William Tucker's article "There's No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste" is probably mis-titled, but makes effective points about the feasibility of storing what's left over from rods used in nuclear power plants.
"Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth's crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.
Of the remaining 5% of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 -- which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.
What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains -- from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy -- beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague."
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2 comments:
I wasn't all that impressed by Tucker's arguments. For one thing, he got a number of facts wrong:
--Uranium (most of which is U-238) does not make up 1% of Earth's crust. The number is more like 4 ppm (parts per million). You cannot put used uranium back in the ground and say everything is just like it was.
--Tucker states that 12 ounces of U-235 could power San Francisco for five years. If this were true, then I don't think there would be any opponents of nuclear power, even in the radical environmental movement. The amount of uranium that is extracted from Earth's crust is on the order of tens of thousands of tons per year, most of which goes to the nuclear industry. I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I suspect that the amount of uranium needed to power San Francisco per year is measured in thousands of pounds--or even in tons--not in ounces.
--I believe that the statement in the article that France can store all of its waste beneath the floor of a single room is simply untrue. France has been looking into long-term storage of wastes in granite, and it has exported thousands of tons of depleted uranium to Russia. Perhaps if we sent all of our waste to Mexico we could store what's left under a floor too.
--Recycling and reprocessing can increase the amount of energy produced by fission, but it is important to understand that even with these, uranium is a limited, non-renewable resource. It may be part of a short-term solution to our energy and environmental problems, but it is not the long-term solution.
--We cannot ignore the proliferation issue, and I am not convinced that Carter and Ford were wrong. The current struggles that Iran is having in producing even small amounts of enriched uranium demonstrates how difficult the process is. For us to have plutonium being used in hundreds of commercial reactors would make it more likely that sometime in the future weapons-grade material could be stolen.
I'm not totally opposed to nuclear power as a temporary part of our energy picture, but we have to do this with a clear idea of the risks involved in the short-term storage, transportation, and long-term storage of the wastes.
Kevin, thanks for the additional information and insights! It is certainly helpful to have a geologist's perspectives.
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