“We are the young generation, we are the young Malaysians, it is our future we are talking about, and we want a sustainable, green, beautiful, secure planet that we can show our own children with our very own eyes instead of just through pictures in history books – We want a future. And let us manage the waste”.
Issues in Science and Technology is a quarterly publication put out by theNational Academy of Sciences, and in its newest issue, out this week, Luther Carter, Lake Barrett, and Kenneth Rogers author a critique of the Obama administration for its re-examination of U.S. policy on the back end of the fuel cycle. In fact, the authors of ‘Nuclear Waste Disposal: Showdown at Yucca Mountain’ [subscription required] don’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. The essay is a political polemic, and it fails to recognize the strategic advantages associated with centralized long-term management of used nuclear fuel.
Is U.S. policy on the back end of the fuel cycle ideal? Absolutely not. The United States needs a path forward for the long-term management of high-level radioactive waste from civilian and defense programs, but new nuclear plants will or will not be built on electricity demand fundamentals, not the political football that has been, and to some extent remains, Yucca Mountain. States have moratoria on building new nuclear plants by virtue of the government not having a repository for used nuclear fuel disposal, but there is widespread reconsideration of that ban in a number of those states. Alaska earlier this year overturned its moratorium. Industry’s safe and secure management of commercial reactor fuel is playing a role in this reconsideration by state legislatures.
There’s no denying that the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle is in a state of flux from a federal policy perspective. The future of Yucca Mountain is questionable; meanwhile, the administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future is examining a range of policy options.
What is certain in policy consideration is that we will be securely storing used fuel in above-ground facilities for an extended period of time.
The nuclear energy industry supports a three-pronged, integrated used fuel management strategy:
managed long-term storage of used fuel at centralized, volunteer locations;
research, development and demonstration of advanced technology to recycle nuclear fuel;
and development of a permanent disposal facility
Long-term storage is a proven strategic element that allows time to redesign the nuclear fuel cycle in a way that makes sense for decades to come. Meanwhile, NRC’s recent final rulemaking on waste confidence represents an explicit acknowledgment by industry’s regulator of the ongoing safe, secure and environmentally sound management of used fuel at plant sites and or central facilities. Although spent fuel is completely safe and secure at plant sites, indefinite onsite storage is unacceptable.
The Blue Ribbon Commission must take the next step, and recommend forward-looking policy priorities for used fuel management. To date, the commission has demonstrated an awareness of the importance and magnitude of its task. The challenge is to recommend a used fuel management policy that can stand the test of time and enable the nation to take full advantage of the largest source of low carbon electricity.
- Everett Redmond, Director, Nonproliferation and Fuel Cycle Policy, NEI
Obama pulls the plug on the nuclear industry's last best hope.
By Timothy NoahPosted Tuesday, March 3, 2009, at 7:49 PM ET
We've seen a lot of hyperbole lately about the significance of a presidency that's all of six weeks old. I hesitate to add to it. But the following statement happens to be the literal truth.
The ramifications of the 2008 presidential election will be felt for1 million years.
One million years is a long time. A million years ago, Homo erectus (who looked like this, notthis) was getting ready to invent the hand axeand discover fire. Yet 1 million years is the length of time that the Bush administration was preparing to guarantee (apparently to our successor hominid species) the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel rods inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain, in a waste facility whose approval had been making its way through three branches of government for a comparatively brief 32 years. The goal was to start dumping this high-level nuclear waste inside Yucca Mountain in 2020. Here is how the Bush Department of Energy forecast the year 1,002,020 A.D. in a safety report issued this past June when it submitted an application for Yucca Mountain's approval to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission:
Imagining the initial quantity of radioactivity emplaced in the repository as 1,500 marbles, natural radioactive decay would leave 270 marbles after 1,000 years and only 90 marbles after 10,000 years. By 100,000 years, there would be only eight marbles left. Finally, after 1 million years, just one marble out of the original 1,500 would remain … about 99.93 percent of the radioactivity originally placed in the repository would have decayed.
This constituted remarkable long-term planning for an administration that refused to provide 10-year budget projections. It was imposed from without. Originally, Yucca Mountain required "only" a 10,000-year safety guarantee, but in 2004 a federal courtinsisted on a million-year standard, citing concerns in a 1995 study by the National Academy of Sciences that the nuclear waste would take much longer than 10,000 years to reach maximum exposure levels. The NAS had said a reasonably accurate assessment could be made of the site's geology over the next million years. (After that, not so much!) The Environmental Protection Agency duly issued its first-ever million-year regulation,setting a maximum legal limit for release of radioactive materials at 15 millirem per year for the first 10,000 years and 100 millirem for the next 990,000. Nevadans of the 10,021stcentury would have to figure out themselves what to do about the 0.07 percent remnant left in that last marble.
The entire discussion was, of course, outlandishly hubristic. It was made necessary by the outlandishly severe and long-lasting environmental dangers posed by nuclear waste. Six decades after the dawn of the nuclear era, the only plausible answer to the question "What do we do with this stuff?" is "Don't create any more of it." That, in effect, is what President Obama is saying in fulfilling his campaign promise to shut down Yucca Mountain. The program, Obama's new budget states, "will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal." That's bureaucratese for "Yucca Mountain is dead."
