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157 comments on Will Nuclear Fusion Fill the Gap Left by Peak Oil?
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Bait taken. :)
The containers will have an inner structure of cast iron with a bolted on lid and channels where dried used fuel elements and other highly active core components will be inserted. This iron structure provides mechanical strenght.
The inner cast iron structure will then be inserted in a 50 mm thick copper shell and a lid is friction stir welded to hermetically seal the container.
The containers are then to be stored embedded in bentonite clay that indeed swells when wet at a depth of about 500 m in crystaline bedrock. They will either be stored individually in vertical holes bored into the floor of a tunnel or several in a horisontal hole drilled between two tunnels. The later method requiers excavation of a smaller rock volume.
There has been geological research for this for about 20 years, the most intresting find is probably microbiological activity in the rock cracs.
Production methods for the inserts and copper shells have been develped, friction stir welding were better then electron beam welding. Copper forgings of this size where something new. Capsule handling have been tested and capsules with simulated decay heat stored and retrieved. A plant for filling the containers is being designed, I dont know if the design is finished.
All of the research, the interrim used fuel storage and so on is paid by fund filled by a small fee on every kWh produced. The same fund will also cover the dismantling of the reactors when they are worn out.
The research and the solution is shared with Finland who has the same kind of bedrock.
Here is a link to an official page with lots of information:
http://www.skb.se/default2____16775.aspx
The final site for the storage is decided in competition between two municipialities. Its expected that final storage will commence in 2018, this means that all the major investments in facilities will be done while the powerplants are running wich I find wise if world finance should burp. A cute bonus idea is to build a railroad with the excavated rock if it is built close to Oskarshamn.
I find this solution good enough for me, its probably overengineered.
thanks for confirming most of what I said, and for the swift reply. 500 m is pretty deep, It does seem like this scheme will keep the material safe for perhaps severel glaciations and interglacials, that is if Scandinavia will be glaciated again before the nuclides decay, who knows if the cycle is broken. I will now go back to reading "The prize".
I expect that far before the end of this century, all what we now call "nuclear waste" will be taken out and recycled. The actinides will be burnt in specially designed reactors and the remaining fissile material will be used and enriched, and only the small fraction of remaining undecayed isotopes will be returned to the storages.
And of course our kids will be amazed at the stupidity of their parents and grandparents, doing what they do now...
I expect that far before the end of this century, all what we now call "nuclear waste" will be taken out and recycled.
I beg to differ. Reprocessing of this kind has proven to be both unnecessary and uneconomical. Even burying spent fuel is not the most economical approach; it's cheaper to just seal the stuff in armored casks and guard them.
About the mining: a Japanese group, some years ago, came up with a polyamidoxime polymer (obtained basically by treating ordinary acrylic polymer with hydroxylamine in hot methanol). This polymer selectively adsorbs uranium from seawater. Suspended in the ocean in a natural current, it adsorbs 1% of its weight in uranium over a period of months, which is not bad when you consider the concentration of uranium in the water is around 3 ppb. It can then be washed with dilute acid to liberate the uranium and reused.
The group estimated the cost of the uranium obtained to be a few times the current spot market price. There would be no mining waste, since the uranium is already liberated in the enviroment, as are all the decay products like radium and radon. At their estimated cost, reprocessing and construction of breeder reactors could be delayed for centuries, even if the world goes over to mostly nuclear energy as its primary energy source.
Seawater uranium extraction deserves more attention than it has been receiving, since it could render some other large government energy research expenditures (like breeder reactors, advanced nuclear fuel cycles, or DT fusion) superfluous for the forseeable future. The primary cost of seawate extraction is the capital cost of the support structure for the adsorbant, so combining this with offshore wind might be a good idea (they could share structural elements).
This has only been market tested with aqueous methods which certainly arent low on capitial and labor and are sort of designed for plutonium extraction. Of course its been more expensive than it will ever be worth. I fully expect that utilizing pyroprocessing methods we'll at least do uranium and fission product extraction sometime this century, as long as we avoid the trap of trying to do MOX fuel nonsense. Now maybe the actinides can be burnt someday in a fast neutron reactor of some sort for profit or maybe they cant, but there is potential profit to be made with non-aqueous methods on the unburnt uranium, xenon, and fission platenoids.
And then we cant discount the political machines that make unnecissary and uneconomical things happen anyways.
And seawater uranium extraction doesnt deserve any attention at all because we'll have so much uranium from more conventional ores for it to ever compete.
I continue to disagree. As it stands right now, reprocessing would be uneconomical even if it were free. The plutonium has negative value, costing more to fabricate into fuel elements than it saves in enriched uranium. This will be true of any reactor with Pu in the fuel elements, since the cost driver (the intense alpha activity of the Pu) will be the same.
I consider homogenous reactor systems, like molten salt reactors, to be nonstarters for practical reasons. No reactor operator wants a reactor in which the entire primary loop is intensely radioactive. Nor do they want reactors that have to include sophisticated chemical processing equipment for online reprocessing.
And seawater uranium extraction doesnt deserve any attention at all because we'll have so much uranium from more conventional ores for it to ever compete.
If so, that would be another reason to not go with reprocessing or breeding.
Where did I talk about Pu?. As it stands, reprocessing just the uranium would be valuable, along with fission platenioids, xenon, and other marketable fission products. Dump the transuranic actinides seperately.
Its sure a seperate business model from LWRs. But the benifits of no fuel fabrication, low fissile load, and extremely small waste stream are there. And while fuel costs are a small component of the cost of nuclear power, they aren't negligable.
Given that MSRs have never been market tested, suggesting that they're a nonstarter because of a different business model is a bit premature.