On topic, you will likely acknowledge, that they have been super lucky that their spent fuel pool did not completely dry up. At the point they got a concrete pump working, to refill, the pool was at ~200°F with water level 5m below normal. If that thing had fallen dry, the consequences would have been to evacuate Tokyo.
The spend fuel rod pools are a product of politics, not engineering. The fuel rods should be reprocessed; and there are plenty of ways to do it cleanly. This video is disingenuous. If the zirconium cladding is the problem, remove it before storing the material. The Zr will be slightly radioactive as a beta emitter.
+Get a Job You Lazy Bumm There is NO WAY to do it cleanly. It is a mess from start to finish. Hell, you start by dissolving the waste in NITRIC ACID, and it gets worse from there.
I would suggest that you consider the sort of chemical work done at the Hanford plant to separate plutonium from uranium, with technology now 60 years old. It was done, successfully, in ton lots. Yes, there is clean up to do. How much is a million times more available power worth?
Very good interview. Mr. Alveraz knows exactly what he is talking about, no BS here. I was actually surprised how accurate and level headed he was. (One good RNN interview over and above the biased Main Stream Media)
He forgot to mention that spent fuel remaining on site is there because of the Yucca Mountain Repository closing. Also, the fission products will be hot for a few years before they have a chance to decay. The water in the pools keeps the fission products from overheating. The waste can go into casks when it cools down enough. It will cool down even more as it spends time in the cask.
The Light Water Breeder Reactor in Shippingport PA showed it was possible to power a commercial reactor by only adding cheap thorium to the fuel after the reactor was started. The reactor would not produce any Plutonium that could be used in bombs. The only catch was that the fuel would have to be recycled. The answer to peace, energy, and waste problems was staring us in the face and we turned it down.
Spent Uranium from the enrichment of ore is used in those rounds not from irradiated fuel. I'm not condoning the use of DU rounds, I'm just saying it's not from spent rods because fuel in the US has not been reprocessed since 1976. And as for the Plutonium the US has, they have been burning it in reactors since 1999.
Nuclear Fuel rods only have 1-2% of their fuel consumed when used in a reactor. the other 98-99% is still in the rods, it just needs to be reprocessed into fuel again. The French have done this safely & sucessfully at their Spent Fuel Reprocessing site, COGEMA La Hague for decades. Doing this would also mean America could turn it's excess stockpile of Weapons Grade Plutonium into fuel for civilian electricity.
the decay of the spent fuel still creates heat. In fact one can still get power from the fuel. when split the power is 200Mev when out of the reactor the fragments can still cause 5Mev of power.
I hope people don't get too adverse to nuclear power as a result of the Fukishima incident. It's still a sensible source of electricity, especially as we work to reduce carbon emissions. Hydro and nuclear are the only proven carbon free sources of energy. Also, coal emits nuclear radiation also - often in larger quantities.
In March 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reversed its policy and signed a contract with a consortium of Duke Energy, COGEMA, and Stone & Webster (DCS) to design and operate a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility. Site preparation at the Savannah River Site began in October 2005. the cost of the project has soared to nearly $5 billion. The structure is a half-finished hulk, and the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies...
Okay, let's start! 1) The title is wrong. The largest concentration of radioactivity is the elephants foot. For anyone not familiar it's the melted mass at Chernobyl. 2) The spent fuel conundrum was being addressed since the 70's when we start Yucca Mountain construction. Political pressure resulted in defending of the project leaving spent fuel at the sites where they are today (or dry casks after they cool for a few years). 3) They are properly protected. Read 10 CFR, specifically 72 deals with spent fuel I believe. 4) Of course there's a lot of spent fuel. What you should also know is that it's not all stored at nuclear reactors. There are also independent sites with dry cask storage. 5) Dry Casks are capable of withstanding an airplane strike. We always were concerned of their safety. 6) They gathered a team of researchers and former nuclear employees, yet no military or combat experts to do an analysis of the attacks? 7) Everything is vulnerable if you decide to up the standards of attack enough. 8) Original design constraints for EVERYTHING are being stretched. It's because we know the consequences and material behavior better than we did in the 60's. We have better technology, more indepth knowledge, and we used HUGE margins of safety before, so we look at accident scenarios and say, 7% was the old standard but we can easily safely operate within 5% using this new fuel rod material. 9) This is their logic chain. "If something happened and the water drained, the fuel would heat up, and ultimately radiation would be released." If ISIS got a nuclear bomb, and they detonated it over Washington DC, people would die. Same thought process to me. You're simply creating a scenario. We design our pools to specifically not have these issues, and then we have an extensive FLEX response force to respond to such incidents. 10) A spent fuel rod pool fire is contained in the spent fuel building. Three Mile Island experienced a 60% core fuel melt and didn't release more background than natural radiation to the surrounding towns. 11) The reason our fuel is in spent fuel casks and not all of it is because our spent fuel casks have no where to go. That and they are incredibly expensive to upkeep as compared to pools. When fuel rods are ready for dry casks the pool can be drained and the building itself contains the radiation with no issues. Just leave it in the pool, no need for the added expense. The university I went to receives tons of money trying to design inspection robots for these fuel casks, it's a brutal environment that can't be readily inspected and maintained. It's an unnecessary challenge. If we had Yucca Mountain available or a depository I would be all for this, because it's permanent, however to hold dry casks they just sit there, still a "vulnerable target". 12) We do continuously fund our defensive measures. 13) The NRC didn't want this document to be released because IF there is a vulnerability why would we tell you? We'll fix the issues first. If a nuclear reactor could melt down by throwing a penny in the cooling tower we would suppress the report until we put up penny guards. 14) "He wouldn't have been on the commission if they didn't know about him." No crap, really? Grover Cleveland wouldn't have been a president if his name wasn't on the ballot. 15) "Congress dominated by politics"... 16) We need to issue tsunami warnings? Do we even have tsunamis? I thought that's what the national weather emergency station was for and that this was a redundant function.
