By Allison Macfarlane, Sharon Squassoni, July 8, 2019
Americans have come late to the game on responsible consumerism, but they are making up for lost time with a passionate obsession about waste. It’s no coincidence that Fox News, CNN, YouTube and USA Today have all reported that the deepest solo ocean dive found plastic waste seven miles below the surface, in the Mariana Trench.
Now that Americans are “woke” about waste in general, they may turn to the specific kind produced by the nuclear energy industry. Plans to revitalize US nuclear power, which is in dire economic straits, depend on the potential for new, “advanced” reactors to reduce and recycle the waste they produce. Unfortunately, as they “burn” some kinds of nuclear wastes, these plants will create other kinds that also require disposal. At the same time, these “advanced” reactors—many of which are actually reprises of past efforts—increase security and nuclear weapons proliferation risks and ultimately do nothing to break down the political and societal resistance to finding real solutions to nuclear waste disposal.
The current nuclear dream is really no different from previous ones of the last 70 years: the next generation of reactors, nuclear power advocates insist, will be safer, cheaper, more reliable, less prone to produce nuclear bomb-making material, and more versatile (producing electricity, heat, and perhaps hydrogen), without creating the wastes that have proved almost impossible to deal with in the United States. The Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act specifically describes the advanced reactors it seeks to support as having all those positive characteristics. This newest burst of enthusiasm for advanced reactors is, however, largely fueled by the idea that they will burn some of their long-lived radioisotopes, thereby becoming nuclear incinerators for some of their own waste.
Many of these “advanced” reactors are actually repackaged designs from 70 years ago. If the United States, France, the UK, Germany, Japan, Russia, and others could not make these reactors economically viable power producers in that time, despite spending more than $60 billion, what is different now? Moreover, all of the “advanced” designs under discussion now are simply “PowerPoint” reactors: They have not been built at scale, and, as a result, we don’t really know all the waste streams that they will produce.
It’s tempting to believe that having new nuclear power plants that serve, to some degree, as nuclear garbage disposals means there is no need for a nuclear garbage dump, but this isn’t really the case. Even in an optimistic assessment, these new plants will still produce significant amounts of high-level, long-lived waste. What’s more, new fuel forms used in some of these advanced reactors could pose waste disposal challenges not seen to date.
Some of these new reactors would use molten salt-based fuels that, when exposed to water, form highly corrosive hydrofluoric acid. Therefore, reprocessing (or some form of “conditioning”) the waste will likely be required for safety reasons before disposal. Sodium-cooled fast reactors—a “new” technology proposed to be used in some advanced reactors, including the Bill Gates-funded TerraPower reactors—face their own disposal challenges. These include dealing with the metallic uranium fuel which is pyrophoric (that is, prone to spontaneous combustion) and would need to be reprocessed into a safer form for disposal.
Unconventional reactors may reduce the level of some nuclear isotopes in the spent fuel they produce, but that won’t change what really drives requirements for our future nuclear waste repository: the heat production of spent fuel and amount of long-lived radionuclides in the waste. To put it another way, the new reactors will still need a waste repository, and it will likely need to be just as large as a repository for the waste produced by the current crop of conventional reactors.
Recycling and minimizing—even eliminating—the waste streams that many industries produce is responsible and prudent behavior. But in the context of nuclear energy, recycling is expensive, dirty, and ultimately dangerous. Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel—which some advanced reactor designs require for safety reasons—actually produces fissile material that could be used to power nuclear weapons. This is precisely why the United States has avoided the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel for the last four decades, despite having the world’s largest number of commercial nuclear power plants.
Continuing research on how to deal with nuclear waste is a great idea. But building expensive prototypes of reactors whose fuel requires reprocessing, on the belief that such reactors will solve the nuclear waste problem in America, is misguided. At the same time, discounting the notion that a US move into reprocessing might spur other countries to develop this same technology—a technology they could secretly exploit to produce nuclear weapons—is shortsighted and damaging to US national and world security.
