[sparky]

.
if one consider that Jimmy Carter decision date from 1977
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=7316
there must be quite a lot of spend fuel in storage more than 40 years old

I wonder if there has been any study on their nature , composition and characteristics
after all , any long term storage should have some data on long term storage .

[KaiserJeep]

In the absence of a central long term storage facilty such as Yucca Mtn, fuel is stored in the moon pools, then eventually in dry casks that are buried in the ground, all over the place but typically near the reactor itself. Those casks are massive steel/concrete containers designed to make it difficult to gain access to the fuel pellets inside. So there is no data collection, no studies, and no information. All part of Carter's plan.

[Cog]

The main problem with using Yucca mountain was Senator Reid(Nevada) didn't want it there. From a geologic stand-point it nearly ideal.

[dissident]

The premise of permanent burial at Yucca mountain is insane. Sell it to be burned in fast neutron breeder reactors that are going to dominate the world nuclear power production in the coming decades. Even if the USA shot itself in the head by ceasing work on reprocessing and basically new reactor construction under Jimmy the Cotton Farmer Carter.

[sparky]

.
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear sub officer trained to the highest level by the genius
who invented military and civilian nuclear reactors , wrote the book on there use , operating procedures and safety

Jimmy Carter had "hands on" reactor experience up to downing protection suit to disassemble the Chalk river failed reactor
no president or Washington official had a more intimate knowledge of nuclear reactors than him .

[Tanada]

.
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear sub officer trained to the highest level by the genius
who invented military and civilian nuclear reactors , wrote the book on there use , operating procedures and safety

Jimmy Carter had "hands on" reactor experience up to downing protection suit to disassemble the Chalk river failed reactor
no president or Washington official had a more intimate knowledge of nuclear reactors than him .

Actually this is one of those internet myths that gets repeated all over the place which is simply not true. James Earl Carter was accepted for the nuclear Engineer program, that much is true. However six months after beginning training his father suddenly died. Jimmy Carter resigned his commission as an officer in the United States Navy immediately upon his fathers death and left the service to take over his fathers farming and business interests. He never completed nuclear training two year long program he did not get beyond the early introductory courses before his fathers death lead to his departure from the navy. He then parlayed his business experience into a political career that lead to being Governor of Georgia which he then used as a stepping stone into the presidency of the USA. Saying Jimmy Carter is a nuclear engineer is the same fallacy as saying a student who leaves school at 16 has the same education as a High School graduate. He completed about one quarter of the nuclear engineer training.

From 1 MAR 1953 to 8 OCT 1953 he was under instruction to become an engineering officer for a nuclear power plant. He also assisted in setting up on-the-job training for the enlisted men being instructed in nuclear propulsion for the USS Seawolf (SSN575).

◾9 OCT 1953 -- Honorably discharged at Headquarters, 3rd Naval District. Discharge was at Carter's request. Total service: 7 years, 4 months, 8 days

◾10 OCT 1953 -- Appointed to US Naval Reserve and placed on inactive duty.

[KaiserJeep]

News to me, T. I never doubted his credentials, one of my close friends graduated the program, then failed his Rickover interview when he said (In effect) NO, he would not fire nuclear missiles when ordered to do so. Rickover booted him out of the USN, he's now a Jesuit Priest.

Never-the-less, that damned executive order has probably cost us our nuclear industry, as it increased nuclear electricity costs to the point where fracked natural gas burned in a converted coal plant is way cheaper.

Nor is there any lack of expertise or fuel re-processing facilities, we proved that with "Atoms For Peace".

Speaking personally, I would hesitate to live in the area around a coal power plant, knowing that the air, the soil, the ground water, and the surface water all bear the toxic legacy of dozens of years of stack emissions - lead, mercury, and various radioactives. However I would not mind living near an American nuclear plant, even one that was 50 years old. It has containment and competent monitoring and management, after all.