While I agree with many of your points, you are wrong on that first one. No matter what Chernobyl videos claim, the elephant's foot does not live up to its billing. It is, after all, simply melted reactor fuel mixed with other materials, cooled to below the solidification point (which is an indicator of its flagging radiation resources) and left to decay for 30 years. Recently removed fuel of a similar mass vastly out-shines.
puncheex2 One recently removed fuel rod is not equal to that of an entire core even at 30 years. If we look at the actinide decay curve (decay heat, whichever graphic showing energy or radiation overtime) ... I think I understand your point. Yes, the radiation inside the rod would be a higher concentration, however if this were the criteria we would say the largest concentration would be inside the worlds most reactive operating reactor. If we consider the water and the fact that the rods are intentionally damped. I still would bet a large sum of money that Elephants Foot is more concentrated. (Depending on our definitions)
I am on no side, and would not call people against nuclear power crackpots, but yes I believe we humans still have no 100 percent safe control over nuclear power. I understand that the power those reactors can produce is huge and cheap in comparisment to other resources, but if things go wrong with them, it goes wrong big time. I hope one day we can rely on sources like solar and wind, but those are still not powerfull enough unfortunatly.
In the intro the newscaster says "PARTIAL meltdowns" at Fukushima. It is now known, for about the past year or a little longer) that there were complete meltdowns at Unit 1, Unit 2 and Unit 3. Triple complete meltdowns. Just last week (October 2014) Tepco and Japanese regulators now, finally, tell the public the situation is out of control - they cannot contain releases of radioactivity in the near term as the fuel cores of the three units melted and cannot be retrieved using current technology
" It certainly demonstrates that he cannot be trusted - we are not talking here about youthful indiscretions, but about purposeful actions of a presumably mature adult."
Spent fuel rods contain plutonium 238 which remains highly radioactive for 240,000 years. This means it will have to be continually guarded and monitored for 240,000 years. Makes sense doesn't it
"Why does anyone trust Robert Alvarez’s opinions about nuclear energy? He served in a politically appointed role at the Department of Energy - at the same time that he was married to a professional antinuclear activist who was proud of her role in helping to organize “No Nukes” concerts. "
Worst case scenario, all 6000 metric tons of fuel came straight out of the reactors within seconds of being a full power and put down dry, they'll catch fire and dump out radioactive contamination. After a few weeks? They'll get warm. Like 150F warm.
The fuel is not 'spent' in the normal sense of the word. What they actually mean is that the fuel needs to be reprocessed before it can be used again. The fuel is just as good as newly made first generation fuel (actually better). So, you guys have an unbelievable amount of useful fuel to produce energy. It's only waste, if you don't use it.
It is well known that some pools in Japan have too many cores. This is certainly because Japan failed to build and activate in a timely manner a used fuel treatment plant.
I agree to the comment that the spent fuel should be pulled out of those holding pools, reprocessed and turned into new fuel rods to make more clean, greenhouse gas free electric power...until we have another solution to power that the government will accept and let us use, I can see no reason why we should not be "smart" about this one as much as we "hate" what has happened with other power plants throughout the world and the acute damage that has been done and will continue..
Sad part is that over 90%of that so called waste can be recycled...issue is we don't recycle it. also there are other types of reactors safer and more efficient where the waste will not be radioactive for thousands of years but for only tens of years...
@82snowball The "recycling" process produces a dozen different radioactive isotopes i.e. crypton which is dumped into the air and tritium that is being dumped into the sea. The spent fuel rods are stored without any safety measures for up to 6 years just next to the reactor. People who think that this is the appropriate way to handle in thousands of tons of highly toxic material are simply crazy.
Dear USA, Please send all your spent fuel up here to Canada. Our CANDU reactors can use your "spent" fuel to power our homes. We'd certainly appreciate all the free power.
+lies damnlies Well maybe.... assuming all of Canada's reactors are Gen3 or newer.... But also the newer SMRs can re-use the US spent fuel one or two times and produce a final spent fuel of much lower toxicity, mass and volume for easier and safer storage. But don't let GreenPeace or Sierra Club find out..... they don't want the world to solve such a major energy issue because it would undermine their raison d'etre!
Use breeder reactors, and the energy extracted from uranium will be increased 60 times. Let's assume the US is the only country not reprocessing, but russia, france, UK, canada, Japan are still wondering what to do with waste. Reprocessing reduces the amount of waste, but not the time it needs to be stored. And it is expensive.
@JangosSoulja Not a good idea. The chances that a rocket launch fail are way to high and if this were to occur, would likely release massive amounts of particulate contamination high into the atmosphere; where it would travel on a much larger "planetary" scale.
"He was FIRED from his job when his daughter turned him and his antinuclear activist wife in for growing commercial quantities of marijuana in their home in Takoma Park WHILE he was serving in a high level government job, presumably with a sworn duty to uphold the laws of the land. That does not say much for his personal accountability or his personal integrity."
Last time I checked, Browns Ferry in north Alabama isn't at much danger of being hit by a tsunami. (It contains 3 reactors that are very similar to Fukushima). Also, the spent fuel pools in most plants are protected by well over 7 feet of steel reinforced concrete and overflow systems, meaning a direct impact by a plane after passing through the plant or even a bomb that could be carried in would be unable to compromise the pools to any extent useful to terrorists.
There would not be that much fuel sitting in a pond if the government would let these company's move the fuel around. They won't let them move it into dry storage and the anti nuclear people wont let them move the old fuel to Yucca mountain.
Germany is sending their rods to france for reprocessing, there are always huge protests around the special train that makes the delivery. It is really, really stupid that he only country that has ever used a nuclear bomb in a war, the country with the most warheads in the world (or maybe russia was first), is not allowing the reprocessing of nuclear fuel, so that they can tell iran not to. And iran are doing it anyway. Japan could not have done it without the permission of the US.
the mau mau tribe member, his father, and grandfather members of the mau mau kikuyu tribe who killed the british in kenya, something terrible has happen here.
Terrapower is a kind of breeder reactor, Bill Gates says so himself. Reprocessing spent fuel rods is not the same as burning the waste in a breeder reactor. It is much mire expensive.
you know how far the sun is. it'd be easier to just dump them on mars. or mars moon. but to spend that much money on space shuttles and fuel is crazy and its easier just to basically dig a hole and forget about it.
In other words you believe what the media says? Well we all know how the russian government handled the issue at Chernobyl, believe what you want. The death rate of events like these are not measured in a short time because a LOT of land and people are still effected or dying, but you never hear about it.
No! The nuclear boss who died of cancer was not killed by radiation cause it's too soon for that to be likely. Most cancers due to radiation are likely to not show up for decades. The detah count now is close to meaningless. Fukushima was a near miss. If procedures had been followed and the SFP gate had worked then SFP 4 would have been a real disaster. Fukushima was saved by failures. Think about that for a minute before saying "anti-nuclear crackpots"
Reprocess the fuel to extract the 95% of unspent uranium, put the rest of the spent fuel into dry casks, and send those to repositories until we develop reactors capable of breeding that stuff into oblivion. That wasn't so hard now was it?
@sirellyn So money is the issue. It's the same for everything. Why don't we have humans on Mars? Not because we don't have the technology, because it's expensive. Money. It has been recognised by a wide range of other commentators: food is not fairly shared; it goes to those who can afford it or have the means to grow it.Famine exists largely because the hungry cannot afford to buy food, not because there is insufficient food produced. Problem:Money.
If the responsible people would pull their heads out of their asses and allow fuel reprocessing and building of reactors that can "burn" the fuel much more (it will not be so dangerous), it would both solve the problem, secure truly clean energy for centuries to come and still cost orders of magnitude less then what you propose :P
There is one way to solve the long lived ("transuranic") waste problem assocaited with Light Water (conventional) nuclear reactors. See from Google TechTalks the following presentation (on RUclips): Energy From Thorium: A Nuclear Waste Burning Liquid Salt Thorium Reactor
Not all spacecraft make it safely into space you know...if something goes wrong and the stuff doesn't reach orbital velocity and it all evaporates as it makes it way back through earth's atmosphere. Sitting around the Fukushima or Chernobyl reactors is going to be a theme park ride as compared for a few hundred kilograms of say plutonium burning up in the atmosphere and being spread by the winds...
All that spent fuel was "lying around" in the reactors around the country? I think that is hardly the case; at a minimum, the implication that it is being treated as if it were scrap iron in a junkyard is not correct. 71,000 tons with the density of, oh, half that of metallic uranium is a cube about 70 feet on a side; compare to the cubic miles of toxic (chemically and radioactivey) coal ash stored in unsafe conditions all over the country. The problem, as someone below pointed out, is political, not technical. At one time we intended that the 95+% of that waste fuel would be recycled, but t turned out to be more economically efficient, particularly for the mining/reactor industry lobbies, that it be tossed (see? now even I'm doing it) and new fuel fabricated from scratch.
@@TheUmbrella1976 Drain? Unless they have been abused, they are sealed and while you can get gamma radiation from them, all the emissions are sealed in. I would agree they have to be a major safety concern, but a problem? Can you direct me to any accident report that has involved ruptured rods outside a reactor? Chornobyl, I suppose. Others? any from stored rods, in pools or casks?
@@puncheex2 the base of the pool in block4 was destabilized from the H2 explosion and without cooling for days causing water to boil and evaporate till they got already exposed and broke. That's very well documented. They finally (and very luckily) were able to add water by using a concrete pump with a 60m arm. If the base would have collapsed or the pool would not have been replenished with water by the pump, Fukushima would have developed into the biggest desaster ever. This was as close as it gets. Just read the details, they are published
@boumar19721972 Because you like your energy prices the way they are, and not say 5-10x more. Hydro is about the cheapest out of those you listed but is very situational. You have to have a large river, lake etc. with a large height difference. Nuclear is popular because you don't need a specific plot of land, in fact you can put multiple (or more powerful reactors) in smaller areas. I've looked up pricing for solar on my house and its expensive. 25-60k takes 10years to pay off and lasts 25y
Why get rid of such a precious energy source? If reprocessed, a large portion could become fuel again... Sooner or later the government will allow reprocessing in the US (or have the Russians do it :P) and make usable fuel from it...