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You forget that firstly there are new vitrification processes which are being developed and could solve a large percentage of high level waste issues. And that if you use empty oil reservoirs such as the ones in Oklahoma and Texas, you can rid yourself of all liquid waste. And all the waste that isn't liquid? You turn it into a liquid uranium hexaflouride slurry then chemically neutralize the acid and put it in the oil well where it is miles below the water table.
Beyond that "Repackaged"? Did you forget that boiling water reactors today with modern equipment are basically the same as the ones designed in the 70's? Because it is basically a nuclear powered tea kettle. Very simplistic design where a reactor heats water, said water turns into steam, is fed through turbines, and then cooled and sent back to the reactor.
If you compare other relatively carbon free sources of power and run the numbers (I came up with this figure using 50kw solar panels promoted by a solar energy company) I get a figure that's around 30 to 40 billion US dollars to produce 2,000,000 kw or 2,000 mw or the equivalent output of a single nuclear reactor when you factor in capacitors and battery banks. Beyond that those are composed of lithium, or lead acid, which is in fact worse for the environment because you produce far more of that in tonnage yearly than nuclear waste with reactors.
Look at France. 75% of their power comes from nuclear energy and they have one of the lowest carbon emission rates per capita of any industrialized country.
Solar, wind and other "renewables" are maintenance intensive, expensive, and difficult to produce power with as they are dependent on weather conditions. Beyond that they take up huge tracts of land compared to nuclear power. They should be used, but not as primary sources. Nuclear should be the primary source and provide about 60-70% of our power with the remaining portion being divided between solar, wind, and hydroelectric, all of which should be built according to locale where most efficient (ie solar in a desert).
Nuclear power is the only primary option if you don't want to bankrupt nations trying to reduce carbon emissions.
While I understand this is an opinion piece, there are a few items in this article that really don't quite mesh with the facts. Because they are presented from a supposedly authoritative source, many people won't question the assertions. I'd like to cover a few of them here.
Lets get some terminology out of the way first. Fast Breeder and Sodium Cooled reactors mentioned above are, for our purposes, the same thing. These reactors use solid, generally metallic fuel instead of the ceramic fuels encased in metal tubes.
Molten Salt Reactors are different in that the nuclear fuel is generally dissolved in the molten metallic salt solution. This presents some advantages in safety and simplicity which I'll briefly touch on.
But first, some glaring items were mentioned that really make me wonder whom this article targets. First, the authors mention that molten salt reactors use a liquid fuel which can form hydrofluoric acid when exposed to water. While technically true, they conveniently omit that these reactors do not use water as a coolant. The fluid is a metal salt which is a metal bonded with either an organic or inorganic molecule. I won't delve into a chemistry lesson here but the reason you use a molten salt (if you wanted to, you could melt the table salt in your spice cabinet...don't try that at home please!) is that it has a very wide temperature range in which is stays liquid without boiling. This is what makes a molten salt reactor so safe compared to water cooled reactors. Because you don' t get hot enough to boil the salt solution, you don't build pressure in your reactor vessel. This means that the catastrophic failures of Chernobyl and Fukushima, can't happen in an MSR. Oh, and because you're not using water in your reactor, your chances of generating any significant volume of hydrofluoric acid are pretty slim. It's simply not a great concern. The other benefit is that the efficiency of these high temperature MSRs is considerably better than any water cooled reactor...orders of magnitude better. This is important because you don't want to interrupt the reaction any more than you need to. Your run times between shutdown are years and years. This means the proliferation concerns are not a serious concern as the authors would lead you to believe. Because your fuel remains dissolved in a scorching hot (600 degrees C or more depending on the type of MSR) fuel salt and is not removed from the reactor, it remains inaccessible for producing weapons. You also keep your fission products and higher actinides in the fuel salt which makes them inaccessible as well. While it is true that some fuel processing must occur, it does not separate fission products from the materials used in weapons. Because you can't use impure Plutonium or Uranium in a nuclear weapon, your proliferation concerns are effectively nil. When the reactor finally uses up its fuel, the spent portion is simply removed from the reactor and fresh fuel salt blended in to keep the reactor operational and the proliferation safeguard in place. The spent fuel salt you have removed, is allowed to solidify as decay heat bleeds off. And because you've used far more of the energy in your fuel, your long-lived actinides are not so long lived. The waste product isn't dangerous for tens of thousands of years. It only needs to be sequestered for about 300 years before it is back to the original radioactivity of the uranium ore from whence it was mined. We don't have a massive project to dig up natural uranium ore or thorium ore to store it in a geologic repository, because there is no pressing need to do so. It's safe.
