As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense to U.S. Rises

[jpak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/us/17nuke.html?hp

WASHINGTON — Forgotten but not gone, the waste from more than 100 nuclear reactors that the federal government was supposed to start accepting for burial 10 years ago is still at the reactor sites, at least 20 years behind schedule. But it is making itself felt in the federal budget.

With court orders and settlements, the federal government has already paid the utilities $342 million, but is virtually certain to pay a total of at least $7 billion in the next few years and probably over $11 billion, government officials said. The industry said the total could reach $35 billion.

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The payments are due because the reactor owners were all required to sign contracts with the Energy Department in the early 1980s, with the government promising to dispose of the waste for a fee of a 10th of a cent per kilowatt-hour. It was supposed to begin taking away the fuel in the then far-off year of 1998.

<snip>

“The rate-payer has paid for it,” said Michael Bauser, the associate general counsel of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade group. “The Department of Energy hasn’t done it, and now the taxpayer is paying for it a second time.”

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[Kolesar]

1. They want to send it to the Piketon site in the Ohio-2 congressional district for "recycling"

There are plans to recycle the waste back into potent, radioactive uranium or uranium/plutonium fuel rods. I expect that the fuel rods will arrive in Ohio on schedule and sit for decades while bureaucrats and politicians slowly establish a recycling program.

I understand that this recycling process also creates a waste stream of some very nasty radioactive products that are hard to store.

So, now, here are the options:
1. Build ever more fuel rod tanks in the yards of the power plants
2. Send the fuel rods to Yucca which has been declared geologically inappropriate. Or maybe it is now "politically" inappropriate; it is all a matter of semantics on how Nevada wants to repel the wastes.
3. Send it to Ohio.

[NNadir]

3. I would be willing to have it all here in New Jersey.

I would support fully a nuclear fuel recycling plant in my community.

But then again, I'm not an ignorant mystic.

In the meantime, the used nuclear fuel has injured zero people.

This contrasts nicely with the electronic waste that the solar industry is trying to foist on humanity.

[Kolesar]

4. I thought you wanted breeder reactors

which is it?

[sergeiAK]

5. The two aren't mutually exclusive

Breeder reactors are a forward solution, reprocessing allows reuse of the waste we have. Two different ideas for different purposes.

[Kolesar]

6. Hi sergeiAK, welcome to DU

:hi:

[NNadir]

7. Anyone who knows anything about nuclear energy - this excludes the membership of Greenpeace -

immediately recognizes that a fuel recycling program assumes some reactors having a breeding ratio greater than 1, long term.

I favor 10 to 15 more reactors in my state, since we have lots of shoreline and an excellent network of rails. I believe that several of these reactors - as many as a third - should be heavy water reactors fueled by U-233 obtained from thorium.

We can run these reactors, heavy water reactors, on uranium obtained from used nuclear fuel for tens of decades, without once ever having to dig shit up, on uranium in used nuclear fuel, if we remove the fission products. It follows that to remove fission products we would need to chemically reprocess fuel.

Unlike the anti-nuke fundamentalists on this site - a fundamentalist is merely a person whose views cannot be changed by any amount of facts or any appeal to observation - I fully understand nuclear chemistry and nuclear technology.

If we build reactors here that are traditional PWR or BWR light water reactors, we can also fission plutonium here. If we choose to run these reactors in the so called Radowsky configuration, we can generate lots and lots of U-233 and burn-up our plutonium.

This program would create infrastructure in my state - eliminate the pollutants that the dangerous dumbell anti-nuke community is trying to shove into my family's lungs through appeals to ignorance - create a base of highly skilled, highly paid scientists, provide for electricity exports to New York and PA, shut the fucking coal plants about which anti-nukes couldn't care less, and possibly, if located in cities where the waste heat could be used for process and district heating, eliminate much of our dependence on natural gas.

You think you know what I am for, but I think you are offering a rather lazy analysis.

I do not, for the record, believe that fast breeder reactors are necessary immediately, but I note that it has been known since the 1960's that thermal breeders based on U-233 can operate.

I submit that were New Jersey to obtain all of the US used nuclear fuel, we would be wealthy, clean and safe for many decades to come. Because of our many rail rights of way here, we could probably shut the fucking turnpike forever and dispense with the awful and dangerous car culture that is so toxic to the survival of this planet.