[sparky]

.
Thanks for the correction Tanada , it certainly bring things down somewhat
still I do believe dry storage is a better option than reprocessing ,
the main issue is that it doesn't exclude later reprocessing .

I got some indication that a fair bit of European fuel get reprocessed in Russia ,
cheaper and less political flack .
http://nbn.media/rosatom-reprocessing-activities/

a good read on reprocessing
http://www.world-nuclear.org/informatio ... -fuel.aspx

[Tanada]

News to me, T. I never doubted his credentials, one of my close friends graduated the program, then failed his Rickover interview when he said (In effect) NO, he would not fire nuclear missiles when ordered to do so. Rickover booted him out of the USN, he's now a Jesuit Priest.

That is kind of my whole point Kaiser. the Media has been stating he was a Navy Nuclear Engineer from the day he announced he was running for the Presidency and that would give him the cache to decide the status of things like spent fuel reprocessing due to his own expertise. The quoted timeline above proves that is a false statement and it comes directly from his Presidential library website. Jimmy Carter himself appears to be a decent and honorable man, as much as any politician in the last 50 years anyhow. Being a relatively honest politician however with a grand total naval career of 7 years and some months plus three years in the accelerated program at the US Naval Academy does not make him some military or nuclear expert. The highest rank he achieved was Lieutenant S.G., the equal in rank of a company commander in the Army or Marine Corp. That requires a basic skill set and command ability, but he was out of the military for 23 years from 1953 to 1976 before he ran for the Presidency. That is over three times as long as an adult doing other things to forget what he did and learned in the Navy, which included the start of nuclear engineer training. In fact at the time he entered nuclear training the first US Nuclear vessel, the USS Nautilus SSN 571 was under construction and it did not launch until 3 months AFTER he resigned from the Navy.

No disrespect for the former Presidents achievements in the military, but his naval career ended when it was still in a very early phase. If he had stayed in the service AND passed Reactor school he would have most probably been assigned to the USS Seawolf, the second SSN built by the navy. He was involved in helping create the school program for that submarines enlisted personnel because it used a completely different design than the Nautilus, cooled by liquid sodium instead of water. A whole new set of safety protocols had to be created because liquid sodium reacts with water or humid air by breaking water molecules to release hydrogen gas and getting very hot, which can ignite the gas explosively.

President Jimmy Carter was obsessed with the idea that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel would lead to a 'plutonium economy' that in turn would cause proliferation of nuclear weapons to many more countries. He hoped that be forbidding commercial reprocessing in the USA that the other nuclear powers, which at that time were the UK, France, the USSR and the PRC would all also forbid commercial reprocessing. Well in the end he destroyed that industry in the USA but had no impact overseas. In the very early 1970's there was a border dispute/skirmish between the PRC and India. India had a couple CANDU power reactors they had imported from Canada and they used them to produce enough plutonium for one bomb that they set off as a warning to the PRC, which immediately backed off from their border incursions. After that the USA and Canada refused to sell any more fuel to India so they took two steps, cozying up to the USSR to buy fuel for their reactors and developing techniques for using Thorium which is abundant in India as part of their fuel mix in their reactors.

If president Carter really wanted to prevent a 'commercial plutonium economy' he could have offered a regulation that all plutonium was property of the US Government at a fixed price. The reprocessing industry would have been thrilled and the Generation III reactors designed for MOX fuel like the Phoenix reactors in Arizona would be using MOX cores today with all of the Plutonium handling done by the Federal Government.

[sparky]

.
I've had a notion that the fuel could be leased , the country enriching it would get the used fuel back
either for reprocessing or storage , it would solve the disposal problem for the user country
make compliance very easy to check and have some kind of moral integrity
you made the stuff , you dispose of its residue .

on reprocessing , I'm not too sanguine about it ,
is there some issues with letting the spent fuel cool down for 50 years ?
that's not an unmanageable time frame .
on the top of my head , I would think gamma emission would have dropped off quite a lot
would there be nefarious secondary irradiation effects ?