The next thing that caught my eye was calling Uranium pyrophoric. While this is true, Uranium will combust, as any high school chemistry student can tell you, you need an oxidizer to make something burn. In our case, Uranium combusts in the presence of oxygen. However, combust is a very relative term when you're talking about metals. If you were to put a piece of Aluminum under a microscope and expose it to oxygen, you'd see some "combustion" but then it would stop. That dull finish that aluminum takes on, is actually aluminum oxide and it renders aluminum safe to handle without any fear of explosion. It's in the engine in your car, the wheels on your car and in dozens of products you handle daily. Uranium behaves the same way, but in the case of a Sodium Cooled Reactor, you're going to be missing that key component to combustion. You don't have any oxygen or other oxidizer in the reactor. By the way, those metal tubes I mentioned earlier that contain the ceramic uranium fuel, those are a Zirconium alloy. Care to guess what happens to Zirconium if you leave it exposed to air? It's pyrophoric too but like most pyrophoric metals, its far less reactive than gasoline. If finely ground enough, it will spit and sputter and produce some smoke, but its less energetic than a match lighting. Pointing out that Uranium is pyrophoric is misdirection, and a scare tactic.
The metallic uranium fuel used in Liquid Metal Cooled Fast Reactors (LMFBRs) doesn't have this problem because there is no air present. The benefits though, are considerable and similar to the MSR's earlier. Because you aren't using water as a coolant, you don't have need of an enormous, expensive pressure vessel. You can use regular stainless steel to build your reactor vessel. Sodium, in its liquid state is far better at conducting heat than water and because it's boiling temperature is far higher than those experienced in a reactor, your reactor runs right around atmospheric pressures meaning no Fukushima or Chernobyl explosions.
The labeling of these reactors as "PowerPoint" Reactors is a falsehood. EBR-2 was exactly this type of reactor, a Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor. It ran at Argonne Natl. Labs in Idaho (now Idaho Natl. Labs) from 1964 to 1994. The fuel reprocessing technique is also not "PowerPoint" vaporware. That was constructed (The entire system was called the Integral Fast Reactor) in the early 1980s and for ten years, proved that Argonne's Pyroprocessing technology worked. EBR-2 ran on its own reprocessed, recycled fuel. It produced and consumed fissile elements, meaning that it can run on its own waste, or the waste produced from every light water reactor in the USA. And because it operates in the Fast Spectrum, meaning the neutrons produced in the chain reaction are not slowed down (water reactors are all thermal reactors with their neutrons slowed down) it has some other advantages. The higher actinides that won't fission in a thermal spectrum, WILL fission in a fast spectrum. The nasty actinides that force you to build your repository to last 30,000 years, are consumed in a fast reactor. The waste stream that finally comes out after years of recycling, is back at background levels in about 300 years.
And the scary weapons materials aren't actually so scary when you are more informed. See, there are only a few isotopes you want to use to make a nuclear bomb. Uranium-235, Uranium-233 and Plutonium-239. The things that make these isotopes useful in bombs, is also what makes them useful in power production, which is why you want to keep them in your reactor. But reactors also produce other isotopes like Plutonium-240 and Uranium-232 that are not useful in bombs. But they are useful in fast reactors. That's why one of the primary uses for a fast reactor, would be the denaturing of old nuclear warheads. Want to run back that 2 Minutes to Midnight clock? Start disposing of old warheads with fast reactors. And this is something we not only know how to do (Ask Dr. Charles Till and Dr. Roger Bloomquist who helped build the Integral Fast Reactor) but something we have already done. This isn't vaporware. The Molten Salt Reactor ran for the better part of 10 years at Oak Ridge National Labs. The fuel salt chemistry was sorted out there back in the 60s. The fuel processing technology too. MSRs were the brainchild of Dr. Alvin Weinberg whose name also appears on the patents for the Light Water Reactor. The man who invented light water reactors, worked on a better option and was successful.