One might think that, but if you check Wikipedia Chernobyl vs Fukushima disaster or win info on even better sites you will find out, Chernobyl was far worse. Fukushimas designs where safer, and smaller. I don't react to argue but Chernobyl was far worse. I to this day still wonder why the russian government still has TEN reactors running with the same design (RBMK). In my opinion the whole world needs to stop using nuclear stuff. It seems to be safe and profitable in theory, but it is not.
@82snowball Bullshit. There is no "nuclear waste". "Recycling" means getting Plutonium from the spent fuel to supply fast breeders and the weapon industry. You cant recycle the concrete and metal of the NPP building. By the way, the reason for nukes isnt the production of electricity, but the production of weapon metal (1kg Pu = 4,5 Million USD). This have always been the reason since the first reactor was build by E. Fermi.
Everyone wants nuclear waste stored safley, but who's gonna pay? Not me i would rather sit in a pool of nuclear waste as long as my bank account is safe
Meanwhile, coal plants are finely distributing their radioactive and other carcinogenic wastes all around the world because it's still the cheapest way to get a lot of electricity.
@sirellyn Geothermal trumps them all! And don't say it can't be tapped anywhere because it can. They use another kind of liquid that has a lower boiling point as water. /watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w
+coalburnerfields Yes.... and the newer and safer SMRs such as the Toshiba 4S - super safe, small and simple..... but one has to put several together for power redundancy and they can only power smaller cities or mine sites or research vessels, e.g., the the arctic. In time they will be fit-for-purpose for desalination of sea water or to produce massive volumes of hydrogen for hydrogen Fuel cell powered electric vehicles.
kim weaver - You might be right in the case of energy density by unit volume it is at the very bottom of the energy density scale. However the energy density by mass is at the very top end of the scale, even well above diesel, kerosene and jet fuel. Otherwise NASA would not have used it for rocket propulsion. Granted a lot of kinetic energy has to be used to get it to high mass concentration. Check out "Smelling Land" by David Sanborn Scott for additional info.
So the fuel rods are in baths beneath the power plants yes? And how many hill sides are there in the US? Would Texas or Arizona accept large concrete containment vessels in their deserts (Death Valley eg)? A problem of long stnding fter 3 Mile Island as much as if not more to the point than Chernobyl or Fukushima.
The only way a terrorist could access the spent fuel storage pools within a nuclear power plant is by dropping a Commando Vault or Daisy cutter on to a critical part of each facility and even then it may not work.
Data shows that nuclear is safe in practice.
Zero death from radiation in Fukushima.
Tiny level of contamination except in a small area.
On topic, you will likely acknowledge, that they have been super lucky that their spent fuel pool did not completely dry up. At the point they got a concrete pump working, to refill, the pool was at ~200°F with water level 5m below normal. If that thing had fallen dry, the consequences would have been to evacuate Tokyo.
The spend fuel rod pools are a product of politics, not engineering. The fuel rods should be reprocessed; and there are plenty of ways to do it cleanly.
This video is disingenuous. If the zirconium cladding is the problem, remove it before storing the material. The Zr will be slightly radioactive as a beta emitter.
+Get a Job You Lazy Bumm There is NO WAY to do it cleanly. It is a mess from start to finish. Hell, you start by dissolving the waste in NITRIC ACID, and it gets worse from there.
I would suggest that you consider the sort of chemical work done at the Hanford plant to separate plutonium from uranium, with technology now 60 years old. It was done, successfully, in ton lots. Yes, there is clean up to do. How much is a million times more available power worth?
puncheex2 When your marrow stops making red blood cells, it's not worth a shit.
Supposing you keep your marrow on the right side of the wall. Would that help?
puncheex2 Perfection eludes us. Look at the radiation profile of the Hanford site. Would you spend a fun month camping out there?
Todays waste, tomorrows fuel. I would keep it my basement and sell it for more than Gold in 10 years if I could.
Very good interview. Mr. Alveraz knows exactly what he is talking about, no BS here. I was actually surprised how accurate and level headed he was. (One good RNN interview over and above the biased Main Stream Media)
partial meltdown? hahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
He forgot to mention that spent fuel remaining on site is there because of the Yucca Mountain Repository closing.
Also, the fission products will be hot for a few years before they have a chance to decay. The water in the pools keeps the fission products from overheating. The waste can go into casks when it cools down enough. It will cool down even more as it spends time in the cask.
The Light Water Breeder Reactor in Shippingport PA showed it was possible to power a commercial reactor by only adding cheap thorium to the fuel after the reactor was started. The reactor would not produce any Plutonium that could be used in bombs. The only catch was that the fuel would have to be recycled. The answer to peace, energy, and waste problems was staring us in the face and we turned it down.
"If something caused them to drain, they'd lose their water"
That doesn't take a sherlock.
Spent Uranium from the enrichment of ore is used in those rounds not from irradiated fuel. I'm not condoning the use of DU rounds, I'm just saying it's not from spent rods because fuel in the US has not been reprocessed since 1976. And as for the Plutonium the US has, they have been burning it in reactors since 1999.
