OT: Hey Nevada people. Yucca Mt?

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Yeah, Munk, this is one of those few areas in which we'll just agree to disagree. That's cool.

Damm, do you really think a .50 could do it? I know they tested the containers against locomotive hits at full speed, with no effect. I heard that a big anti-tank rocket could do it, but a .50? Man. Talk about AWB revival! :( :(

Namaarie
 
Yvsa said:
Howard has spoken well here. I used to know a lot about the hazards of what is called atomic waste but have forgotten much so that leaves me even more ignorant on the subject than I was before.
So the question I have now is... Do we have the technology to convert said material to usable product?
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A few years back there was the Isaiah Project, the goal of which was to convert demilitarized nuclear warheads into fuel and medical isotopes.

Spent military reactor fuel can be refined and reused; commercial fuel was not highly enriched enough to be practical in most cases. However, many by-products such as cesium and cobalt could be used for other purposes once isolated. Whether it's practical or not would depend on the source, the processes by which it was created and by which it would be recovered.
 
Be careful...the AEC may look totally engaged in moving that stuff but I assure you that they are not and the movements are very well guarded. They *will* shoot back.

"The Trained Survive"
 
Nasty said:
Be careful...the AEC may look totally engaged in moving that stuff but I assure you that they are not and the movements are very well guarded. They *will* shoot back.

"The Trained Survive"
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Yep. space
 
Nam, we may differ, but a major change away from oil, without a viable economic alternative, will hurt not you and I severely, but the Third World Nation poor first and catostrophically. Goods and services will be out of reach.

There is a way to gradually move from fossil fuels.


>>>>>>>>

Nasty- you mean those trains full of nuclear crud aren't just shipped Northern Pacific on flatbeds? DOE prepared to defend. In the age of Terror, I imagine a 50 cal bullet hole would be investigated from satellite and the perps dealt with.
 
They were well prepared long before the age of terror. Back in the 80s our shipments were assumed to be targets and were accompanied by a significant number of very serious US Marines.
 
raghorn said:
A few years back there was the Isaiah Project, the goal of which was to convert demilitarized nuclear warheads into fuel and medical isotopes.

Spent military reactor fuel can be refined and reused; commercial fuel was not highly enriched enough to be practical in most cases. However, many by-products such as cesium and cobalt could be used for other purposes once isolated. Whether it's practical or not would depend on the source, the processes by which it was created and by which it would be recovered.
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Thanks Raggie. You know if the effort to reclaim this material was focused on as much as the Space Race was at one time there is no telling the good that could come of it, or the amount of jobs that would be produced from the spin offs!

I realize the complications of private enterprise doing anything with this but if the profit potentials could even be forecast by private enterprise research the potentials could be tremendous, but that'll never happen I'm thinking, or could I be wrong?
I'm thinking the AEC and the Government have it pretty much tied up ainnit?
 
You're probably right Munk, but I'm just hasty. :D

I like to think that my penchant for guns and khuks is a good influence on my more liberal friends. :) Believe me, they get *way* more radical!

Namaarie
 
Yep, it's pretty much tied up. I think the DOE now regulates the government's materials and the NRC regulates commercial.

The main problem as I see it is that the high-level stuff is extremely difficult (and therefore expensive) to handle safely (and securely), and the low-level stuff is just not worth the bother because it's basically a large amount of garbage with a bit of contamination stirred in.

It's much easier and cheaper to create medical isotopes with new materials and an operating reactor than to try and extract them as by-products from spent fuel rods.
 
Nam; I'd like to see real strides towards battery technology and alternative energies. I'd like to see non productive and insane environmental policy dropped, but realistic ones made to stick.

"Raggie" Well, I've heard it twice now; Raghorn has been perverted to "raggie". First Dan K did it, and now Yvsa.

Raggie Raggie Raggie. I don't like it, but I'd better get used to it, Raggie.

munk
 
Rusty said:
It's a stupid-wild-arse-guess, but if they start hauling trainloads of nuclear waste into the state, they'd better get good at welding 50 BMG caliber bullet holes up in their oh-so-safe containers. Or get used to dynamite/diesel- ammonium nitrate explosions blowing up the tracks with locomotives and containers loaded with nuclear waste on them before they make it into Nevada. I don't have nor want a bolt or semi-auto in the caliber, but I just might contribute to the fund for other Nevadans to exhibit their displeasure. Then again, maybe not.
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Rusty, before you load up, you may want to look at the tests here. http://www.archive.org/movies/details-db.php?collection=opensource_movies&collectionid=nuccasktest1 The Brits crashed a locomotive at 100 mph carrying a fuel flask into a derailed flatcar with virtually no damage to the flask. The DOE has sent rocket powered trucks carrying shipping containers into concrete walls with the same effect. You will have to try harder than a 50 BMG or a simple train derailment to rupture one of these flasks.



Yvsa said:
So the question I have now is... Do we have the technology to convert said material to usable product?
Click to expand...




The most valuable component of spent nuclear fuel is the fissile plutonium that it contains. This can be separated from the other components via relatively simple chemical processing. The technology does exist and is being used elsewhere in the world. The plutonium can be used for weapons manufacture, and that is the rationale for the US abandoning breeder reactor technology. That is like throwing away the vast stores of energy locked in U-238. Most uranium is U-238 (99.27% of natural U), which is not fissile. We laboriously separate the fissile U-235 by various complex isotopic separation techniques to power our reactors. But in the environment of a reactor the "useless" U-238 is converted to fissile Pu-239, which can be used as fuel. This conversion of U-238 to Pu-239 happens regardless of the enrichment of the uranium.



If the U-239 were being recovered (it is without question cost effective to do so) then additional chemical separations for other useful isotopes would be less expensive than if a special process had to be run for just one chemical. I suspect the best way to do this would be to let the really "hot" short lived isotopes decay for a while prior to processing, so spent fuel may never be a very good source for the short lived isotopes used for many medical procedures. However, we could probably extract things like Co-60 (used for industrial radiography, sterilization of food, and medical therapies), Sr-90, Ir-192, etc.



Even after the economically viable constituents were removed there would be some hot material left over, so the waste issue does not go away. Some material would have to be stored or disposed of. However, as technology advances we continue to find new uses for things that were previously called "waste." I would not be surprised if we end up mining our garbage dumps in the future. It makes sense to me to store this material in a manner in which it may easily be recovered.

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Oh, and concerning the transportation of weapons-grade material. I heard an amusing anecdote in one of my classes on the transportation of radioactive material. It seems one of the DOE drivers got a kick out of speeding his unmarked truck through speed traps. When the local sheriff pulled him over and said "You in a heepa trouble, boy," the unmarked station wagons following the truck would pull over, and several plainclothed security personnel with machine guns would walk over and set the local constable straight. It's just a story so take it for what it is worth. I would have loved to have seen the video though.
 
namaarie said:
:D Tehehehe! I would love to see that. :D
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Me too and I know of a couple of places I would really like to see it done. I live in one, at Catoosa, and the other is Hulbert Oklahoma, there you had better be driving 5 mph Under the speed limit as they say your speedometer is inaccurate.:rolleyes: :grumpy:
 
raghorn said:
Whether nuclear, solar, hydro, coal, wind or otherwise, there is NO single solution. The solution is a combination of all of the above, employing each in the context where it makes the most sense.
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This statement is very true. We need to stop putting all our eggs in one basket.

We have some wind generation plants here near the Allegheny Front where the wind continuously blows all the time.

I am glad I posted this. I am surprised at the depth of knowledge I have seen on the subject.

I consider myself an environmentalist, but while the spent fuel is really dangerous, assuming it can be stored in a safe manner it seems to me a well run nuclear plant is way less damaging to the environment than coal mining or oil drilling. Also no particulate in the air or mercury falling into the water. Many places the fish are unsafe to eat due to high mercury levels from coal fired plants.
 