And finally, the question of waste. What do we do with the waste from 65 years of nuclear power production. The simple answer is Don't Bury It. The long answer is that this waste still contains 90% or more of the accessible energy it started with. Our relatively inefficient light water reactors can only consume about 5% of that energy before the fission products build up and higher actinides build up and stop the reaction. The waste fuel then must be pulled out, placed into storage to await its eventual decay back to background. This process is the whole reason we have so much waste to begin with. But if you use a more efficient reactor, like an MSR or LMFBR, you consume the fuel into ranges above 90%. The radioactivity that makes waste fuel so dangerous outside the reactor, is what makes it so useful inside the reactor. And the more energy you extract inside the reactor means you'll have less of it to deal with later, which is why fast reactors and MSRs are so much better when it comes to waste and safety. You don't have to build your repository to last eons. It has to safely contain a much lower level hazard, for about 300 years.
The final argument, that the US moving into these reprocessing technologies would spur other nations to do the same, is flawed on its face. Other countries ALREADY reprocess their nuclear waste. France does it. Japan did it. Russia does it. And the insinuation that this reprocessing technology blatantly ignores that reprocessing waste fuel is about the last way you'd want to go, to produce fissile materials for bombs. No nation on Earth who has made nuclear weapons, has bothered mining the waste from commercial power reactors to do it. The USA didn't do that, because it was far more economical and effective to build reactors intended specifically for weapons grade isotopes. Ditto for Russia and China and the UK. Waste from commercial power reactors contains all sorts of things you don't want, like fission products (Cesium-137, Strontium-90, Iodine-131) and the wrong isotopes. You can't build a nuclear weapon with Plutonium-240. Digging through commercial reactor waste for bomb materials would be like developing a special filter that goes on the tailpipe of a very dirty diesel engine, just so you can extract a tiny amount of oil blow-by from the cylinders, and then use that to produce a special lubricant. You'd just build a refinery that can give you the compound you want, in the same way that you build special reactors to give you the isotopes you want.
It's a wasteful, stupid way to do the job, which is why NOBODY has done that.
And in closing, we come to the non-nerdy part. The USA has a large amount of nuclear waste that we must deal with. A geologic repository is the best solution thus far, and because of this, it makes sense to put the least active waste products in said repository that you can. And while costs were an objection before, that was before we understood just what a problem climate change is. The simple fact is that we are no longer just comparing nuclear to gas or coal or solar or wind. Fossil fuels and renewables cannot denature high level nuclear waste. Fast reactors can. Nuclear reactors produce more power than ANY renewable power plant and do it without interruption or need for battery storage. Nuclear reactors do not produce harmful greenhouse gases in any substantial amount. Those rehashed designs from decades past, worked and still work today. Those fast reactors can take high level waste and turn it into clean, plentiful electricity (or process heat for desalination...are you listening California?) without releasing megatons of CO2 or methane or NOx into our atmosphere. They can do it without the need to mine new fuel for a long time.
Is it more expensive than what we're doing now?
Well, yes it is. But to me, it sounds like we'd be getting a lot for our money, instead of kicking the can down the road for the next generation. It is worth it and these rather hollow arguments from this opinion piece, that have been debunked in the past, should not stand in our way. Dr Charles Till said of the Integral Fast Reactor system "this isn't somebodies calculation. This is real. We know how to do these things." It's long since past the time for us to implement these things and start making a real difference.
However, as the FOIA documents reveal in detail, the pyroprocessing technology simply has not worked well and has fallen far short of initial predictions (Figure 1) (Refs. 1-3). Although DOE initially claimed that the entire inventory would be processed by 2007, as of the end of Fiscal Year 2016, only about 15% of the roughly 26 metric tons of spent fuel had been processed. Over $210 million has been spent, at an average cost of around $50,000 per kilogram of fuel treated. At this rate, it will take until the end of the century to complete pyroprocessing of the entire inventory, at an additional cost of over $1 billion.
