What is the job of DOE?? Promote nuclear energy or insure nuclear safety?? There is a built-in conflict of interest in what they are doing.

Note the conspicuous absence of any requirement to deliver long-term storage of the nuclear waste produced during operation and decommissioning.

Until and unless those problems are resolved - technologically, economically and politically - no new nuclear reactors should be built at all. The Yucca Mountain repository is still not operational.

It's no good saying that nuclear reduces CO2 emissions as long as there is no final resting place for this waste. Hard choices must be made wrt this trade-off in all OECD countries. Either you get someone to accept a long-term repository in their back yard or, you focus on a combination of energy conservation and renewable power.

Reprocessing stretches the available uranium resources, since regular reactors only use around 5% of the energy contained in their fuel rods. As a fringe benefit, this also reduces the volume of the remaining waste - but plenty of deadly plutonium is produced as a by-product. This exacerbates issues related to waste transportation, handling and exposure to terrorist attack in transit. Plus, how can you get countries like India, Pakistan and Iran to agree not to develop any reprocessing capability if you do?

Tough noogies its comming ready or not.

Rafael,
At least the waste has the ability to be stored. Unlike coal, oil, or anything else that we'd have to use if we just "conserved", where it just ends up in the air and in our lungs. conserving can't cut most of our energy requirements, especially with growing populations. Conservation mixed with renewables, and fossils just can't work, and renewables can't cover the base load. Nuclear is the safest option to cover our energy needs.

Also, India, Pakistan, and Iran will do what they want, when they want, regardless of whether we do it too, we just have to do our best to stop them from developing the capability, or get them to allow the UN to inspect plants. There's not a whole lot more we can do, we might as well be using the technology ourselves.

You cant. Thats why it needs to be regulated and managed by IAEA. This industry needs international transparentcy.

Re "conspicuous absence":
http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/NuclearRemediation/

Kick ass!

And I own 1 part in 16,753,925 of this company.

Wohoo! :D

DS, the NRC regulates commercial nuclear power in the US. The EPA regulates environmental aspects. DOE oversees operation of weapons facilities and also general energy matters. Certain aspects of newer DOE operations like the high level waste storage at Yucca Mountain will be regulated by both EPA and NRC. No reason for you to be confused.

It is amazing is that anything can get done at all in the US, but no conflict of interest in this case.

DS

Not to split hairs, but the ESP was issued by NRC, not DOE. NRC's role is strictly regulatory.

Rafael,

I agree that the 'waste' issue must be addressed. Light Water Reactors are quite inefficient. They are, however, mature, safe and liscensable. Heavy water reactors are marginally more efficient but they will not be liscensed in the near term in the US.

To delay further nuclear deployment until more efficient reactors are on the market would only cause more coal plants to be built. Solar and wind are not ready as baseline power.

Both liquid metal cooled with reprocessing and molten salt reactors can operate approximating 100% consumption of the nuclear fuel. The waste products are just fission fragments which are harmless after 400 years. Both reactor types have been operated as prototypes but they cannot economically compete with Uranium at less than $15/pound. With Uranium now approaching $100/pound perhaps commercial interest in these more efficient designs will increase.

From my vantage point in the nuclear industry (although I'm not a waste expert) I'd say the storage problem is much more political than anything else. But we do live a democracy and have the right to choose these things. One of my major concerns is that pundits, the press, the politicians and most of the public seem to be far removed from how much electricity we produce and use, and what goes into producing it. What does it actually mean on the ground and in the real world to invest more in nuclear? Or renewables?

When making decisions about our energy future, I think we need to start by first understanding our energy present. So I've written an introduction to my own field of expertise - nuclear power. To avoid reader boredom it's in the form of a thriller novel, and it's available at no cost to readers at RadDecision.blogspot.com. Reader reviews at the homepage have been very positive. "Rad Decision" is also available in paperback at online retailers.

"I'd like to see Rad Decision widely read." - Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog and noted futurist.

DefenseNews.com recently came out with an article summing up the present status of IEC fusion research: http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=2584496

I have to wonder why we aren't funding this. It has huge potential, and the cost of building test reactor would appear to be relatively small.

Like many techs fusion is waiting on luck. Sooner or later some unrealted tech will pop up that allows us to push fusion into full working order. But that tech could be out next week or next century and nothing we do short of a GARGANTAUN push will do it.

Regarding waste, I was under the impression that the majority of it came from secondary materials, i.e. piping, facilities used to carry the fuel and all the fuel handling materials, not the actual fuel itself. Does anyone have some numbers on percentages by mass of waste and what it consists of?

