TEPCO Rose

[PamW]

34. This is where EDUCATION is needed..

Octafish states
Nuclear power's impact on human health, the storage of waste, and the proliferation of material for weapons are just three problem areas the answers to which are not even up for discussion in a democratic manner.

This is where EDUCATION is needed. Contrary to what someone has told you; there really IS NOT a "problem" of nuclear power's impact on human health. You may be able to point to some medical researchers that are anti-nuke activists before they are good scientists, but the VAST majority of the medical research shows that nuclear power is not having an adverse effect on human health. The radiation we receive due to using nuclear power is TRIVIAL compared to what we receive from Mother Nature and her radioactive planet. Courtesy of the University of Michigan Health Physics Society chapter:

http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/radrus.htm

The dose due to the use of nuclear power and all its supporting activities labeled "Nuclear Fuel Cycle" in the table, is <0.03% of the average person's annual radiation exposure. That's well within the capability of our body's radiation damage repair mechanism; so any exposure is repaired. Likewise we see from large studies conducted by the cancer researchers like the National Institute of Health's National Cancer Institute:

No Excess Mortality Risk Found in Counties with Nuclear Facilities

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/nuclear-facilities

Evidently you are a non-scientist, because most scientists know that the nuclear waste "problem" is really a solved problem, and has been so since the beginning. The solution to the longevity of nuclear waste is to reprocess / recycle the long-lived isotopes, like Pu-239; back to the reactors to be used as fuel. Nuclear physicist and Associate Director of Argonne National Laboratory, Dr. Charles Till, explains the process in this interview with PBS Frontline:

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

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.

By reprocessing / recycling, you can transmute the long-lived waste like Pu-239 which lasts for many thousands of years, into short lived fission products that have the short lifetimes Dr. Till relates above. We don't need to have to store / isolate nuclear waste from the environment for thousands of years in a repository. That was a problem created by the anti-nukes when they got the US Congress to mandate the USA's "once through" fuel cycle and outlawed the real solution back in 1978. That was a problem that the anti-nukes created for us so they could complain about the problem of long-lived waste. Other countries, like France; reprocess / recycle. The USA should do the same, as well as build reactors like the IFR Dr. Till speaks of since the IFR is a good "actinide burner" and can burnup our accumulated stockpile of long-lived isotopes.

The third point about nuclear proliferation is another "red herring" brought to you by the anti-nuke propagandists. There are specially built "production reactors" like those at Hanford and Savannah River in the USA that make all the plutonium in the USA's nuclear weapons. NONE of the plutonium in US nuclear weapons came from commercial power reactors. Commercial power reactors don't produce "weapons grade" plutonium, they produce "reactor grade" plutonium:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor-grade_plutonium

The degree to which reactor-grade plutonium is less useful than weapons-grade plutonium for building nuclear weapons is debated, with many sources saying it is difficult or impossible, and others saying it is relatively easy with modern technologies like fusion boosting to overcome predetonation...

Nuclear reactions are much, much faster than any mechanical assembly of the bomb's core. There are isotopes of Plutonium, namely Pu-240 and Pu-242, that spontaneously fission without the introduction of a neutron. A certain level of Pu-240 and Pu-242 is found, even in "weapons grade" plutonium, but the production reactors minimize this. Even with weapons grade, one can't use the "gun assembly" method as was done in the Uranium-fueled "Little Boy" bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The Los Alamos scientists were working on a plutonium gun until they got the first samples of Hanford plutonium and found that the spontaneous fission of Pu-240 / Pu-242 gave so many neutrons that they couldn't assemble the bomb core fast enough with a gun, before the neutron-induced nuclear reactions blew it apart. You get a very small explosion, not a big nuclear explosion. That's the "pre-detonation problem" referred to in the above wiki article. That's why Los Alamos had to switch to an "implosion" type of bomb for the Fat Man that destroyed Nagasaki.

If there's enough Pu-240 / Pu-242 in the plutonium, then it's impossible for even an implosion system. The IFR makes spent fuel that is very high in Pu-240 / Pu-242 which is why Dr Till states in the interview above:

Q: So it would be very difficult to handle for weapons, would it?

A: It's impossible to handle for weapons, as it stands.

It's highly radioactive. It's highly heat producing. It has all of the characteristics that make it extremely, well, make it impossible for someone to make a weapon.

You may have heard that weapons scientists made a nuclear bomb with "reactor grade" plutonium. That is true; they did that in 1962. It's also true that they did that with 1962-vintage "reactor grade" plutonium; not modern vintage.

Back in 1962, we had the Generation I nuclear power plants like Yankee-Rowe and Connecticut Yankee. The degree to which the levels of Pu-240 / Pu-242 are present is measured by a quantity called "burnup". The higher the burnup, the less suitable the plutonium is for weapons. In 1962, the Generation I reactors put out spent fuel with burnups of about 12,000 Mw-D/MT ( Megawatt-Days per metric tonne ). The AEC wondered if that spent fuel could be used to make bombs, and asked the weapons labs to check it out. They got some Generation I burnup fuel from the British as detailed in the wiki article above. They found they could; although they used some advance methods to accomplish it ( More on that later ). When the labs determined that spent reactor fuel could be used; that fact was classified.

However, nuclear reactor technology moved on, those old Generation I reactors were retired, and by the late '70s; we had a bunch of Generation II power reactors whose typical discharge burnup was 40,000 to 45,000 Mw-D/MT. That's WAY, WAY too high to be used for bombs. Since the spent fuel from the then current reactors was too high to be used for weapons; the DOE ( AEC's successor ) declassified the fact that those old Generation I reactors could be used to make bombs. It was now safe, because we didn't have them anymore.

Nuclear reactor technology has continued to improve, and those Generation II reactors are now getting about 55,000 to 60,000 Mw-D/MT burnup from their discharge nuclear fuel. So more than ever; one can't use current Generation II reactors to produce bombs.

As detailed by Dr. Till; Generation III and Generation IV reactors ( like IFR ) have even higher burnups and are even more impossible to be used to make bombs.

Additionally, the wiki article mentions that "fusion boosting" can help a bomb designer use less than "weapons grade" fuel. However, "boosting" is a rather advanced nuclear weapons design technique. Just like the "Teller-Ulam Principle", the basic idea of boosting has been declassified, but NOT the details of how you do it. The weapons designers that made that 1962 explosion with then reactor-grade fuel, were able to do experiments to learn the details of how to do boosting on bombs that didn't need boosting that were made with weapons-grade plutonium.

If all you have is reactor-grade plutonium when you make your first nuclear bomb; how do you learn to do boosting? You have a "chicken and egg" problem. You can't get your first nuclear explosion with reactor-grade plutonium unless you do boosting. You can't learn to do boosting until you have a way to do a nuclear explosion. "Chicken and Egg". Boosting doesn't help you do your first nuclear explosion with reactor grade plutonium.

Because of this; nuclear scientists consider the proliferation risk of modern power reactors to be pretty much a "red herring". The technique of boosting is useless to a new nuclear proliferant, and the current and future reactors can defeat ANY nuclear bomb building attempts.

Of course that doesn't stop a bunch of anti-nukes and anti-nuke organizations from complaining about a solved problem. To me it's a little like a bunch of people who would like to ban automobiles. They keep complaining about how much unburned hydrocarbons that cars put into the air. However, the numbers that they are using come from 1962 when cars didn't have catalytic convertors. Cars have had catalytic convertors for decades, and any future internal combustion engine driven cars will also have catalytic convertors. So these complainers are really quite dishonest.

So with a little scientific education; your seemingly intractable problems simply evaporate.

PamW