[Subjectivist]

.
I've had a notion that the fuel could be leased , the country enriching it would get the used fuel back
either for reprocessing or storage , it would solve the disposal problem for the user country
make compliance very easy to check and have some kind of moral integrity
you made the stuff , you dispose of its residue .

on reprocessing , I'm not too sanguine about it ,
is there some issues with letting the spent fuel cool down for 50 years ?
that's not an unmanageable time frame .
on the top of my head , I would think gamma emission would have dropped off quite a lot
would there be nefarious secondary irradiation effects ?

The only radiation that makes other materials radioactive are the ones that release neutrons like spontaneous fission reactions.

[sparky]

.
Would it not be the case in spend fuel ,
a cascade of irradiation of other elements and their "daughters" products down the transmutation table

I've found this cute interactive table from the IAEA
https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharth ... tHTML.html

as for activity ,I'm not sure if this is appropriate ,
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... total1.svg

it is a rather rough graph of the activity of three type of fuels versus time ,
beware the axis are not linear .
I would read it as ~ 80% active after 40 years , but it seems to refer to Plutonium only
Uranium would be pretty flat too , however nothing for the irradiated by products

[Tanada]

.Would it not be the case in spend fuel , a cascade of irradiation of other elements and their "daughters" products down the transmutation table?

I've found this cute interactive table from the IAEA
https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharth ... tHTML.html

as for activity ,I'm not sure if this is appropriate ,
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... total1.svg

it is a rather rough graph of the activity of three type of fuels versus time ,
beware the axis are not linear . I would read it as ~ 80% active after 40 years , but it seems to refer to Plutonium only Uranium would be pretty flat too , however nothing for the irradiated by products

Indeed, all of the 'fuel' isotopes are long to very long lived by their very nature. Pu-239 is an excellent fast neutron fuel and a usable epithermal and thermal neutron fuel. With thermal neutrons the fission rate for Pu-239 just 61.3 percent, the other 38.7 percent of neutron captures simply transform it into Pu-240. With fast neutrons the ratio is much higher, more like the ratio of Uranium-235 in a thermal reactor. The portion of the reactor grade plutonium that drops off in that first 80 years are the short lived isotopes like Pu-238 with its half life of 87 years and Pu-241 half life 14 years.

Fission fragments on the other hand are in the vast majority of cases short lived isotopes with 30 year or shorter half lives. The two peaks for fission fragment isotopes are around 99 (Technetium) and 139 (Lanthanum). You can do a simple search for 'isotopes of' any element on the periodic table and find a chart of half lives. For example Lanthanum has one stable isotope, La-139. It has
two isotopes with relatively long half lives, La-137 of 60,000 years and La-138 of 100,000,000,000 years which is a trivial decay rate eight times as long as the Universe has existed. Nearly every other isotope of Lanthanum has a half life measured in seconds to milliseconds and the rare exceptions only include one that lasts longer than a day, La-140 half life 1.68 days.

Thus for all practical purposes in terms of radiation risk reactor produced Lanthanum is very weakly radioactive less than 17 days after the reactor shuts down. You can do the same kind of review of all the fission fragments and you will find that same pattern repeated over and over. One or more stable isotopes with the exception of Technetium which has no stable form. Many many isotopes with very very short half lives. Zero to a very few long lived isotopes. Then there are the few like Plutonium 241 half life 14 years, Hydrogen-3(tritium) half life 12.3 years, Strontium-90 half life 28.9 years, Cesium-137 half life 30.17 years. These medium short length isotopes are the reason 300 to 600 years is used as a 'safe' storage range, after 300 years all of those are gone and after 600 years even Pu-238 with its 87 year half life is less than 1 percent of the original quantity remaining.

