“Reportedly, Dr. Charles Bowman has warned that plutonium stored at Yucca Mountain would remain long after the steel casks holding it dissolve. At that point, the plutonium could migrate and concentrate, while the rock in the mountain could actually accelerate a chain reaction and subsequent explosion.”
-World Information Service on Energy
Now, it is true that, over time and if not used, the plutonium in spent fuel will become weapons-grade (it currently is not). That is one of the biggest arguments against geologic storage on a policy level; a nuclear waste repository that contains reactor-grade plutonium will become a plutonium mine.
However, spent fuel is about 1% plutonium. By the time it would become weapons-grade if left alone that proportion will be even lower. Nuclear weapons are made of essentially pure plutonium, and even then, they don’t go off all the time. A plutonium bomb is extremely finicky, and any suggestion that the flow of groundwater would cause a sphere of pure plutonium metal to assemble, followed by an enormously complicated and precise detonation mechanism appearing from nowhere, is ludicrous.
“Groundwater” brings us to something else: the quote says it will dissolve, but in what? And I’ve never heard of a rock acting to accelerate a chain reaction; methinks pure graphite is pretty rare in nature.
There is a precedent for this: the natural nuclear reactors in the Oklo uranium deposit, which started up about 1.6 billion years ago and ran for about 500 million years. Water flowed constantly through this deposit, yet the plutonium and waste produced by this reactor moved less than ten feet until the reactors were discovered in 1972. And no, the plutonium did not go critical, or react, or explode. It just sat there, for a billion years.
Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Clueless, Crackpots, Physics, Proliferation
