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THE Nuclear Waste Thread (merged)

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.

Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby lowem » Fri 24 Jul 2009, 02:42:11

If it could clear the usual political hurdles, and I'd suspect it may well be easier in almost any other part of the world outside of the USA (which frankly IMHO is just too bad), we could potentially go from let's say around a 50-year supply of uranium to at least a couple thousand years give or take, giving us some time to move to Something Completely Different (TM).
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby outcast » Fri 24 Jul 2009, 04:56:51

lowem wrote:If it could clear the usual political hurdles, and I'd suspect it may well be easier in almost any other part of the world outside of the USA (which frankly IMHO is just too bad), we could potentially go from let's say around a 50-year supply of uranium to at least a couple thousand years give or take, giving us some time to move to Something Completely Different (TM).



The reason is because of politics, another victim of the anti-nuke hysteria in the US.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 24 Jul 2009, 19:59:39

pstarr wrote:There is no reason why little chunks of nuclear waste can't be contained in little lead vessels for use around the home. Right?

The vessel would have a little door that would open for use. Toast bread. Warm the feet at night. Aim the little vessel as a cup of coffee to heat it. So the technology would be like a toaster/microwave/convection unit?

Or there could be a motion sensor and the little vessel could be under the sink and when a cock-a-roach walked by the motion sensor would cause the vessel to swing around toward the roach and the little door would open. Instead of checking in the roach would check out and then the door would close.

Makes sense to me. What do you guys think?


I think you are a perfect example of the use of Aggressive Ignorance as a debating tactic.

It is a shame really, I know you have a brain in your head. I have read evidence that it exists in some of your posts which are sound. However, you refuse to use it when it comes to this topic because your talking points instructions are much too near and dear to your heart.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 25 Jul 2009, 06:19:31

pstarr wrote:It became pointless years ago to blame the failures of the nuclear power industry on environmentalists or the nimby syndrome.

The United States simply blew it by having been in the unfortunate position of the early adopter. We bought the first generation and they sucked. The French waited and installed a nice nuclear infrastructure.

Except for the problem of waste. And in the case of nuclear--the solution to pollution is not dilution



Indeed, the solution to WASTE is greater efficiency, and the solution to pollution is RECYCLING.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby Starvid » Sun 26 Jul 2009, 03:47:29

outcast wrote:
Plantagenet wrote:Nuclear waste is a giant potential energy source, not only for reprocessing and reuse in nuclear power plants, but also as a power source for electric generation directly from solid state electric cells, similar to solar radiation cells.



Given that NASA is starting to run out of plutonium I'd say that would be a good use.

They can always ask the French, who have a 100+ ton stockpile just laying around.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby Starvid » Sun 26 Jul 2009, 03:52:35

pstarr wrote:The United States simply blew it by having been in the unfortunate position of the early adopter. We bought the first generation and they sucked. The French waited and installed a nice nuclear infrastructure.

The French copied US Navy reactors, which were also depolyed on a wide scale in the US. The US was a an early adopter of the winning nuclear technology. The guys who were early adopters of sucky nuke tech are the British. The US reactors that were actually built (ie the largest nuclear fleet in the world) are great successes today.

Construction of nukes in the US faltered because of economic reasons and the lack of a clear national nuclear strategy, nothing else. It wan't NIMBY's, greens or even TMI.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby outcast » Mon 27 Jul 2009, 01:04:55

It wan't NIMBY's, greens or even TMI.


I don't think we should underestimate the effects of massive negative publicity........
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby outcast » Mon 27 Jul 2009, 10:47:09

On the flipside new nukes can't be built without government approval, if the government doesn't want it then it doesn't get built, period, no matter how sensible the economics are (or aren't). If huge amounts of people dont want it then the government would be under massive political pressure to discourage development.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby patience » Mon 27 Jul 2009, 16:58:58

There are damned good reasons why a govt would not want nuclear powerplants. How 'bout Y'all watch this, then get back to me, hmmm?

http://video.google.com:80/videoplay?do ... 7276447319

The story of what happened at Chernobyl. There are some neat bits in there aabout stuff that is WAAAAAAY over my head. And over the heads of most US physicists, too, it seems, or at least it was at the time....

Y'all really think we oughta be messing with this stuff?

Here's a quote from an Email I received on the movie, from a much more informed head than mine:
"Some salient points for me were:

They kept running the other reactors until 1991! From another site: They rotated the staff. Train trips into the contaminated area to run the remaining reactors required the workers to change clothes 3 times each way for contamination control.

At 33 mins: The first explosions were just the beginning. After dousing the reactor with water, a pool formed under it, and still the reactor was on fire. As molten fuel began seeping through the concrete floor of the reactor into the pool below, scientists calculated this would trigger a new explosion, the shock wave (from fuel heating the contained water into steam?) would be perfectly directed to create a 3 to 5 megaton explosion, destroying as far as Minsk, Gomel, and Kiev with its shock wave, and rendering all of Europe uninhabitable.

The underground aquifer for just about all of Ukraine lay below ground---below the reactor! (It's up to you to believe whether they stopped it in time.)

Firemen were sent in to drain the pool. 600 pilots die quickly from the flights they make dropping lead into the reactor from above.

10,000 miners, rotating in short shifts, dug under the reactor and poured a slab of concrete.

Robots failed to work in the highest radiation zones, the radiation ruined them. So humans, nicknamed "Bio-Robots" were sent in for 40 second intervals. It was enough time to move just two tiny shovels of radioactive waste from the roof. 500,000 men worked as "liquidators" to clean up this site.

Robotic-controlled bulldozers were driven into the site by people for burying topsoil farther away from the reactor.

Deformities of children today with images

At 1hr 26 mins it shows and starts talking in vague terms about the Russian Military's scalar-wave-generating antenna just a few miles from Chernobyl, which was decommissioned. It calls the site of the antenna Chernobyl 2. It doesn't come right out and tell you, but it lets you think about it. This is very daring for any documentary to do.

At about 1hr 30 mins: Plutonium on site can be released if the existing protective concrete structure collapses. It was built to last 30 years. 20 years have passed. It is failing. Ukraine has no money to replace it. The new structure is 10 years behind schedule. There are 100kgs of plutonium in there. Enough to poison 100 million people. It has a half-life of 245,000 years.

Gorbachev uses the measurement of 800 years. "This disaster will be with us for 800 years."

The most painful part of this has to be that they did it to themselves. This was not an enemy from outside the country. They blew THEMSELVES up, with their own weapons. The only thing that saved the United States, and made us victors in the scalar weapon wars, was that we were too far behind technologically, and we didn't have any scalar weapons! We thought nukes were the scary weapons. We had no idea about electrogravitational pulses from collapsing scalar waves setting off fissionable materials. The Russians did. They accidentally ignited buried nuclear waste with a standing scalar wave before Chernobyl. Arguably the most technologically advanced country in the world, Ukraine, blew itself up. Probably because its own scalar antenna failed during its years-long weather modification attack on the US. (See Woodpecker Grid)

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/ar ... read=41102

Of course, this disagrees with the Wikipedia explanation. But really, how do you go from "all is fine" to "all is blown to bits" with no in between steps? Only scalar EGP ignition of the reactor materials explains this to me.

From this, we got Glasnost, disarmament, and Ukrainian independence. (Who would want Ukraine now? The brain drain is complete. The damage is for 800-245,000 years, depending on who you ask.)

As for disarmament, who wants to stockpile nukes in their own country when they can be set off by the enemy's scalar weapons remotely?"

Most of the above I can't begin to understand. But I CAN understand enough to be certain that I don't want ANY nuke plants on the planet, not just here. Got to be the stupidest thing that man has done yet. Just my humble opinion.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby Starvid » Mon 27 Jul 2009, 19:31:43

What happened in Chernobyl (RBMK design) cannot happen in a Western design, for physical reasons, no more than gravity can stop working.

The rest of the stuff you mention is pure lies and conspiracy theory. There is wide scientific consensus among all experts what happened, and that includes none of what you mention. There are plenty of unbiased multinational (UN) studies on what happened and what the results were.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby patience » Mon 27 Jul 2009, 20:20:41

R-I-G-H-T..... And the check is in the mail, and I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today....

Scientist friend of mine has been talking to someone who was there. Dream on, it's much more peaceful and secure feeling that way.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby Tanada » Mon 27 Jul 2009, 20:26:31

patience wrote:There are damned good reasons why a govt would not want nuclear powerplants. How 'bout Y'all watch this, then get back to me, hmmm?


I'm sorry patience but you are the victim of conspiracy theory propagandists, there is absolutely nothing mysterious about how and why the Chernobyl accident happened, they had disabled all the safety systems that kept trying to automatically shut down the reactor during a test. When the system overheated and some of the water in the core boiled into steam it lowered the moderating ratio of the core leading to a power spike, the boiled more water into steam in a very rapid cascade failure. In under a second the power level was so high all the water turned to steam and the resulting pressure blew the top off the core.

Other speculations in the propaganda are off the wall on the face of it, even if someone proved that the core could explode with a force of 20 Mt (which was not a possibility) the damage would not have reached all those cities. The city of Pripyat would have been vaporized along with a chunk of forest and a lot of people would have died, but apparently that reality is not bad enough so they have to embellish it with nonsense about making Europe uninhabitable. A 50MT bomb called the Tsar Bomba was dropped on Novaya Zemlya by the USSR back in the 1960's you can find clips of it on Youtube if you are interested. The USA and USSR both built many 10, 15, 20 and even some larger hydrogen bombs back in the late 1950's when they figured a big enough explosion would make up for poor targeting. Explosion physics do not care what the energy source is, chemical, meteor, fission, fusion, anti-matter does not change the physics of how explosions work. The Cubed Squared law always applies, volume increases as a cube function of the radius from the explosion while the area effected increases by the squared function of the same radius. Therefore as you get further from ground zero the blast and other effects decrease very rapidly. Heck the impactor that is speculated to have killed of the Dinosaurs only made a crater 200 miles wide and it had more energy than all the bombs Mankind has ever built combined.

Oh and BTW they got the half life of Plutonium wrong by an order of magnitude, its close to 27,000 years, not 269,000.
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Re: New Fuel Source: Nuclear Waste?

Unread postby patience » Tue 28 Jul 2009, 08:21:36

Tanada,

Okay, let's see what I can do to tear it all down. I know you're right bout the half-life, and the cubed/squared rule. On that, however, I think they were referring to fallout damage in Europe, not blast radius. I'm not at all familiar with wind patterns over Europe, but fallout drift could clearly affect a huge area, so that much area being affected did not immediately trip anything for me.

What really worried me about the email I got, was the scalar-standing-wave stuff. I understand how standing waves work, but have no idea if this is fiction from there on , or not. What gave credibility to it all for me was the personal encounter my scientist friend had with a survivor of Chernobyl, who was well-placed at the time of the disaster. I have to protect identities here, but when my friend says the meltdown was suspect, it really gives me pause. And yes, whatever the official policy there, Ukraine is not fit to live in, from what this man said.

I suspect any bit of public news about the nuclear industry, having followed the Three Mile Island problems and the liberal doses of reassurance issued to the public about it. So much disinformation was put out by govt on that and the Enrico Fermi reactor problems, that I don't believe any "official" info on the subject now. Govt has zero credibility here, for me.

I think govt disinformation about nuclear energy in general is the reason the public where I live in Indiana supported blocking construction of a nuclear plant near us-the Marble Hill plant at Madison, IN, that was never completed. And, which I am still paying for on my electric bill....