Ben Arown-Awile said:
The eggs are not "ours". They belong to "them".
We just get to pay to have them shoved down our throats.
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True. Some of us more than others. For instance while I still have to buy gas to get to work cause there is no public transportation, I have a gas well on the property and I get 200,000 cubic feet of natural gas a year free, so I don't have to support the fatcats as much as some. I even have some gas lights upstairs and 2 natural gas refrigerators.
 
For Nevada's citizens: I know it's a raw deal but you got picked. If it makes you feel any better, we've been stuck with Hanford since WWII. (And we've been stuck by Hanford once or twice but that's before my time.) If it were up to me, we'd be shipping that stuff to Jersey. ;)

Nuclear power is here to stay. We'd better get used to it. The petroleum's going to be gone in my lifetime. Those "fifty years to go" forecasts I received in grade school are now twenty years old and had not taken China's growth into account at all. The fuel is not going to last, period.

Energy concerns: environmental overregulation will be the death of us. My power bills over the last few years have been twice what they were before that, primarily due to California's inability to get their power grid straightened out and our governor's decision to assist them in their time of imbecility. (And, of course, the power company's decision to jack up the rates and keep them there even after the crisis died down. When's the last time a utility lowered rates anyway?) I'm convinced that their Green Party had a lot to do with that. Environmental regulation is not an exact science. A balance must be struck between actual and forecasted power needs and preservation of the environment. Overregulation is just as bad as underregulation and overzealousness here (as in all cases) is counterproductive.

Plug "biodiesel" into your search engine and do some reading. It's the one alternative energy source we've got right now that's well understood and works. (Don't get me started on the fallacies of hydrogen.) I don't understand what the holdup is here. It won't fix the problem entirely but it'll give us a lot more breathing room and will keep more of that money spent on foreign petroleum inside our borders. The big problem I'm seeing with it is the price - it runs around $3.00 a gallon here as opposed to $2.30 or so for dino. I'm guessing that once the dino prices match (and exceed) the bio we'll be seeing more of it.

About DoE: I won't pretend to be an expert in the subject but they take over our range for one week a year for scenarios and training, thereby making themselves better trained than a bluewater sailor several times over. :rolleyes: They do have some high-speed units for various tasks and they take spent fuel movements very seriously. (Our ammo shipments don't get that kind of security.)

Whew. Didn't mean to rant, but current energy policies and trends really get my goat sometimes. :barf:
 
If they're going to stick us with Yucca Mountain, they ought to go whole hog and put congress and the bureacracy here too, right on top of the dump. Oh, drat - can't go that way: seems Nevada is denying the feds all water rights to Yucca Mountain.

Jeeze, start out talking about letting pedophiles get what's coming to them, and next thing you know the congressmen and senators are getting nervous!

( Oh, all right. Pedophiles do deserve better than to be classed with congressmen and senators. )
 
Howard Wallace said:
Even after the economically viable constituents were removed there would be some hot material left over, so the waste issue does not go away. Some material would have to be stored or disposed of. However, as technology advances we continue to find new uses for things that were previously called "waste." I would not be surprised if we end up mining our garbage dumps in the future. It makes sense to me to store this material in a manner in which it may easily be recovered.
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With all this said does the "hot material" generate any heat or just radiation? If it generated heat would there be any way to safely tap into that for energy use?

On another tack....
I have read accounts of uranium mine tailings being used for the resurfaceing of gravel roads on the Navajo Rez and also used for fill in an area where a school and clinic was built IIRC.
It's been a while since I researched all of this but it seemed that there was a high incidence of cancer because of exposure to radiation on the rez than other places.
It was also said that due to the uranium 238 laying so close to the surface in many places on the rez that a lot of surface mining was done by individuals that over the years also suffered a higher incidence of cancer.
The really scary areas were in Russia though where there was no regualtion of waste dumping because of the vast areas.
Like I said, "It's been a while since I researched this." so is this similar to the problem that Nevada is facing or are we talking two different situations?

There's a lot more I recall, bits and pieces, of the situation on the Navajo Rez such as the dust blowing on the grass, the sheep eating said grass and then the Navajo eating said sheep that contributed to the cancer incidences....
All scary stuff but then I wonder how much is true and viable information and how much is scare tactics from the naysayers?
 
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