Nuclear is Our Future Pro-nuclear activist group

They say it’s “incoherent.” And it is; that’s the sad part.

The report does not make any concrete proposals. It recommends that more committees be set up and the issue discussed, saying that the British government is moving too fast.
That’s right: telling the British government to slow down. It’s difficult to think of a recommendation that lacks initiative to a greater degree.

They also are fixed on geologic disposal and do not seem to be interested in processing beyond the existing PUREX-and-storage instead of recycling or beneficial use of fission products. That’s a terrible mistake; these materials can be useful and shouldn’t be dumped.

Filed under Applications, Politics and Regulation, Waste

Posted on June 3, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

The Mars Science Laboratory will carry a device known as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) that converts the heat given off when radiation is absorbed by metal into electricity, with no moving parts.
All that’s required is a piece of radioactive material, sealed up inside metal or ceramic, and a thermocouple. The result is a lot of electricity from a small device that takes care of itself, for as long as the material is radioactive (a slight problem being the fact that the longer the material is radioactive, the less radioactive it actually is–materials that are chosen are the best combinations of time and activity, like plutonium-238 or the “nuclear waste” substance strontium-90). See a post from July 2005 for more.

It apparently wasn’t discussed very loudly until recently for political reasons, given the Moon-hoax-theorist level of ignorance surrounding the last major RTG mission, Cassini.

Filed under Applications, Energy, Politics and Regulation, Waste

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

Swedish regulators (who are possibly even less rational than the NRC) ordered a work stoppage effective June 21 (?) for paperwork violations (”failure to provide sufficient evidence” and “insufficient methods”).

Notice how no actual problems are involved.

Link.

Filed under International, Nitpicking, Politics and Regulation, Waste

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

An Australian indigenous group has volunteered a part of their land as a low- and intermediate-level waste repository (read: for rubber gloves and used reactor parts, respectively).

Do you think they’ll stop using the “environmental racism” argument? Don’t hold your breath.

Link.

Filed under Environment, International, Perception, Sustainability, Waste

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“But the UK has a potential solution. British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) operates a spent fuel reprocessing facility at Sellafield on the west coast of Wales, where it extracts uranium and plutonium. Should Amergen and Entergy become able to ship spent fuel rods from their U.S. nukes to Sellafield, what is now useless radwaste will be worth billions.”

-Michael Steinberg

Is there something wrong with separating what is actually waste from unused nuclear fuel? Does making money from it make it bad?

BTW…Sellafield is in Cumbria…and Cumbria is in England, not Wales.

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Economics, Fuel Cycle, Waste

Posted on May 30, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

The AP-1000, EPR, ESBWR, and ACR-1000 have been submitted. The ACR has the advantage of being able to consume waste from the others, as well as some from the British nuclear weapons program; I hope they can come up with a way to coordinate these two fuel cycles. US and Canadian governments take note.

They also seem to be using a design-basis site, which is something we really need to start using in the US.

Link.

Filed under Fuel Cycle, Industry Performance, International, Politics and Regulation, Safety, Waste

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

I didn’t know it was this easy to get press. Maybe we should pour orange juice into a vacuum breaker and get the NRC’s response on video, or make an inflatable of a polar bear hugging a containment structure, or something like that.

How to turn a five-minute calculation into a “major, startling new report”:

1. Figure out how much nuclear waste was produced by nuclear power plants in each state from publicly-available numbers. Inflate this figure by a factor of 20-30 by ignoring the unused fuel still left in the fuel rods that are in storage.
2. Get population data.
3. Divide.
4. Give it to your state groups to make a hullabaloo, even if the number is all of two pounds.

That’s right. The most nuclear waste that anyone has accumulated per capita around the country is 2.15 pounds. That’s something to be proud of–how much carbon dioxide has accumulated in the atmosphere from coal burning, per capita, and how much particulate matter is in people’s lungs from coal burning, per capita? And how much of that nuclear waste is in the environment?

Zero.

Perversely, this is being used to justify a subsidy for fossil fuels, paid for by the operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. In Anti-Nuke World, climate scientists have it all wrong: carbon dioxide doesn’t cause global warming; nuclear power plants do. Sure.

Talk about social responsibility. Yes, nuclear waste is going to be around for a while; a lot longer if we don’t reuse the half-used fuel that poses the biggest part of the waste problem. But so are the Pyramids; the Pyramids have no conceivable use to the generations that have had to live alongside them. Like the Pyramids, there’s no way for it to magically disperse itself into the environment. Like the Pyramids, it doesn’t require any nannying. Like the Pyramids–and unlike chemical toxins from coal burners–it has a finite lifetime. Like the Pyramids, people regard it as magical and not the physical entity that it is.

Let’s cite this study in the future. It looks very useful, not just from the data, but from the source.

More from We Support Lee (plus background on the subsidy here).

Link.

Filed under Activism, Environment, Fun With Statistics, Sustainability, Their Actions, Waste

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

Part 1 of this anti-nuclear email alert as well as the entirety of this one are devoted to complaining about the decommissioned LaCrosse nuclear power plant’s reactor pressure vessel (a tank of pressurized water that the reactor’s fuel rods were once suspended in) heading to the Barnwell low-level waste site. They inaccurately call it a “core” (the core is the fuel rods and associated structure to hold them in place) and say that Barnwell will close in 2008 (it will close to low-level waste from all states except those in the Mid-Atlantic Compact).

Filed under Decommissioning, Their Actions, Waste

Posted on May 20, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

This one is a set of maps showing how YOU WILL BE VICTIMIZED under GNEP, assuming a facility at the Savannah River Site. It’s apparently going to come out tomorrow; if we had a PR organization to speak of, maybe we could have done something about it.

Link to email alert.

Filed under Activism, Fuel Cycle, Their Actions, Transportation, Waste

Posted on May 20, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

Well, what is a spent fuel pool?

Most people’s experience of “fuel” is gasoline. Thus, the image that comes into most people’s heads when you say “spent fuel pool” is somebody draining spent nuclear gasoline from the reactor and pouring it into a spent fuel pool. Unsurprisingly, this image is far enough from the reality of what a spent fuel pool is that the general public does not understand how we can say that a leak from a spent fuel pool is irrelevant.
Spent fuel pools look very much like swimming pools, but with a rack at the bottom. That rack is used to store fuel rods that have already been through the reactor and are awaiting long-term storage, disposal, or the recovery of unused energy. Hence, a spent fuel pool.
The term “spent fuel pool” does not accurately describe what it is. It is more correctly described as an “underwater rack”–so why can’t we call it one?
Easy. Because we don’t. We always do what we always have done, simply because we always have done it; accordingly, we haven’t changed our approach and the industry hasn’t changed its products since about 1975. If someone had decided in 1975 that it was a violation of professional ethics to speak languages other than Romanian, nuclear engineers all would have said “OK,” learned Romanian, and conducted every meeting, hearing, and public briefing in Romanian. When the public shows up to an NRC hearing and listens to two hours of rapid-fire Romanian, they (a) don’t understand anything and (b) start throwing eggs at those onstage.
We can’t please the loons. But we can communicate to the public in a way that they can understand; the packaging is independent of the content and there is nothing more ethical than transparency.

More important, I suppose, is “why does the industry insist on calling it a spent fuel pool?”

I agree with the article in that leaks aren’t convincing. They’re a lot less convincing when we’re unwittingly misleading people about what’s leaking.

As usual with The Journal News articles, the comments section is more encouraging; the article is a better barometer.

Link.

Filed under Activism, Industry Performance, Missing the Point, Waste

Posted on May 20, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »