Bingo.
No one seems to have even a clue about any way to neutralize the stuff. The only option of any kind seems to be extremely long-term storage and no assurance of security can be made for the thousands of years it will take for it lose it's radioactivity.
By almost any system of "values" I submit that it would be immoral to pass even more nuclear waste to future generations simply to satisfy our short-term desires.
Nature stuck us with an easy solution that we are unable to handle, and too tempted to risk.
The primary issue with nuclear waste is the plutonium output from thermal reactors, since plutonium is both dangerous as a weapon and has a very long half-life. Newer technologies such as the AFR (advanced fast reactor) have been designed to consume plutonium and other nuclear waste and ultimately form a closed loop. There is some waste material from the AFR, but it is completely unusable for weapons and a problem for only 500 years.
The half-life of the waste material is probably still too long for extremely widespread use, you might say, and I'd agree with you. But the very first nuclear power plant was only built 50 years ago. The AFR demonstrates the advances that are still being made.
Should nuclear power be adopted right away in a widespread fashion? Are pebble-bed reactors the way to go over the long run? No and no. I don't agree with Kristof on this point. But I tend to agree with him about the longer-term future of nuclear power. I think we need to seriously promote the research + development end of things, the way other countries are doing.
I went quite a bit more in depth on this over on DKos. Sorry if my rant about people using 25-year-old prejudices against a 50-year-old technology includes anyone reading this, but there you go.
Also for your enjoyment, here's a reasonable look at the pros and cons of nuclear power at the end of 2004. The same author has also done similar analyses of the state of solar, wind, etc.
We were talking about "neutralization".
Think about that word before you kid yourself into believing you busted anything at all.
It is indeed an anti-radioactive neutralizing process by any measure of the phrase -- highly radioactive elements go in, and generated electricity and weakly radioactive elements come out. Converting from 24,000 year half-life material to a smaller amount of less dangerous material with half-lives of 100 years or less is 99% neutralization.
No, it's not 100% neutralization. The AFR can only consume the most dangerous waste -- actinides like uranium, plutonium and thorium. There are still other forms of waste that result, but it's a much smaller and less dangerous amount of material. And because of the way chemistry works they are either not very radioactive, or have very short half-lives, or both.
Further, there is no rational reason to think that there cannot be a similar solution to neutralizing this other waste if the technology is developed further. Radioactivity is not a mythical beast; it's a well-understood natural process.
And, I do reiterate: there is no proven process for genuinely neutralizing radiation.
This cycle idea this guy talks about doesn't even make sense. It's hokum science.
Where does all the radiation go? Just "back into the cycle"? How? What takes in the radition? Where do net gains and losses go? Just into la-la land?
As an avid consumer of urban myths (one of my favorite studies), my myth radar is peaking when I read statements like that, because they are the kind of broad-brush statements that charlatans make.
Slightly more credible papers I've found on the subject seem to indicate this AFR processing does nothing new with the radioactive waste.
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/designs/ifr/ifr1.html
"A new recycle technology called pyroprocessing is used to close the fuel cycle by separating the unused fuel from most of the radioactive waste. "
So . . . nothing special is done with the radioactive waste as best as I can discern.
Even your guy's documents use the phrase "fiendishly radioactive" at one point in the process. Not reassuring if we're not talking about waste, but rather the likelihood of catastrophic failure.
http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/images/image_large/ifr_concept.html
When I look at this process, I still don't see where the radiation disappears.
While you would realize some reduced waste simply from recycling, and perhaps by spending more of the material more efficiently, it hardly eliminates 99%.
I'm not buying. It looks like somewhere between total hokum and Budweiser Institute Corporate Science.
Medium version: Radioactive material is material in which atoms are in an unstable high-energy state. In an energy-generating nuclear reaction, these atoms are converted to other atoms (fission products) which are stabler and lower energy. No more unstable high-energy atoms, no more radioactivity.
Long version: Radioactive material is material in which atoms are in an unstable high-energy level.