I would like to add to Bill's point upthread about liquid metal and molten salt reactors: if society makes it a priority to push these technologies, then all that is currently considered waste could supply America's electricity needs for centuries - without any more uranium mining. Our current inventory of depleted Uranium and nuclear "waste" would provide 60-100 times more energy than what was supplied on its first pass through a light water reactor! We could then deal with the coming fossil energy supply crunch, GW issues and nuclear waste disposal all at the same time.

What the hell are we waiting for? Advanced nuclear breeder technologies have been prototyped in the past and experts claim there are no technology show stoppers - it all boils down to cost. I think this needs to be front-burnered in the public policy arena ASAP.

What we are waiting for is simple. The power companies khow that the cheapest and best way for them to get nuke power working again is to let the supid dweebs today go for a good rousing blackout during a heat wave or bitter cold spell.

I agree the Integral Fast Reactor is the way to go. Note this is not a Breeder Reactor, existing thermal reactors, however, are inherent plutonium breeders. Burning rather than burying nuclear waste makes a lot more sense. The waste that would be buried would have a shorter period of storage (<400 years) than the CO2 everyone is so eager to store. Why is it, for CO2 sequestration, the fact that " the natural gas reservoir's have been there for millions of years " good enough, but for Nuclear Waste burying in hard rock that has been there for 500 million years, is just no good. When earthquakes occur natural gas is often released into the atmosphere, CO2 however will hover at ground level for some time, enough to kill everyone in an entire city that happens to be built over the CO2 reservoir 500 years from now.

The ass dragging that has gone on in advanced nuclear reactor design, has simply resulted in developing nations building their own, or buying old Soviet technology unsafe, badly designed reactors. And China & India have both recently announced plans to reprocess their nuclear waste, presumably by PUREX, plutonium commerce here we come, in insecure developing nations no less. Whereas we could be selling them IFR's, with no Plutonium commerce, safe, reliable well designed reactors. Also, existing nuclear reactors use primitive archaic instrumentation and were built using expensive, inefficient construction methods. If we standardized to a well designed IFR, use the assembly line production methods of large aircraft, then nuclear power would be very safe, reliable and cost competitive with coal or natural gas.

Also, interesting stuff on thorium nuclear reactors. Check out:
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/2006/05/introduction-and-basic-principles.html

Not to put too fine point on it, but we have not built any commercial nuclear electrical generating stations in the USA because the NIMBYs will not allow it. Nuclear power is bottled up by the lack of spent fuel long term storage, and long term storage is bottled up in the courts. The only way to cut this knot is to take political risk. Open Yucca Mountain on the basis of national security, and let those opposed go to court on that basis. Once the spent fuel was in place, we could quibble over how to make it into a monitored retrivable storage facility.

But until that action is taken, we will continue to fund those who think of us as infidels, and at the same time spew CO2 into the air as fast as we can.

Those that say conservation is the answer are hypocrites. Look at the energy consumption of the Green folks, the Governor of California, or Al Gore, or Senator "Beach House" Edwards. Remember when J. F. Kerry got caught riding in big SUV's, why they did not belong to him but to "the family." Folks, they are all phony hypocrites, using our desire to be good stewards of the environment to obtain and hold political power, but since they advocate "conservation" for others but not for themselves, they are green with greed for power, offering nothing to shift us off of fossil fuel.

Van, the reason no new nukes have been built in the US is that baseload generation with coal or nuclear was projected to be cheaper. That has changed for some locations. To some extent the NIMBYs are partially responsible. They are against everything including wind and solar. You need fewer lawyers per kw with nukes.

Burning rather than burying nuclear waste makes a lot more sense.

No, is economically nonsensical to burn nuclear waste, and will continue to be so unless uranium becomes extremely expensive. Even the french admit their reprocessing effort wastes money.

BTW, unless you burn the actinides from spent fuel in fast reactors, you will not be able to burn much of it before the isotope mix becomes unsuitable for further use (even ignoring the economics). So reprocessing for the purpose of waste disposal also necessarily requires a large number of fast reactors to burn the waste.

Paul, this is not reprocessing as the French are discussing. The IFR is a different concept which has not been built or tested due to no funding. Also note that Uranium prices have quadrupled in the past few years and likely to continue rising. The simple fact is that these GenIV reactors have to be designed, tested and built using modern methods of instrumentation, control & construction, a simple question of funding. Until this step is taken, the economics will remain debatable, but unknown. Meanwhile, we are wasting 10’s of billions and more on nutty schemes like fuel cell vehicles, the hydrogen economy, freedom car initiative, corn ethanol, the United States Pretend Advanced Battery Consortium Boondoggle and the Oil Company Iraq proxy war.

