Quote from jprad:
It's not the technology, it's the business and politics behind nuclear that's led us to where we are. It's a program that's now over 50 years old and there still isn't any system in place for the long-term, safe and secure storage of spent fuel.
I could not agree with you more. The official attitude to safe used fuel management has been poor. There is plenty of blame to go around here and both government and industry have not performed very well.
There are in fact solutions to the used fuel issue. There are at least three:
1. Pyroprocessing of spent fuel. This separates uranium, plutonium and other transuranic elements from the spent fuel which are then recycled and fabricated into new fuel. The rest is fission products, initially highly radioactive and quite dangerous, but with short half lives rendering them harmless after about three hundred years. This waste stream stream is very small - a few percent in mass of current "once through fuel cycle" high level waste. Unlike PUREX reprocessing, it cannot separate out plutonium from the other actinides and cannot be used for the the production of bomb making material. There has been quite a lot of research in the US in this area, and I really am at a loss to account for the foot dragging.
This is not pie in the sky stuff. For some years GE-Hitachi has been keen to build an industrial scale used fuel recycling facility called ARC. This combines pyroprocessing with advanced Gen IV fast spectrum reactor technology based on the EBR-II research program. The reactor design is called PRISM and is a complete commercial scale design. In such a facility the spent fuel could be split into three recycle streams - natural uranium for CANDUs, uranium for re-enrichment for PWRs and metal fuel containing uranium, plutonium, americurium etc for PRISMs.
The crying shame is that work on this could commence tomorrow, with a very real prospect of effective recycling within a decade.
2. Looking a little further into the future molten salt thorium fueled reactors have huge potential. On-line continuous reprocessing should yield waste streams of a size and nature similar to ARC. The technology is fundamentally safe for many reasons. I admit to having a preference to this technology. The Chinese think so too, which is why they have initiated a serious R&D program. Meanwhile, the US just sits on it's hands....
3. Just store the stuff safely until effective recycling programs are in place.
Options 1 and 2 are both consistent with a remarkable future of "a lifetime of energy in the palm of your hand" - a future where a piece of uranium or thorium the size of a golf ball would supply all the energy for the lifetime of one individual. The waste stream should be of similar mass. Nothing can match that for tiny environmental footprint. I say - lets get on with it ASAP.