It is expected that after 300 to 600 years stored spent nuclear fuel will be no more radioactive than the ore it was made from, and in many cases it will be substantially less radioactive. It would actually not be unreasonable to place the spent nuclear fuel into a deep Uranium mine that is no longer producing and never worry about it again. Because of all the ore and overburden that had to be removed in the first place the much more compact spent fuel would very easily fit in that empty space, and because the oxide ceramic pellets are chemically inert they would just sit there quietly decaying for as long as you want to project into the future.

[sparky]

.
Thanks Tanada , much obliged for your information .
This would indicate that a century span of storage would still leave reprocessing possible .
some kind of "cold" reprocessing as opposed to "hot" reprocessing .
wet storage followed by dry storage doesn't seems to present much technical problem
it seems the whole issue is driven by the politic of fear ,
I don't dismiss it !
after all , zealots have had people killed and terrified populations with the fear of witches

[Tanada]

OKUMA, FUKUSHIMA PREF. – At the facility on the Pacific Coast, people in casual clothes stroll under cherry trees in full bloom.

Hot meals made with local ingredients are served for ¥380 at a cafeteria. Cold drinks, snacks and sweets are available at a convenience store.

This scene is not unfolding at a popular tourist site, but at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, which was rocked by a magnitude-9 earthquake and the ensuing tsunami on March 11, 2011.

Accompanied by officials from Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., a group of reporters was given access to the power station earlier this month.

Six years have passed since the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

Efforts to remove radioactive debris and to cover tainted soil with materials like mortar have helped decrease the radiation at the plant, allowing workers to wear regular uniforms at about 95 percent of the site.

Tainted water has been moved to more secure welded tanks, replacing weaker ones made of steel sheets and bolts, reducing leaks.

Visitors can overlook the four reactor buildings from a hill about 80 meters from the facility, where core meltdowns hit reactors 1, 2 and 3. Hydrogen explosions heavily damaged the buildings for units 1, 3 and 4, which have since received new facades.

On the hill, the radiation in the air was 150 microsieverts per hour, less than the amount received during a round-trip flight between Tokyo and New York. Tepco says there is no health hazard here as long as you wear masks and helmets and keep your stay short. Workers once needed to change into tightly woven clothing at the J-Village soccer training center about 20 km away before entering the Fukushima complex. But that burden has been lifted.

About 7,000 workers — 6,000 from construction, electronics and machinery companies and 1,000 from Tepco — work at the power station to deal with the aftermath of the meltdown and decommission the reactors.

“Our near-term goal is to create a place where they can work without worries,” said Daisuke Hirose, a spokesman for Tepco’s Fukushima No. 1 Decontamination & Decommissioning Engineering Co.

There are now 400 cherry trees at the facility. Before the disaster, there were 1,200, and local residents were invited to enjoy cherry blossoms every spring, Hirose said. Now, workers walk with smiles under a tunnel of trees, greeting passers-by.

In May 2015, a nine-story rest house with meeting spaces and shower rooms opened. A convenience store was added last year.

At a 200-seat cafeteria, hot meals made with Fukushima produce are delivered from a central kitchen in the town of Okuma, about 9 km from the plant.

“I used to eat cold rice balls,” a worker on a lunch break said. “Hot meals make me happy and motivate me to work.”

The plant, which stands on a 3.5-sq.-km site about 230 km northeast of Tokyo, started up in 1971.

Since the radiation has dropped sharply at the facility, about 10,000 people per year, including journalists from the United States, Europe and Asian countries, have visited. Last year, high school students dropped by.

After the two-hour tour, a dosimeter carried by a reporter showed she was exposed to only 40 microsieverts, less than the amount from a chest X-ray.

Although the working environment has certainly improved, the fate of the plant is far from clear.

Decommissioning the crippled reactors is expected to take 30 to 40 years. The utility is aiming to begin removing fuel debris from one reactor by the end of 2021, but so far it has failed to even ascertain the condition inside the reactors.

A lot of rubble remains in many of the buildings on the seaside, keeping alive fears of a quake-tsunami catastrophe like the one that struck six years ago.