Had John McCain been elected, Yucca Mountain would be headed toward final NRC approval, possibly before the next presidential election (though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a longtime opponent, would be trying very hard to prevent that). During the campaign, McCain favored opening Yucca Mountain for business even whiletelling an interviewer that he would never permit transport of nuclear waste through his home state of Arizona en route to Nevada (with which Arizona shares a border). The Obama campaign made gleeful use of the clip. McCain's worry about the transport of high-level nuclear waste is well-founded; routinely hauling this stuff by truck or rail poses serious risk of a catastrophic accident.
The nuclear industry has long argued, correctly, that the current practice of storing spent fuel rods on-site in water-filled vaults and, after those fill up, transferring them to steel-reinforced dry concrete casks is impractical. Though the industry is loath to point out safety concerns, it has repeatedly noted that storage space is running out. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter effectively ended the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel in civilian plants, and it's doubtful that will be reversed during an era of homeland security. (In truth, the end product of reprocessing, plutonium, would be fantastically difficult for terrorists to steal safely, but reprocessing creates environmental headaches of its own.) What should nuclear power plants do? "Our position," says Kevin Kamps, a radioactive-waste expert at the environmental group Beyond Nuclear, "is that we should not be creating this material to begin with." Since 2006, environmental groups haverecommended limiting the density of existing water-filled vaults and hardening the dry casks. The Obama administration will likely end up doing something along these lines.
Global warming has caused some policy experts to call for a revival of nuclear power, whose expansion halted after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Currently there are20 applications for new reactors under active consideration at the NRC. As recently as 2007, there were none. Nuclear plants are indeed vastly preferable to coal-fired plants from the standpoint of carbon dioxide emissions. But you can't just take into account the waste that power plants don't create. In shuttering Yucca Mountain, Obama makes it extremely likely that nuclear power in the United States will continue its long, slow, and extremely welcome death. For the next couple of decades, anyway. That's as far out as I'm willing to predict anything.
Work on disposing of radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain has all but stopped after President Barack Obama's budget blueprint yesterday. A new strategy for permanent storage is to be developed.
A cross section of the Yucca plan
The confirmation came with the following words from the Department of Energy: "The Yucca Mountain program will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal."
An application to build the Yucca repository was lodged with the NRC in June last year, and this confirmation that NRC will continue to examine it indicates that Yucca will remain on the table for consideration at least until a firm strategy is announced. The move remains basically in line with Obama's pre-election statements that Yucca Mountain was "not an option."
America must now set a new course for long-term management of high-level radioactive waste, which could include reprocessing and recycling after a change in attitude towards the practices during recent years. A major factor could be Obama's position on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), which would see a community of countries share nuclear power technology with leading nations storing all the high-level waste from the entire group after dramatic volume reduction from reprocessing.
Modern long-term strategies usually involve a step-wise reversible process that starts with an invitation to communities nationwide to express interest. The authority responsible for the project would then engage with each community and conduct preliminary geological assessments of the surrounding area. A shortlist of possible hosts would be drawn up, giving a range of project options with tailored benefits developed for each community. Moving along a clearly defined path, the list is reduced until a single site, plan and timetable can be announced. A key aspect of the process is that communities have the absolute right to withdraw at any stage. The process to manage Sweden's waste is currently nearing the step of picking from two sites eager to host the underground repository, Oskarshamn and Forsmark. Eventually Swedish high-level wastes will be sealed in copper canisters and embedded in clay plugs some 400 metres below ground in solid rock.
The history of Yucca Mountain clearly contrasts with this kind of equitable process. Legislation in 1982 stipulated that the USA should have a permanent store for radioactive waste from its military, research, power and medical activities from 1998, and initial plans foresaw two such facilities - one in the eastern states, and one in the west. Several sites were given preliminary evaluation and identified as feasible locations for the project, but a Congressional vote directed the Department of Energy to focus on just one: Yucca Mountain, Nevada, where a powerful and persistent force quickly arose from state authorities to block progress.
Nevada Senator Harry Reid, who has been the most prominent anti-Yucca figure over a two-decade campaign wrote on his website that he "couldn't be happier for the people of Nevada" after more than two decades of effort.
Natural nuclear reactors, power plants and landscape:
A brief history of design
Power plant designs can vary in their fuels, coolants and configurations, as WiredScience describes in the article Reactor Drawings Make Nuclear History Beautiful. Now there are lots of discussions about the construction of new power plants worldwide, due its environmental influence over nature, but we want to focus on their design that sometimes resemble a dystopic urban landscape or the massive mobile robotic structures projects designed by the avant-garde architects from the 60s and 70s.