If the Boeing 777 was built like current nuclear reactors are built it would likely cost in excess of $10 billion per plane. I see no reason that North American Governments focus on an optimal design, and European as well, this efficiency is needed on large, complex structures, just as we now have Airbus in Europe, and Boeing in the Americas. If you want to know the facts about the IFR check out:

http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA378.html

Paul, this is not reprocessing as the French are discussing. The IFR is a different concept which has not been built or tested due to no funding.

The IFR involved reprocessing (where do you think they get the Pu to start the thing, and note that without reprocessing, you still have lots of the Pu/etc. left in the spent fuel). A different, and unproven, kind of reprocessing, granted (pyroprocessing). Oh, and sodium cooled fast reactors have a dismal record when they've actually been built. Sodium is nasty stuff and the inevitable leaks cause huge headaches. The fact the coolant is opaque also makes it very hard to inspect the system.

Also note that Uranium prices have quadrupled in the past few years and likely to continue rising.

Call me when they reach $300/lb; below that reprocessing is silly. And given that the Japanese estimate they can extract seawater uranium for well below that price, I don't expect U prices to stay sustainably above that level (in constant dollars) for many generations.

The simple fact is sooner or later we will have alot of nuke plants simply because if we dont we will have alot of fired politicians and alot of blackouts. Oh and alot of dead people.

The IFR reactor can burn transuranics. It requires multiple recycles of the fuel to do so.

A Thorium based molten salt reactor is not necessarily a fast reactor. It was prototyped in the '50s as an epithermal (half-fast?;)reactor. It would do a dandy job of burning transuranics but, since most of the fertile material would be U-233 rather than Pu, not as quickly. Because the transuranics are dilute, criticality instability would not be a problem and the transuranics can be fully consumed. Reprocessing would be largely limited to removing fission fragments from the salt.

Either the IFR or a MSR would be more expensive to operate than a GenIII LWR. Therefore, for either of them to be viable, either the cost basis of the LWR must be altered (such as tax Uranium to $200/pound or pay the utilities $100/pound to burn transuranics) or the government must operate the reactors as a public service.

Paul, as I said the type of reprocessing of spent fuel that the IFR uses is quite different from that one mickey mouse example of France’s attempt at nuclear fuel reprocessing. They are called closed cycle or combined cycle, and the important thing is they do not involve commerce in plutonium, which will certainly happen if the closed cycle reactors are not developed. It certainly has been true in the past with Uranium prices < $20 per lb that reprocessing was not profitable especially when, the cost & difficulties of waste storage was ignored.

Yes sodium is nasty stuff, as is liquid hydrogen (didn’t BMW make a car to run on liquid hydrogen), liquid oxygen, cyanide, Hydrogen Peroxide, Arsenic, to name a tiny few of the chemicals routinely used in industry. There was one dumb accident in a experimental reactor in Japan with liquid sodium, which wasn’t even close to a public health threat. Besides, liquid lead or bismuth can be used, its only a question of economics of prudent design. Liquid sodium is not a problem.

Several preliminary cost studies have indicated IFR’s will be cost effective. You sure as hell, not a chance on Earth, have any idea, as to the cost effectiveness of the IFR. And India & China have both announced plans to build Fast Reactors. The only legitimate argument against the IFR, I have heard is the economic one. And contrary to your one mickey mouse example, it is entirely undetermined as to this question. And the ONLY WAY to evaluate it, is to go through the complex scientific, engineering and economic R&D cycle to determine the complexity of variables, such as material supply, production methods, uranium supply, current energy costs, necessary safety modifications. Certainly the basic argument for the IFR is impeccable, burn up existing thermal reactor plutonium loaded wastes, creating trillions of dollars worth of green energy, without making an expensive ten thousand year storage facility, eliminating destructive uranium mining, no significant greenhouse gas emissions, avoiding commerce in plutonium which is most certainly going to occur otherwise. These facts make it logical that the R&D cycle be pursued, and furthermore I believe that the application of modern large Aircraft assembly line production techniques could be applied to a standardized nuclear reactor design, to produce them on a continuous basis, at a cost that is far less than using archaic manufacturing methods, that have been used in building nuclear utility reactors in the past.

Warren,

The IFR will not eliminate Uranium mining. It may reduce it but not eliminate it. (What you gonna use when the used LWR fuel is gone?)

My preferred solution, the MSR, does not eliminate mining either, although a lot of Thorium would be mined instead of Uranium.

The French process was basically a modified version of the US PUREX process, the only industrially demonstrated reprocessing technology. I agree, it is nasty; particularly if done on the cheap. The worst US nuclear environmental messes are associated with PUREX reprocessing. Other than West Valley, NY, I think all the PUREX messes are from the weapons program.

Other systems, UREX, pyro and DUPIC are very nice on paper or laboratory scale. (OBTW, how do you say Mickey Mouse in French?)