Switch to LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors). This would solve the long term storage and decrease the chance of a meltdown.
Nuclear Fuel rods only have 1-2% of their fuel consumed when used in a reactor. the other 98-99% is still in the rods, it just needs to be reprocessed into fuel again. The French have done this safely & sucessfully at their Spent Fuel Reprocessing site, COGEMA La Hague for decades. Doing this would also mean America could turn it's excess stockpile of Weapons Grade Plutonium into fuel for civilian electricity.
the decay of the spent fuel still creates heat. In fact one can still get power from the fuel. when split the power is 200Mev when out of the reactor the fragments can still cause 5Mev of power.
I hope people don't get too adverse to nuclear power as a result of the Fukishima incident. It's still a sensible source of electricity, especially as we work to reduce carbon emissions. Hydro and nuclear are the only proven carbon free sources of energy. Also, coal emits nuclear radiation also - often in larger quantities.
I agree, its nice to think you can produce power from "safe" sources like solar, wind, hydro. But I think Nuclear Power id the best.
The answer? Mixed oxide fueled reactors. Irregardless, these plants should be better at house keeping and not keeping this stuff on-site.
In March 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reversed its policy and signed a contract with a consortium of Duke Energy, COGEMA, and Stone & Webster (DCS) to design and operate a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility. Site preparation at the Savannah River Site began in October 2005. the cost of the project has soared to nearly $5 billion. The structure is a half-finished hulk, and the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies...
that fuel may be useless in a reactor but it still has tons of usable energy in it
Okay, let's start!
1) The title is wrong. The largest concentration of radioactivity is the elephants foot. For anyone not familiar it's the melted mass at Chernobyl.
2) The spent fuel conundrum was being addressed since the 70's when we start Yucca Mountain construction. Political pressure resulted in defending of the project leaving spent fuel at the sites where they are today (or dry casks after they cool for a few years).
3) They are properly protected. Read 10 CFR, specifically 72 deals with spent fuel I believe.
4) Of course there's a lot of spent fuel. What you should also know is that it's not all stored at nuclear reactors. There are also independent sites with dry cask storage.
5) Dry Casks are capable of withstanding an airplane strike. We always were concerned of their safety.
6) They gathered a team of researchers and former nuclear employees, yet no military or combat experts to do an analysis of the attacks?
7) Everything is vulnerable if you decide to up the standards of attack enough.
8) Original design constraints for EVERYTHING are being stretched. It's because we know the consequences and material behavior better than we did in the 60's. We have better technology, more indepth knowledge, and we used HUGE margins of safety before, so we look at accident scenarios and say, 7% was the old standard but we can easily safely operate within 5% using this new fuel rod material.
9) This is their logic chain. "If something happened and the water drained, the fuel would heat up, and ultimately radiation would be released." If ISIS got a nuclear bomb, and they detonated it over Washington DC, people would die. Same thought process to me. You're simply creating a scenario. We design our pools to specifically not have these issues, and then we have an extensive FLEX response force to respond to such incidents.
10) A spent fuel rod pool fire is contained in the spent fuel building. Three Mile Island experienced a 60% core fuel melt and didn't release more background than natural radiation to the surrounding towns.
11) The reason our fuel is in spent fuel casks and not all of it is because our spent fuel casks have no where to go. That and they are incredibly expensive to upkeep as compared to pools. When fuel rods are ready for dry casks the pool can be drained and the building itself contains the radiation with no issues. Just leave it in the pool, no need for the added expense. The university I went to receives tons of money trying to design inspection robots for these fuel casks, it's a brutal environment that can't be readily inspected and maintained. It's an unnecessary challenge. If we had Yucca Mountain available or a depository I would be all for this, because it's permanent, however to hold dry casks they just sit there, still a "vulnerable target".
12) We do continuously fund our defensive measures.
13) The NRC didn't want this document to be released because IF there is a vulnerability why would we tell you? We'll fix the issues first. If a nuclear reactor could melt down by throwing a penny in the cooling tower we would suppress the report until we put up penny guards.
14) "He wouldn't have been on the commission if they didn't know about him." No crap, really? Grover Cleveland wouldn't have been a president if his name wasn't on the ballot.
15) "Congress dominated by politics"...
16) We need to issue tsunami warnings? Do we even have tsunamis? I thought that's what the national weather emergency station was for and that this was a redundant function.
While I agree with many of your points, you are wrong on that first one. No matter what Chernobyl videos claim, the elephant's foot does not live up to its billing. It is, after all, simply melted reactor fuel mixed with other materials, cooled to below the solidification point (which is an indicator of its flagging radiation resources) and left to decay for 30 years. Recently removed fuel of a similar mass vastly out-shines.
puncheex2 One recently removed fuel rod is not equal to that of an entire core even at 30 years. If we look at the actinide decay curve (decay heat, whichever graphic showing energy or radiation overtime) ...
I think I understand your point. Yes, the radiation inside the rod would be a higher concentration, however if this were the criteria we would say the largest concentration would be inside the worlds most reactive operating reactor. If we consider the water and the fact that the rods are intentionally damped. I still would bet a large sum of money that Elephants Foot is more concentrated. (Depending on our definitions)
Screw the actinide decay curve; look at the fission products. And I didn't say a single fuel rod; fuel rods having a "similar mass" will do nicely.