A scandal in recent years about the govt program giving radiation-laced medication to welfare mothers down south did nothing to improve my opinion of "officials" on the subject. So, when I hear anything about nuclear power, my mind automatically goes to Hiroshima/Nagasaki, to Three Mile Island, to Chernobyl, to Nevada tests in the 1950's, and all the rest that were declared SAFE by all the respective officials. Why should I believe govt sponsore scientist on the subject either? This is the crowd that gave us DDT, 2-4-D, and 2-4-5-T. I have lung damage from spraying corn with 2-4-D in the 1950's. I have friends who died from Agent Orange. My brother in law did drafting for Bechtel who was contracted to save an ill-conceived nuclear plant in Michigan from sinking into the swamp where it was built. They dug huge holes down below the level of the nearby lake and poured them full of concrete. Will it hold? I dunno. Don't think it's a good idea to take the chance, though. In my own engineering career, I have seen numerous disasters, mostly attributable to bad management decisons. We saw that with NASA and the space shutlles. Why would electric power be different? You see one cockroach, you'd better plan on having a nest of them.

I am probably not rational on these subjects. That makes me a fine propaganda target for the naysayers, but it does keep me from believing propaganda in favor of unknown or poorly proven technology.

What science and electronics background I do have, superficially says that the scalar weapons thing might be possible, so I want to know more about that, if possible. There's been a lot of background noise about tinkering with the weather.

I have to agree with you that there is no proven case that Chernobyl was anything other than what you said. But I also know that the extent of the disaster was hushed up as much as possible, which still makes me suspect the rest. The idea that it can't happen again won't fit in my head, though.

Many thanks for your input. I need all the help I can get with my paranoia on the subject. :-D
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Death Knell for Nuclear Power

Unread postby AlexdeLarge » Tue 04 Aug 2009, 09:40:05

Can't have nukes, Can't burn coal, Can't drill off shore, Oil running out , CapNtax . We are so very f#cked...............

Death Knell For Nuclear Power?
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=334190009926126

Killing the storage facility for the spent fuel rods produced by the nation's nuclear power industry has long been a dream of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama. Last week, the Senate granted their wish, voting to deny the resources needed to complete a review necessary for Yucca Mountain to open.

"This is a major victory for Nevada," said Reid, who is up for re-election next year. "I am pleased that President Obama has lived up to his promise to me and to all Nevadans by working with me to kill the Yucca Mountain project."


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Re: Death Knell for Nuclear Power

Unread postby Tanada » Tue 04 Aug 2009, 12:28:42

No big deal, a small concrete pad at each plant site for cask storage will tide us over until we get somebody with some common sense in charge of the country, after that we will recycle all of it.
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Re: Death Knell for Nuclear Power

Unread postby yesplease » Wed 05 Aug 2009, 23:48:24

I'm inclined to agree with Tanada. The death knell for Yucca Mountain isn't the same thing as a death knell for fission. Especially in light of the politics behind the energy bill.
The Obama administration endorsed a revival of America's nuclear industry yesterday in an effort to build forward momentum for climate change legislation before the Senate.

The seal of approval for nuclear power – a cause embraced by Republican senators – came on day one of a full-on lobbying effort by the White House for one of Obama's signature issues.

Obama sent four of his top lieutenants to the Senate – his secretaries of energy, interior, agriculture and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – to try to drum up support for a global warming bill.

The PR effort saw direct appeals to the farming and nuclear lobbies – some of the fiercest critics of Obama's clean energy agenda – with Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning energy secretary, calling for new nuclear plants to re-establish America's technological dominance in the world.
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Re: Death Knell for Nuclear Power

Unread postby kiwichick » Thu 06 Aug 2009, 01:10:14

tanada; re recycling nuclear fuel

why isn't that being done now?
or is it?
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