Left alone, these unstable atoms will over time spontaneously decay to a stable lower-energy level. Since energy can never be created or destroyed, this energy has to go somewhere -- and it is released as radiation.
But nuclear reactors do not leave this material alone. They create reactions which trigger atoms to release their energy in controlled (rather than spontaneous) ways. This is literally done by knocking atoms into each other and changing them into other elements. This is illustrated here. Energy is released when this happens.
Problem is, most nuclear reactors only take 5% of the energy out of their fuel. They leave highly radioactive plutonium behind as a waste product, which still contains a great deal of energy. If left alone for a hundred thousand years that plutonium will spontaneously decay and lose its energy. But why leave it alone? It's a potential energy source. Technologies like the AFR are designed to consume that plutonium and take as much of the rest of the 95% as possible.
What happens to the unstable (radioactive) plutonium that goes in? It literally becomes something else -- iodine, cesium, strontium, xenon, barium, etc. The unstable high-energy atoms are converted to lower-energy atoms, and the difference in energy is released and converted to electricity.
Since radioactivity is a property of unstable atoms, and you are quite literally changing the unstable atoms into stabler ones, the radioactivity really does go away.
Other stuff: Am I a nuclear scientist? No. I have an engineering degree and have read extensively on quantum physics and nuclear reactors as a hobby, enough to understand the gist of it. In college I had friends who were, but I'm not. I just pay attention, that's all. I am not at all qualified to peer-review that guy's claims. But if you take a while to google "advanced fast reactor" you'll see that many other nuclear physicists have reviewed the concept and found it sound. It is being actively developed by the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. AFRs are a fully accepted concept; I just picked his explanation of the earlier IFR project because it's one of the most friendly and understandable.
And I should further point out that science is VERY different from politics. Scientists and engineers do not behave the way you suggested... just because this guy's project was killed and he's peeved about the stupidity does not mean he's going to get all Swift Boat Veterans for Nukes and start making shit up. Doing such a thing in a highly technical and close-knit field like nuclear engineering would end his career in a hurry.
Regarding waste, I never said that all waste was eliminated. However, the important point is that the nastiest stuff (plutonium) which we have all too much of lying around is eliminated. There are still byproducts, but here's the point:
You take X amount of very deadly plutonium -- highly radioactive, half-life 24,100 years, and usable for weapons -- and put it through the AFR and you wind up with roughly X amount of non-plutonium waste -- a mixture of much less radioactive elements with much shorter half-lives. Strontium-90's half-life is 29 years, Cesium-137's half life is 30 years, etc. And all of these elements are completely unusable for nuclear weapons.
Is waste being generated? Since the source material was waste to begin with, not really. In fact, since the output is so much less nasty than the input, you could very accurately say that the input waste was 99% neutralized.
However, that still does nothing to asuage fears about catastrophic failures. Also, it doesn't eliminate the waste, since all of that fuel rod will eventually produce waste. It does, however, at least make better use of a bad thing.
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"just because this guy's project was killed and he's peeved about the stupidity does not mean he's going to get all Swift Boat Veterans for Nukes and start making shit up"
Science does not make a man a saint. This is giving human beings too much credit.
How does this only produce electricity? That doesn't make sense. Given the types of radiation, it's highly selective to say this process would only lead to electron excitement. If nuclear reactions were that easy to disappate, I'd have a reactor in my car by now (and I wouldn't need an alternator, to boot!).
Radiation isn't just going to be nice enough to hit one part of an atom. Some variety from the reaction is going to strike the whole atom when the radiation comes into contact with whatever it does come into contact with.
This, to be honest, is the part of this whole theory that makes me doubt all of this. This answer is too simple and too self-satisfying. My natural inclination is to doubt these things.
One of the other causes for doubt is the number of absolutes being laid down here.
Too many things from this theory are being laid down as absolutes. Too many potential solutions are being represented as solved.
My natural inclination is to doubt under these circumstances.
