Yes we have a problem. The good news is that energy technology is on
the road to make all reactors obsolete everywhere even if we are
still building them. This means that in time they will come out of
the system. Unfortunately that will be a long time.
The flaw is that we simply opted for too large systems that we have been unable to properly shut down and dismantle when hit with an accident or even decommissioned.
I think that the best available solution is to produce small thorium
based liquid salt reactors and deploy as many as the market can
absorb even as heat engines.
The reason for this is that we can blend in uranium based isotopes in
order to have that legacy fuel consumed. Successive enrichment can
then keep recycling spent fuel.
In this manner we can slowly consume all uranium based material
produced over the past decades.
We will have better ways to produce energy but no other way to dispose of the fuel itself.
Irradiated material needs to be then ground up into a powder or
melted. In powder form it can then be blended into small blocks of
concrete. In this form it is no trick to store them in a coal seam.
The metal may go the same way. There are naturally dry coal seams
out there that will allow geological time to neutralize any remaining
problem.
Nuclear power has turned out to be a terribly bad idea and worse is
that it has shown us multiple tails that we have not been able to
control or neutralize. It is now on the way out in terms of using
uranium and the Thorium protocol will need to operate for centuries.
The good news is that while it is operating it can consume everything
including plutonium.
Ex-Regulator Says
Reactors Are Flawed
By MATTHEW L.
WALD
Published: April 8,
2013
WASHINGTON — All 104
nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a
safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with
newer technology, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission said on Monday. Shutting them all down at once is not
practical, he said, but he supports phasing them out rather than
trying to extend their lives.
The position of the
former chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, is not unusual in that various
anti-nuclear groups take the same stance. But it is highly unusual
for a former head of the nuclear commission to so bluntly criticize
an industry whose safety he was previously in charge of ensuring.
Asked why he did not
make these points when he was chairman, Dr. Jaczko said in an
interview after his remarks, “I didn’t really come to it until
recently.”
“I was just thinking
about the issues more, and watching as the industry and the
regulators and the whole nuclear safety community continues to try to
figure out how to address these very, very difficult problems,”
which were made more evident by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear
accident in Japan, he said. “Continuing to put Band-Aid on
Band-Aid is not going to fix the problem.”
Dr. Jaczko made his
remarks at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in
Washington in a session about the Fukushima accident. Dr. Jaczko said
that many American reactors that had received permission from the
nuclear commission to operate for 20 years beyond their initial
40-year licenses probably would not last that long. He also rejected
as unfeasible changes proposed by the commission that would allow
reactor owners to apply for a second 20-year extension, meaning that
some reactors would run for a total of 80 years.
Dr. Jaczko cited a
well-known characteristic of nuclear reactor fuel to continue to
generate copious amounts of heat after a chain reaction is shut down.
That “decay heat” is what led to the Fukushima meltdowns. The
solution, he said, was probably smaller reactors in which the heat
could not push the temperature to the fuel’s melting point.
The nuclear industry
disagreed with Dr. Jaczko’s assessment. “U.S. nuclear energy
facilities are operating safely,” said Marvin S. Fertel, the
president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the
industry’s trade association. “That was the case prior to Greg
Jaczko’s tenure as Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman. It was
the case during his tenure as N.R.C. chairman, as acknowledged by the
N.R.C.’s special Fukushima response task force and evidenced by a
multitude of safety and performance indicators. It is still the case
today.”
Dr. Jaczko resigned as
chairman last summer after months of conflict with his four
colleagues on the commission. He often voted in the minority on
various safety questions, advocated more vigorous safety
improvements, and was regarded with deep suspicion by the nuclear
industry. A former aide to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of
Nevada, he was appointed at Mr. Reid’s instigation and was
instrumental in slowing progress on a proposed nuclear waste dump at
Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles from Las Vegas.
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