It is often claimed that nuclear stations are inflexible in their output. Whilst it may have been true for certain reactors, this is not longer true of at least some modern designs, as we can see e.g. in France, where the French government decided in 1974, just after the first oil shock, to greatly expand the country’s nuclear power capacity. We can also read in The History of Nuclear Energy:
Nuclear powerplants generate electricity like any other steam-electric powerplant. Water is heated, and steam from the boiling water turns turbines and generates electricity. The main difference in the various types of steam-electric plants is the heat source. Heat from a selfsustaining chain reaction boils the water in a nuclear powerplant. Coal, oil, or gas is burned in other powerplants
We’re talking about all of these to get the context to understand the design behind the nuclear reactors and power plants showed in these drawings:
The World’s Reactors, No. 11, Bradwell-On-Sea Power Station, Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex. Wall chart insert, Nuclear Engineering, April 1957
The World’s Reactors, No. 12, Dounreay, Scotland. Wall chart insert, Nuclear Engineering, June 1957
Electricity was generated for the first time by a nuclear reactor on December 20, 1951, at the EBR-I experimental station near Arco, Idaho, which initially produced about 100 kW [the Arco Reactor was also the first to experience partial meltdown, in 1955].
But going further in time, we found out that remnants of nuclear reactors nearly two billion years old were found in the 1970s in Oklo, Africa. Two billion years old? The explanation is that these reactors are thought to have occurred naturally. No natural reactors exist today, as the relative density of fissile uranium has now decayed below that needed for a sustainable reaction. As read in the web-site:
Creating a nuclear reaction is not simple. In power plants, it involves splitting uranium atoms, and that process releases energy as heat and neutrons that go on to cause other atoms to split. This splitting process is called nuclear fission. In a power plant, sustaining the process of splitting atoms requires the involvement of many scientists and technicians.
It came as a great surprise to most, therefore, when, in 1972, French physicist Francis Perrin declared that nature had beaten humans to the punch by creating the world’s first nuclear reactors. Indeed, he argued, nature had a two-billion-year head start.1 Fifteen natural fission reactors have been found in three different ore deposits at the Oklo mine in Gabon, West Africa. These are collectively known as the Oklo Fossil Reactors.
Seems like we’re going from this:
To this:
We can even discuss how nuclear power affects our landscapes. The Yucca Mountain Waste Repository is the perfect example to talk about this issue, because following 20 years of intense study, Yucca Mountain[Nevada] has become the site for long term management and underground storage of the country’s growing stockpiles of high-level radioactive nuclear waste. This means that the mountain will be excavated for a tremendous phased development of the repository. We can read that the footprint of the facility is 1km wide x 6.5km long and comprises some 50 storage tunnels or ‘emplacement drifts’ for a total of some 56 miles or 90km of 5.5m to 7.6m diameter tunneling. In addition there is an elaborate ventilation system comprising several deep shafts and a shaft connection from each emplacement adit to a central service tunnel that runs the length of the footprint beneath the repository.
More than ten years before of the current state of the discussion about using Yucca Mountain as an option for storing nuclear waste, the mountain was excavated by a 25-foot diameter borer machine to open the other end of the tunnel three miles south of the north portal. For most of its length the tunnel is about a thousand feet beneath the summit of the mountain and even more important a thousand feet above the water table, as can be read at Atlas Obscuraarticle. They pointed:
The more than five miles of tunnels, cross drifts and alcoves that have been drilled so far are really part of what is called the Exploratory Studies Facility. It is a research program, costing $8 billion so far, intended to prove the absolute safety of the repository for ten thousand years. If it morphs into the actual nuclear waste site then they will bore another sixty miles of tunnels branching off the main one where they will actually store the hot waste.
Yucca Mountain North Tunnel Entrance. Google Earth
As we started talking about design, we can end this article quoting part of the interview that Geoff Manaugh andNicola Twilley did to Abraham Van Luik, a geoscientist with the U.S. Department of Energy [currently based at the nuclear waste-entombment site proposed for Yucca Mountain]:
BLDGBLOG: How did you start designing a project like Yucca Mountain, when you’re dealing with such enormous timescales and geological complexity?
Abraham Van Luik: You start with a question: how do you perceive the need to isolate a material from the environment?
I think most people would begin to answer that by looking at the nature of the material. Wherever that material is currently, we make sure that there is either a thick wall or a deep layer of water to protect the people working around it [...] Now, in most countries, what they have done next is asked: What geology would be very good for isolating this material from the environment? And what geologies are available in our country?
Now, the reflection here could be: are we architects prepared to respond or to design this kind of large-scale infrastructures? The discussion started when FASLANYC pointed, “what value do landscape/architects add to the design of infrastructures?” and was followed by Rob and Stephen at mammoth’sthe dead sea works. It can be continued here.
Of course we don’t have the answer, there are still so much things to do and think and we just want to go on with the conversation.
Issues in Science and Technology is a quarterly publication put out by theNational Academy of Sciences, and in its newest issue, out this week, Luther Carter, Lake Barrett, and Kenneth Rogers author a critique of the Obama administration for its re-examination of U.S. policy on the back end of the fuel cycle. In fact, the authors of ‘Nuclear Waste Disposal: Showdown at Yucca Mountain’ [subscription required] don’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. The essay is a political polemic, and it fails to recognize the strategic advantages associated with centralized long-term management of used nuclear fuel.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