Seems to be just more hyperbole from the nuclear industry.
https://allthingsnuclear.org/elyman/the-pyroprocessing-files
Erica, pyroprocessing was never intended to be just a waste disposal technology. Pyroprocessing was intended to recycle spent fuel elements for reuse in the LMFBR that produced them, and indeed that is what it did. The high level "spent fuel treatment product" that contains high levels of plutonium is indeed not suited to serve as fuel...in a light water reactor. It is quite well suited to serve as fuel in a fast reactor.
Just as the above opinion piece omits critical details, so does the article you cited.
Why have other nations been interested, but seemingly unable to procure this pyroprocessing technique? Why hasn't the DoE readily shared this technology? It's not because it is embarrassing failure, it's because it has the potential to isolate weapons materials from spent fuel. That's the reason the pyroprocessing was to happen on-site at the reactor; to ensure the fresh fuel elements went back into the reactor. By never leaving the site, you eliminate proliferation concerns and possibilities for accidental release. The waste products are less hazardous than those produced by the PUREX aqueous process used in France. They are certainly less hazardous than the high level wastes produced by light water reactors in the USA that aren't treated at all.
About the only viable argument is that such facilities are expensive. But then we must ask ourselves how much our planet's climate is worth? Is it worth spending a little more per kWh in order to have a source of base load electricity that can supplant coal, oil and gas on a gigawatt-for-gigawatt basis? I would argue that it absolutely is worth the expense. Perhaps in the 1970s, before wastes started piling up and before the US Government failed to do anything with it, it wasn't worth the pricetag. But today, we have lots of waste and we emit gigatons of greenhouse gases into the air every single year.
And the same short-sighted thinking leaves us in the same position we are now, which is sitting on 80,000 tons of reactor waste with nowhere to put it other than storage pools and dry casks on site at nuclear power plants. A geologic repository is a great idea, but does it not make sense to put in the lowest level wastes we can? Building a repository to last 30,000 years is beyond us. We have no way to guarantee such a thing will remain undisturbed. By reducing the hazards we put in this repository, we make it far safer for future humans who might happen across that waste one day. We make it far less hazardous, should containment ever be breached.
@Erica Gray, from the source materials you cited: a summary of 15 reports concluded that “all criteria were successfully met” and that “The EBR-II Spent Nuclear Fuel Demonstration Project has established electrometallurgical technology as a viable option for treatment of…spent nuclear fuel.” While Ed Lyman is correct that DOE never concluded that the sodium-bonded spent fuel was unsafe to directly dispose of in the first place, he misses the point of the project. It was a research and demonstration program. If someone is afraid to learn, or afraid of ever doing anything new, then research is a threatening prospect indeed.
The statement that high temperature MSRs are orders of magnitude more efficient than water reactors is factually incorrect. Efficiency is primarily a function of the working fluid temperature used to generate electricity. As the MSRs generate steam, that’s sets a limit on the practical efficiency of the plant. Very High temperature reactors are not that useful if the steam plant materials cannot handle the required temperature and pressures.
Bottom line: MSR efficiency around 40% versus water reactor’s of around 34%. Clearly, not “orders of magnitude”
By contrast, gas turbines (combined-cycle) have efficiencies of around 55%, and these are the most efficient power plants. The working fluid temperature is around 2600 F with air used to adequately cool the materials.
High temperature MSRs, relative to the lower temperatures achieved by water cooled reactors, are orders of magnitude more efficient. The efficiency comes in the consumption of fuel rather than the efficiency of the steam plant. I suppose I should be have been more specific in my initial post, which I'll admit was hastily composed. A combined cycle gas turbine is indeed very efficient although you're still emitting greenhouse gases where a nuclear plant does not. Eventually, you might find Brayton cycle turbines an option should they prove economically feasible and that would improve the thermodynamic efficiency of an MSR.
The efficiency I was speaking of is in fuel usage. A pressurized water reactor uses up about 4% of the accessible energy in its fuel before fission products and actinides require the refueling of the reactor, because the reaction is no longer sustainable. Heavy water reactors like CANDUs are a little better but none of them touch the level of fuel burnup observed in the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. Also notable is the burnup time in which the fission products and higher actinides remain in the reactor and out of reach to assuage proliferation concerns.
“Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel—which some advanced reactor designs require for safety reasons—actually produces fissile material that could be used to power nuclear weapons.”
What are the safety reasons advanced reactors require reprocessing? Which reactors does this not apply to?
Planned advanced reactors ... actually produces fissile material that could be used to power nuclear weapons ... This is a non-sense statement. Better to ask which ones that may actually be built could support producing fissile material ... Reality - none - they have PU 240, 241 contamination after several months ... A Uranium 233 cycle would have at least 2.4 percent of U232 with lots of gamma ... fiction stories to stop progress addressing climate change ... nation states would simply use a graphite moderated reactor or no reactor at all and simply do uranium-enrichment process centrifuge ... not some form of advanced isotopic separation ... Again, non-sense made up by anti-nukes to stop progress on climate action.
The US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (nwtrb.gov) admitted in their Spring 2018 meeting on geological repositories that no one has the technology to make any geological repository work for even 20 years, let alone long term, and they have no idea how they ever will. It's time to quit believing the false promises of future solutions.
The best we can do right now is to use thick-wall bolted lid metal casks (10" to 19.75" thick) that have ASME N3 nuclear pressure vessel certificates. Instead, the NRC grants numerous exemptions to ASME in order to approve thin-wall stainless steel welded canisters, only 1/2" to 5/8" thick. The NRC licenses these without requiring the ability inspect (inside or out), repair or maintain or monitor in a manner to prevent hydrogen gas explosions and other failure modes. They have no plan in place if something goes wrong, even though it's a regulatory requirement.
The thin-wall pressure vessels have no pressure monitoring or pressure relief valves.
Kris Singh, the President of Holtec admits even a microscopic through wall crack in his thin-wall Holtec canisters will release millions of curies of radionuclides into the environment and it's not feasible to repair cracks even if you could find them. See video of this and other evidence at SanOnofreSafety.org
At Fukushima, thick-wall casks survived the tsunami and 9.0 earthquake. The thin-wall canisters have no seismic rating once partially cracked.
The NRC has no authority over costs, only radiological safety. It's up to the states to take a leadership role to demand containers that have a longer lifespan and can be maintained. Ratepayers are footing the bill for these thin-wall canisters. Each canister contains a Chernobyl disaster's worth of radionuclides.
I've listened to numerous federal hearings on proposed nuclear waste legislation and read the long complex bills. Instead of addressing these issues these bills remove critical safety and financial requirements from the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and take more control away from the states.
Instead of focusing on where to store the waste, the waste must first be repackaged in proven thick-wall casks designed to be maintained and monitored in a manner to prevent radioactive releases and explosions. Until this is done, none of us are safe financially or otherwise.
Donna Gilmore’s comment conflates the design of dry fuel casks with those of a reactor pressure vessel. The NRC has responded specifically to her group’s claims. The expert determination is that, “There are absolutely no immediate concerns regarding the condition of the MPCs, and their ability to perform their confinement function.” Also that the dry fuel casks will be safe in the future, “It's safe for indefinite use…for 100 years.”
http://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1834/ML18347B379.pdf
You could store US spent nuclear fuel at Holtec’s Proposed Consolidated Interim Storage Facility in Southeastern New Mexico. Then, we could utilize Fluoride volatility method for reprocessing of LWR and Fast Reactor fuels to process streams of U235/U238 and enrich with SILEX Laser Uranium Enrichment Technology and fuel light water reactors. The next PU/Uranium step can also provide fuel to a molten salt reactor or molten chloride salt fast reactor. There are also recently trialed steps at national labs with molten chlorination to fuel molten chloride fast reactors.There will still be high level waste. You can dispose in facilities like waste isolation pilot plant (wipp), deep bore disposal (e.g., Deep Isolation and Bechtel) et al. (NOT YUCCA Mountain.) There are even advanced technologies like Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) such as ANSTO Synroc technology. Both of you are stooges for the fossil fuel industry taking us away from the "right solution" to address climate change. I refer to the both of you as not real scientists and plant cookers!
I am interesting to Mike McKeen explanation on MSR..
Could you let me know where this MSR up and running for Nuclear Power Plant