I note that the construction of 10 to 15 reactors here would provide many tens of thousands of highly paid union construction jobs and would require the investment of very little land.

In a few acres of land, there are single nuclear facilities in this country that produce more energy than all of the solar and wind facilities in the entire country combined.

[Kolesar]

9. The IEEE article says the best that France can do is reprocessing to manage the waste

France is not operating any breeder facility and it is not because President Carter banned them.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/4891/4

With visions of nuclear electricity “too cheap to meter” long gone, the case for breeder reactors has shifted from creation of new fuels to management of spent fuels. Without breeder reactors, the case for reprocessing is less than compelling. Considered in isolation, the economic arguments for and against reprocessing are a wash. Most of the arguments concerning security and terrorism, too, seem moot. But until or unless breeder reactors are commercialized that can truly burn up all the residual fissile material found in spent fuels, reprocessing will simply concentrate high-level waste in a form that’s hotter and harder to handle, exchanging one nuclear waste headache for another.

That's what Ohio is getting.

[jpak]

2. Ya gotta hand it the Nuclear Energy Lobby

Convincing (a Republic) Congress to take their spent reactor fuel off their hands AND making rate payers pay for it was a real coup.

Undoubtedly the Biggest ($100 billion) Corporate Welfare Scam in US history.

and foisting the nation's spent reactor fuel on the state of Nevada was arguably the Biggest Act of Congressional Cowardice and Political Selfishness in the 20th Century...

[NNadir]

8. Um,. I know that in fundie land, they pretend that fossil fuels are not subsidized,

(and they also pretend that guarantees are subsidies and that funded initiatives are subsidies) but, in fact, fossil fuels are by far, the world's largest subsidized form of energy.

You'd have to be some kind of isolated dope to not understand that.

If you think that every square centimeter of asphalt pavement in this country is not a fossil fuel subsidy, you've probably been laying plastered under the dining room table in the mansion with mom.

If you think that the the United States adventure in Iraq (and elsewhere is not) a fossil fuel subsidy, you've been smoking something and having dangerous hallucinations.

If you are so high that you do not recognize that all of the particulates and other shit that anti-nukes are pushing all over this planet do not consist of a subsidy - and an indiscriminate and uncontrolled waste dumping subsidy at that - you probably have been living for too long behind the gates where you don't see what happens to those who aren't living on great-granddad's land investments in the early 19th century.

In fact, the mountain top removal program - hardly the worst consequence of the dangerous coal industry that the anti-nuke cult couldn't care less about - is a huge subsidy, and all the interest will be paid by every single person who ever lives in North America.

The anti-nuke cult, which appeals to ignorance of science, ignorance of economics, and ignorance of ethics, is very arbitrary about what it picks to note.

I note that the entire renewable energy business would collapse immediately without subsidies - subsidies amounting to many billions of dollars per year - and said industry is mostly notable for having failed to produce an exajoule of energy in any calendar year. Thus, like Amory Lovins checks from Walmart, said subsidy is nothing more than a handout for which no real value is obtained.

[jpak]

10. Ummm ...(again)...92+ GW of wind, 15+ GW of solar electric and 100+ GW of solar thermal capacity

alone will produce 1+ EJ of energy this year world-wide.

and that doesn't include biomass, biogas or geothermal...

(((((ex-o-jewels)))) of renewable energy...

QED

:evilgrin:

[bananas]

11. Fundieland? LOL!

God only blows up atheists reactors - like Chernobyl!
:rofl:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7317289

Iran Says God Protects Nuclear Program
AP Sunday February 17 2008

By NASSER KARIMI

Associated Press Writer

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Sunday that God would punish Iranians if they do not support the country's disputed nuclear program, state radio reported.

``The Iranian people openly announce that they will defend their rights... God will reprimand them if they do not do so,'' state radio quoted Khamenei as saying.

The 68-year-old ayatollah, who has final say on all state matters, said Washington's claim that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon is false. The Iranian government has long insisted its nuclear activities are only for peaceful generation of fuel.

``They know that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon, and they are just trying to block the Iranian nation from achieving advanced technology,'' Khamenei was quoted as saying in Tehran.

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