Jess Vagnar actually over 600 sieverts per hour highest ever recorded in unit 2 fukushima
I am on no side, and would not call people against nuclear power crackpots, but yes I believe we humans still have no 100 percent safe control over nuclear power. I understand that the power those reactors can produce is huge and cheap in comparisment to other resources, but if things go wrong with them, it goes wrong big time. I hope one day we can rely on sources like solar and wind, but those are still not powerfull enough unfortunatly.
In the intro the newscaster says "PARTIAL meltdowns" at Fukushima. It is now known, for about the past year or a little longer) that there were complete meltdowns at Unit 1, Unit 2 and Unit 3. Triple complete meltdowns. Just last week (October 2014) Tepco and Japanese regulators now, finally, tell the public the situation is out of control - they cannot contain releases of radioactivity in the near term as the fuel cores of the three units melted and cannot be retrieved using current technology
+Clay Turnbull The video is from 2011.
" It certainly demonstrates that he cannot be trusted - we are not talking here about youthful indiscretions, but about purposeful actions of a presumably mature adult."
Where's the thumbnail scene? I came here for glowing fuel!
Spent fuel rods contain plutonium 238 which remains highly radioactive for 240,000 years. This means it will have to be continually guarded and monitored for 240,000 years. Makes sense doesn't it
You mean Plutonium 239 ;)
"Why does anyone trust Robert Alvarez’s opinions about nuclear energy?
He served in a politically appointed role at the Department of Energy - at the same time that he was married to a professional antinuclear activist who was proud of her role in helping to organize “No Nukes” concerts. "
Germany has a lot of problems with radioactivity in the ground water near the storage in these "mountains".
Worst case scenario, all 6000 metric tons of fuel came straight out of the reactors within seconds of being a full power and put down dry, they'll catch fire and dump out radioactive contamination. After a few weeks? They'll get warm. Like 150F warm.
+dorgodorato I'm sure you meant 2250 C.
I don't
You should.
The fuel is not 'spent' in the normal sense of the word. What they actually mean is that the fuel needs to be reprocessed before it can be used again. The fuel is just as good as newly made first generation fuel (actually better). So, you guys have an unbelievable amount of useful fuel to produce energy. It's only waste, if you don't use it.
It is well known that some pools in Japan have too many cores. This is certainly because Japan failed to build and activate in a timely manner a used fuel treatment plant.
Only 24,000 years... but still a very long time to hang around in our environment
I agree to the comment that the spent fuel should be pulled out of those holding pools, reprocessed and turned into new fuel rods to make more clean, greenhouse gas free electric power...until we have another solution to power that the government will accept and let us use, I can see no reason why we should not be "smart" about this one as much as we "hate" what has happened with other power plants throughout the world and the acute damage that has been done and will continue..
Sad part is that over 90%of that so called waste can be recycled...issue is we don't recycle it. also there are other types of reactors safer and more efficient where the waste will not be radioactive for thousands of years but for only tens of years...
Those pools make for great warm swimming holes.
@82snowball The "recycling" process produces a dozen different radioactive isotopes i.e. crypton which is dumped into the air and tritium that is being dumped into the sea. The spent fuel rods are stored without any safety measures for up to 6 years just next to the reactor. People who think that this is the appropriate way to handle in thousands of tons of highly toxic material are simply crazy.
Dear USA,
Please send all your spent fuel up here to Canada. Our CANDU reactors can use your "spent" fuel to power our homes. We'd certainly appreciate all the free power.
+lies damnlies Well maybe.... assuming all of Canada's reactors are Gen3 or newer.... But also the newer SMRs can re-use the US spent fuel one or two times and produce a final spent fuel of much lower toxicity, mass and volume for easier and safer storage. But don't let GreenPeace or Sierra Club find out..... they don't want the world to solve such a major energy issue because it would undermine their raison d'etre!
+lies damnlies We have these pools in Canada as well
CptCanada
Yes, what's your point exactly?
Use breeder reactors, and the energy extracted from uranium will be increased 60 times. Let's assume the US is the only country not reprocessing, but russia, france, UK, canada, Japan are still wondering what to do with waste. Reprocessing reduces the amount of waste, but not the time it needs to be stored. And it is expensive.
@JangosSoulja Not a good idea. The chances that a rocket launch fail are way to high and if this were to occur, would likely release massive amounts of particulate contamination high into the atmosphere; where it would travel on a much larger "planetary" scale.
"He was FIRED from his job when his daughter turned him and his antinuclear activist wife in for growing commercial quantities of marijuana in their home in Takoma Park WHILE he was serving in a high level government job, presumably with a sworn duty to uphold the laws of the land. That does not say much for his personal accountability or his personal integrity."
Last time I checked, Browns Ferry in north Alabama isn't at much danger of being hit by a tsunami. (It contains 3 reactors that are very similar to Fukushima). Also, the spent fuel pools in most plants are protected by well over 7 feet of steel reinforced concrete and overflow systems, meaning a direct impact by a plane after passing through the plant or even a bomb that could be carried in would be unable to compromise the pools to any extent useful to terrorists.
+adeedaas Our most recent "development" in bunker busters are good to 120 feet of reinforced concrete. 7 feet? I spit on that.
yeah! because terrorists really have access to bunker busters costing millions of dollars a pop, much less the resources to deliver them.
