Future of America's Nuclear Power Plants

[PamW]

19. Arjun proved NOTHING!!

Contrary to Kris' claim; Arjun doesn't "prove" anything in that paper.

Arjun merely asserts that the volume of waste will increase, but he doesn't prove it or explain why.
The reason is because he can't.

Reprocessing is performing chemical processing on the waste. Chemical processes don't create radioactivity. The same amount of radioactive material that goes into a chemical reaction is the amount that comes out.

Contrary to a popular misconception among anti-nukes, radioactivity is NOT "contagious". You don't make some non-radioactive material radioactive merely because it was in the vicinity of some other radioactive material.
That's how it appears in the movies, for those that get their science education from Hollywood.

University of California - Berkeley Physics Professor Richard Muller makes this point in his book, "Physics for Future Presidents" on page 121:

http://books.google.com/books?id=6DBnS2g-KrQC&pg=PA121&lpg=PA121&dq=Muller+radioactivity+contagious&source=bl&ots=_0kXRDDnzu&sig=Wk6u3EEXz7vsIkNdqGAwG-OzCOw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=N2WlT--EL4rYiAL8htDuAg&ved=0CFoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

In fact, reprocessing actually reduces the amount of waste that we have to handle in a special manner. This is best seen by using an analogy to a doctor's office.

Next time you are at the doctor's office, look around the exam room for a special waste container for medical waste. It will have a covered top, display the biohazard symbol, and it is where the doctor and nurses put stuff like used needles or gauze pads with blood on them. You don't want those items in the regular trash, especially when much of our trash is picked over by sorters recovering recyclable materials. You don't want them to encounter medical waste.

Somewhere else the office will have regular trash cans for regular office waste; used envelopes, discarded papers, and the remnants of the receptionists lunch and the bag she carried it in. The office trash is disposed of by the same service that disposes of our household trash. It's much more expensive to dispose of the medical waste which gets special handling.

Suppose the doctor and his/her staff were to dump both types of waste into a common dumpster. That wouldn't make sense, because the dumpster would contain medical waste, the entire contents would have to be treated as medical waste and receive the expensive handling. It's much better to have the ordinary trash separate from the smaller volume of medical waste that needs special handling.

Recall the composition of spent reactor fuel that I cited above:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel

3% of the spent fuel is fission products that are radioactive. This is analogous to the medical waste; this stuff needs special handling and needs a special repository to lock it away while it decays.

1% of the spent fuel is Plutonium and other actinides. This stuff also is analogous to the medical waste, and requires special handling.

96% of the spent fuel is Uranium - both U-235 and U-238. This is EXACTLY the same stuff we took out of the ground. Why not just put it back where we got it? The Uranium is like the office trash that is mixed in with the medical waste. By itself, it would be easy to dispose of; but because it is co-mingled with other nasty stuff, we have to handle it all as if it were all nasty stuff.

Reprocessing separates the above classes of materials. Once you get the 96% that is just Uranium separated by itself, just like having separate office trash; it's easy to dispose of.

For 96% of the stuff that is in nuclear waste, burying it in Yucca Mountain or what ever we decide to do; is overkill.

The only stuff that needs the special treatment is the 4% of spent fuel that is NOT Uranium.

Therefore, reprocessing reduces the amount of stuff you have to treat special; by a factor of 25!!!

Damn the cost. At the bussbar, nuclear generate electricity costs about 2 cents per kw-hour. Of that, about 0.1 cents is for waste disposal. Reprocessing increases the disposal cost by about 80%. Lets say it increases it by 100%, i.e. doubles it. So now our nuclear generated electricity costs 2.1 cents per kw-hour at the bussbar.

That extra 5% in cost buys us a dramatic reduction in how much waste we need to process specially. It also allows us to return the really long-lived stuff, the Plutonium and actinides, back to the reactor which is the only thing that can transmute those long-lived radioisotopes into short-lived radioisotopes as Dr. Till points out in the interview with Richard Rhodes for PBS's Frontline:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: The fission products.

A: Fission products. But none of the long-lived toxic elements like plutonium and americium or curium, the so-called manmade elements. They're the long-lived toxic ones. And they're recycled back into the reactor ... and work every bit as well as plutonium.

Q: So they go in, and then those are broken into fission products, or some of it is. Right?

A: Yes.

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

Arjun doesn't like reprocessing because he's just anti-nuclear and it deprives him of something to complain about.

I frequently asks anti-nukes what they want to be done with nuclear waste. The answer I get is that they never wanted it created in the first place. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed, so their response is really a non-answer. However, I take it that they would like not to have a repository with Plutonium in it somewhere. They want to get rid of that Plutonium. That's their main concern.

The scenario I outline above is the one way that we can get rid of all the Plutonium. Unfortunately, the anti-nukes don't want the best solution to their problem, even when it is handed to them. I guess they're having too much fun complaining about the problem than to want to solve it.

PamW