting around in the same location where it was once used just waiting for a recycling facility to be built. It does not take up much space, does not cost much to watch (compared to the heat value that it provided), and it has never hurt anyone because the people that watch it understand the simple concepts of time, distance and shielding.
Someday, I will tell you about how to apply the third R (Reduce) in the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra to nuclear fuel, but it is a separate topic that will require some thought about how to explain it without using terms that cause eyeballs to roll.
Related posts:
US Missing Opportunity to Recycle Vast Amounts of Energy
Its Time to Start Paying Attention to John McCain’s Ideas on Climate Change
Emily, the proliferation is really a straw man argument. No country developed its nuclear weapons by reprocessing fuel spent in power reactors, for the very good reason: it is insanely difficult, virtually impossible to make a weapon from such material.
Therefore each and every country which ever developed weapons made a special, non-commercial-power reactors to do the job.
Perhaps most importantly, nuclear weapons were created more than 60 years ago, using the primitive technology and knowledge of the time. Now all the knowledge necessary is pretty much out there in the open. Any country which decides to make nuclear weapons, will make them. (It has to be a country-wide decision, as one needs protection from Interpol and such). Even the least likely country, the starving pitiful North Korea, was able to make a stupid weapon! Using zero power reactors.
There are other reasons why nuclear weapons are always developed independently of peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Besides making the process much more straight forward and cheaper, it is also easily secured and concealed. Indeed, inb fact there is no correlation between possessing nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants: there are countries with neither, either, having weapons but no plants and countries having just plants and no weapons. There is no correlation, besides the media spinning the “N” word.
This shows that nuclear weapons are purely a political problem, not a technical one, with absolutely none relation to peaceful nuclear program.
Coutries have to be encouraged by intenational policies, that is against their interest to develop nuclear weapons. If a country political leadershiop considers nucelar weapons useful, they are going to develop them, independently of peacefull nuclear power.
Obviously, in world where energy resources are increasingly more scarce, the lust for powerful weapons is higher than in the world with abundant energy resources. Therefore denying 3rd world countries at the pretext of proliferation worries is a ill conceived policy based on wrong assumption, which will backfire.
To all of those who have commented here, the only long-term energy option now available to the inhabitants of Earth is nuclear energy. Even Dr. Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace has stated the same. We do not need energy only when the wind blows or when the sun shines, we need reliable, clean energy 24 hours per day, seven days per week, for centuries. If you think batteries are the answer, remember this: 60% of the electrical power in the U.S. is created by burning coal. To charge your batteries, we will just have to burn more coal.
Integral fast reactors (IFRs) are advanced liquid metal (liquid lead or sodium, or other suitable metal) cooled reactors that will consume plutonium and uranium and other radioactive metals for fuel. When IFRs have consumed their initial load of fuel, this spent fuel can be reprocessed using an electrometallurigical process called “pyroprocessing” to sort out the unconsumed fissionable materials and use them for fuel again. IFRs are 99.5 percent efficient. The reactors in use today (light water reactors) are five percent efficient. Integral fast reactors have “integrated” within the nuclear reactor site, the capability to perform the needed pyroprocessing functions.
IFRs need only be fueled once during their lifetime. This means that hazardous nuclear fuel will not have to be trucked to and from the reactor every three to five years. The best part of the IFR fuel cycle is that the 65,000 or more tons waste plutonium that is stored in about 125 locations throughout this country can now be used for fuel in an IFR instead of being a waste disposal problem. IFRs produce less than one percent of the waste plutonium that today’s reactors produce. And what waste an IFR produces will be safe in 400 years instead of 1,000 to 200,000 years.
If you are concerned about safety, think about this: hundreds of people are killed in the U.S. every year while mining coal or drilling for oil. The U.S. Navy has been operating a large fleet of nuclear-powered submarines for over 60 years and not one person has died from a nuclear-related accident.
For about $2 trillion, and 15 years time, the U.S. can be oil independent and have a hydrogen fuel infrastructure on which to operate our entire nation’s transportation fleet. This will all be possible using the integral fast reactor - we already have enough nuclear waste and mined uranium to fuel 1,000 large IFRs for 1,000 years or more.
Try reading the book: “Total Energy Independence for the United States - A Twelve-Year Plan.” Amazon has it.
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