At least we can clearly see exactly what kinda fire this wicked and treacherous country will be utterly destroyed by!
Yea, until we figure out the Higgs boson fully enough to break down the waste into either more energy, or into something else...
That is power plant waste, defense waste is much larger.
+Rod Morrison It's all thoroughly defended.
+Jess Vagnar Sorry Jess been there done that.
Rod Morrison It's fine. Just ask someone whose job it is or read the NRC CFRs.
+Jess Vagnar Reading is not defending.
There would not be that much fuel sitting in a pond if the government would let these company's move the fuel around. They won't let them move it into dry storage and the anti nuclear people wont let them move the old fuel to Yucca mountain.
Germany is sending their rods to france for reprocessing, there are always huge protests around the special train that makes the delivery. It is really, really stupid that he only country that has ever used a nuclear bomb in a war, the country with the most warheads in the world (or maybe russia was first), is not allowing the reprocessing of nuclear fuel, so that they can tell iran not to. And iran are doing it anyway. Japan could not have done it without the permission of the US.
the mau mau tribe member, his father, and grandfather members of the mau mau kikuyu tribe who killed the british in kenya, something terrible has happen here.
Terrapower is a kind of breeder reactor, Bill Gates says so himself. Reprocessing spent fuel rods is not the same as burning the waste in a breeder reactor. It is much mire expensive.
So you're saying all the spent fuel should be stored in New Jersey, where it wouldn't do the world any harm if it got all melty.
you know how far the sun is. it'd be easier to just dump them on mars. or mars moon. but to spend that much money on space shuttles and fuel is crazy and its easier just to basically dig a hole and forget about it.
In other words you believe what the media says? Well we all know how the russian government handled the issue at Chernobyl, believe what you want. The death rate of events like these are not measured in a short time because a LOT of land and people are still effected or dying, but you never hear about it.
i can lead you to water, but i cannot force you to drink, my friend. that's on you.
Bob looks like the picture of health! Come on this guy is half dead from radiation lmao!
No! The nuclear boss who died of cancer was not killed by radiation cause it's too soon for that to be likely.
Most cancers due to radiation are likely to not show up for decades. The detah count now is close to meaningless.
Fukushima was a near miss. If procedures had been followed and the SFP gate had worked then SFP 4 would have been a real disaster.
Fukushima was saved by failures. Think about that for a minute before saying "anti-nuclear crackpots"
Geothermal,wave power,tidal power,wind,solar,hydro dams. Why the hell are we still generating power with primitive fuels?
The reporter seems nervous and uncomfortable.
Reprocess the fuel to extract the 95% of unspent uranium, put the rest of the spent fuel into dry casks, and send those to repositories until we develop reactors capable of breeding that stuff into oblivion.
That wasn't so hard now was it?
Why don't we just disperse it all over the planet to see if we build up a natural resistance to radiation....🤔
Why do I feel like I just watched some serious Astroturfing at work?
Orange Joe fertilized AstroTurf at that P U wait that’s plutonium
Adding mass to the sun will shorten the sun's lifetime.
Use those rods until they are dead really makes the most sense.
@sirellyn So money is the issue. It's the same for everything. Why don't we have humans on Mars? Not because we don't have the technology, because it's expensive. Money.
It has been recognised by a wide range of other commentators:
food is not fairly shared; it goes to those who can afford it or have the means to grow it.Famine exists largely because the hungry cannot afford to buy food, not because there is insufficient food produced.
Problem:Money.
another statistic: "March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation total, $17.4 billion."
If the responsible people would pull their heads out of their asses and allow fuel reprocessing and building of reactors that can "burn" the fuel much more (it will not be so dangerous), it would both solve the problem, secure truly clean energy for centuries to come and still cost orders of magnitude less then what you propose :P
America #1!!!!!!!
Partial meltdown in Japan ? No love, Three full ones.
71e9 / 19.1 / 1e4 = 371727 m3 of depleted uranium? That's a lot of fuel.
Exactly.
Well Nuclear energy is the best source of energy, besides Anti Matter
There is one way to solve the long lived ("transuranic") waste problem assocaited with Light Water (conventional) nuclear reactors.
See from Google TechTalks the following presentation (on RUclips):
Energy From Thorium: A Nuclear Waste Burning Liquid Salt Thorium Reactor
This should be really alerting...
"The sky is falling, the sky is falling!"
Not all spacecraft make it safely into space you know...if something goes wrong and the stuff doesn't reach orbital velocity and it all evaporates as it makes it way back through earth's atmosphere. Sitting around the Fukushima or Chernobyl reactors is going to be a theme park ride as compared for a few hundred kilograms of say plutonium burning up in the atmosphere and being spread by the winds...
so we will find out in 20 years if it can be done
yes but the risk of the cycle being abused is massive look at the process as is there has been illegal dumping around the world Italy and somalia
you dont know what kind of effect that would have on the sun.... the source of all life in our solar system...
All that spent fuel was "lying around" in the reactors around the country? I think that is hardly the case; at a minimum, the implication that it is being treated as if it were scrap iron in a junkyard is not correct. 71,000 tons with the density of, oh, half that of metallic uranium is a cube about 70 feet on a side; compare to the cubic miles of toxic (chemically and radioactivey) coal ash stored in unsafe conditions all over the country.