A frozen underground wall has seen only limited success in preventing groundwater from flowing into the reactor and turbine buildings, regulators have said, acknowledging that the facility is still a perpetual generator of tainted water.

Tepco is also struggling to dispose of tainted waste, such as used protective garments, gloves and socks. It has burned 1,500 tons of such waste while monitoring the radiation in the smoke. It still had 70,000 cu. meters of garbage as of the end of February.

“Through legislation, we are prohibited from taking radioactive contaminated garbage outside the facility even after we incinerate it. We have to continue the fight against garbage and ash,” Hirose said.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/0 ... P_A8I-cFkf

[Tanada]

Fukushima InFORM takes umbrage with an inappropriate use of its data. The summation posted on May 5th says, “Beware the difference between color schemes.” ENENEWS is reporting that a "red blob" from Fukushima is on its way to North America.” (InFORM 5/5/17) ENENEWS posted a typically unfounded article on May 3, 2017, using past InFORM mapping to make it seem that a deadly red blob of radiation was nearing North America’s Pacific coast. InFORM’s August 2016 report used various colors on a map to show the extent of the different levels of barely detectable radioactive Cesium. The biologically innocuous concentration of Cesium at ~10 Becquerels per ton of seawater happened to be in red! There is, was, and never will be a “red blob” as intimated by ENENEWS! https://fukushimainform.ca/ene fake news (Comment - ENENEWS is arguably the most biased and misleading internet site focusing entirely on Fukushima. We have not responded to its eschatological drivel, to date, because it could give its webmaster/author undeserved free publicity. We hope the InFORM response to ENENEWS does not give it a wider audience.)

http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/fukush ... dates.html

[Cog]

I guess Fukishima did not boil worker's eyeballs out of their sockets as an esteemed member here claimed.

[Subjectivist]

Just like what happened in Chernobyl, the extreme hype about radiation danger has caused far more harm to the population than the radiation did. While in Ukraine the government started out criminally negligent the government in Japan went to the opposite extreme and was criminally cautious, destroying lives and stoking baseless fear in their own citizens for political reasons despite what the science told them.

Fear is a killer: Nuclear expert reveals radiation’s real danger
Experience in Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Fukushima has taught Shunichi Yamashita that anxiety and disruption can hurt people far worse than radiation itself
FUKUSHIMA wasn’t just a nuclear disaster. It was also an information disaster. Before the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and meltdown of three nuclear reactors, there was a myth in Japan about how nuclear power was completely safe. Ever since, we have had a new myth: everybody thought Fukushima was a second coming of Chernobyl, and that they would all get cancer.

I went to the prefecture to give radiation safety advice. I recognise people’s fears about radiation. It is human nature. You can’t smell or see or touch it – it is like a ghost. Radiophobia has become a big public health problem. And it is made worse because, especially here in Japan, people have lost trust in experts. I am one of those experts.

I have studied the health effects of radiation for most of my adult life. I know about it personally too: I was born in Nagasaki seven years after the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on the city. My mother was 16 years old when it fell, and she was just 3 kilometres away. A third of the population died, but she survived. Now she’s 88 and lives in my house. She has had lots of diseases, including tumours and cardiovascular diseases that may have been caused by the radiation, but she has a strong heart and is still going.

Perhaps this background led me to study medicine. I was a professor at Nagasaki University when I was asked to go to Chernobyl in 1990, four years after the nuclear accident there. People had received high doses of radioactive iodine because milk from cows grazing radioactive pastures wasn’t removed from the food supply. More than 5 million people were exposed. Thousands were diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid, a gland that takes up iodine.

We started a screening programme among the Chernobyl evacuees. It continues and I go there regularly. New cases are still emerging. Apart from the radiation sickness power plant workers experienced after being exposed to massive doses during the accident, thyroid cancers have turned out to be the main health impact. Many people expected a big surge in other cancers and genetic effects on the next generation. They haven’t happened, but I have seen how people live in fear of these things.