The problem, as someone below pointed out, is political, not technical. At one time we intended that the 95+% of that waste fuel would be recycled, but t turned out to be more economically efficient, particularly for the mining/reactor industry lobbies, that it be tossed (see? now even I'm doing it) and new fuel fabricated from scratch.
Its a fact that spent fuel pools are a major safety problem. If they drain, for whatever reason, this triggers an unforeseen environmental disaster.
@@TheUmbrella1976 Drain? Unless they have been abused, they are sealed and while you can get gamma radiation from them, all the emissions are sealed in. I would agree they have to be a major safety concern, but a problem? Can you direct me to any accident report that has involved ruptured rods outside a reactor? Chornobyl, I suppose. Others? any from stored rods, in pools or casks?
@@puncheex2 the base of the pool in block4 was destabilized from the H2 explosion and without cooling for days causing water to boil and evaporate till they got already exposed and broke. That's very well documented. They finally (and very luckily) were able to add water by using a concrete pump with a 60m arm. If the base would have collapsed or the pool would not have been replenished with water by the pump, Fukushima would have developed into the biggest desaster ever. This was as close as it gets. Just read the details, they are published
so bury it under Mount Borah, Idaho, Homestake Mine, SD, Mountains in CO, and Yucca Mtn. and NH
nope it just needs an orbit into the sun.
@boumar19721972 Because you like your energy prices the way they are, and not say 5-10x more.
Hydro is about the cheapest out of those you listed but is very situational. You have to have a large river, lake etc. with a large height difference.
Nuclear is popular because you don't need a specific plot of land, in fact you can put multiple (or more powerful reactors) in smaller areas.
I've looked up pricing for solar on my house and its expensive. 25-60k takes 10years to pay off and lasts 25y
Use it all to build "The Wall"...
why the hell dont we use thorium agian? oh wait we cant make plutonium from the stuff.
Why get rid of such a precious energy source? If reprocessed, a large portion could become fuel again...
Sooner or later the government will allow reprocessing in the US (or have the Russians do it :P) and make usable fuel from it...
Yup.
Why not use the heat for electricity
no links, still no links
One might think that, but if you check Wikipedia Chernobyl vs Fukushima disaster or win info on even better sites you will find out, Chernobyl was far worse. Fukushimas designs where safer, and smaller. I don't react to argue but Chernobyl was far worse. I to this day still wonder why the russian government still has TEN reactors running with the same design (RBMK). In my opinion the whole world needs to stop using nuclear stuff. It seems to be safe and profitable in theory, but it is not.
@82snowball Bullshit. There is no "nuclear waste". "Recycling" means getting Plutonium from the spent fuel to supply fast breeders and the weapon industry. You cant recycle the concrete and metal of the NPP building. By the way, the reason for nukes isnt the production of electricity, but the production of weapon metal (1kg Pu = 4,5 Million USD). This have always been the reason since the first reactor was build by E. Fermi.
Everyone wants nuclear waste stored safley, but who's gonna pay? Not me i would rather sit in a pool of nuclear waste as long as my bank account is safe
The producers should pay and sell it to consumers such as CANDU reactors.
Meanwhile, coal plants are finely distributing their radioactive and other carcinogenic wastes all around the world because it's still the cheapest way to get a lot of electricity.
Yeah , but you cant spend your money when your organs are melting .
Im a viking i will be buried with all my money so i can spend it in the afterlife
+Hjembrent Kent The United States government already paid for the last 4 decades. We built Yucca Mountain.
@sirellyn Geothermal trumps them all! And don't say it can't be tapped anywhere because it can. They use another kind of liquid that has a lower boiling point as water. /watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w
you should drink, cuz it seems dehydratation speaks from you
4th Gen is the way to go
+coalburnerfields Yes.... and the newer and safer SMRs such as the Toshiba 4S - super safe, small and simple..... but one has to put several together for power redundancy and they can only power smaller cities or mine sites or research vessels, e.g., the the arctic. In time they will be fit-for-purpose for desalination of sea water or to produce massive volumes of hydrogen for hydrogen Fuel cell powered electric vehicles.
+Scott Drysdale Hydrogen fuel cells are a waste of time.
kim weaver - You might be right in the case of energy density by unit volume it is at the very bottom of the energy density scale. However the energy density by mass is at the very top end of the scale, even well above diesel, kerosene and jet fuel. Otherwise NASA would not have used it for rocket propulsion. Granted a lot of kinetic energy has to be used to get it to high mass concentration. Check out "Smelling Land" by David Sanborn Scott for additional info.
So the fuel rods are in baths beneath the power plants yes? And how many hill sides are there in the US? Would Texas or Arizona accept large concrete containment vessels in their deserts (Death Valley eg)? A problem of long stnding fter 3 Mile Island as much as if not more to the point than Chernobyl or Fukushima.
for that u have to wait probably about couple of centuries :P
The only way a terrorist could access the spent fuel storage pools within a nuclear power plant is by dropping a Commando Vault or Daisy cutter on to a critical part of each facility and even then it may not work.
i say re use it 95% can be used again
blah! burpedy burp burp BLAH! blah! blinggy bloobers BLAH!
dafuq did i just read
Vitamins for the drinking water.
whydoes France love this stuff.
Chernobyl is much worse than fukishma
@82snowball what is the reason the industry is not recyclyng and who can let them or make them?
@82snowball
LENR/CANR reduces waste by 100%.