Fear can be very damaging. After Fukushima, I saw part of my role as being an intermediary between the government and the public. But I got into trouble for telling people to smile. I said it at a public meeting 10 days after the accident. Everybody was very stressed and in the middle of chaos. Many had been forced to evacuate. I said it was bad to worry so much. They should try to be at ease with themselves.

My audience, I think, understood. Almost nobody reacted badly at the time. But later my words were posted – out of context – by a lot of people online. Some opposed the advice I was giving and used it to attack me. I had difficulty working as a government adviser because of it.

Many people thought even a tiny amount of radiation was dangerous, despite the natural background radiation we are all exposed to. Some 110,000 people living within 20 kilometres of the Fukushima plant had been evacuated. I said publicly that there should be no apparent health effects when exposure was below 100 millisieverts a year. This is the lowest dose linked to rising cancer rates in studies such as those following the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it is in line with recommendations by the International Commission on Radiological Protection – an independent body of scientists. Some people wanted the official safety limit set as low as 1 mSv, but that is below the natural background level. The government decided on 20 mSv.

This caused confusion. Many people thought I wanted them to live in dangerous places. This is totally wrong. I felt that any small risks from radiation were much less than the psychological effects of being in evacuation camps or unable to return to normal life. I had seen this in Chernobyl.

The confusion was made worse by the chaos after the accident. When I went to Fukushima, I was shocked to discover that 60 people had died. This was not from radiation. Old people died during the evacuation, and some were even left behind in nursing homes or at home without medication.

Ironically, just three weeks before the accident, I had helped organise a World Health Organization meeting in Nagasaki, to discuss how to prepare for a nuclear accident. But these desk plans weren’t put into practice. Instead, the medical system collapsed. The Red Cross pulled out all its staff. Nurses left because they were frightened. And nobody knew how bad the radiation was because the government wasn’t issuing timely information. In the end, scientists at the local universities decided to take radiation readings themselves and produce their own maps.

It is now clear that, thanks to the evacuations and food safety controls, dose levels for the public were far below 100 millisieverts. We think that during the accident more than 99 per cent of people in the area received below 5 mSv, and the highest exposure was only 25 mSv.

“Many people thought even a tiny amount of radiation was dangerous”
In most places, radiation was soon back below the government’s safe level, but plans for the return of people didn’t get going for a long time. I had told the government that people could start to return after a month. The delay fed the fears.

One of the big concerns people had was that children would get thyroid cancer, as happened at Chernobyl. But here, with milk and other foodstuffs swiftly banned, children received thyroid doses of just a few mSv at most, whereas in Chernobyl they often received hundreds.

Nevertheless, we decided to do a mass thyroid screening using ultrasound, repeated every two years. We knew from Chernobyl that no cases were likely for four years, and we did an initial baseline survey to compare future rates against. We screened more than 300,000 children between 2011 and 2015.

We hoped this would reassure people. But the problem is a mass screening is bound to show up cancers that wouldn’t otherwise have been diagnosed. They had nothing to do with radiation, but the public and the media didn’t understand this. So when we published our first baseline results, showing we had found 113 thyroid cancers, all the headlines were about a “skyrocketing” 30-fold increase.

But you see the same “skyrocketing” whenever you do mass thyroid screening. And the rates we found were no different between areas with higher and lower radiation doses. There hasn’t been an epidemic of cancer, but there has been an epidemic of fear. The psychological effects from the trauma of evacuation and the fear of radiation are now the biggest health consequence of Fukushima.

Many people remain in an uncertain situation, frightened that they or their children will get sick, and unable to resume their lives. Adults are experiencing depression, sleep loss and anxiety. Their children are also anxious and school performance has suffered.

There have been more than 80 suicides linked to the accident and the evacuation. But there have been no deaths or sickness from direct exposure to radiation.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... al-danger/