10nfl1-Nukes-Cover
NEW TECHNOLOGY ALLOWS NUCLEAR WASTE TO BE REUSED IN
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| NEW TECHNOLOGY ALLOWS NUCLEAR WASTE TO BE REUSED IN NUCLEAR ENERGY PLANTS THAT WOULD DRASTICALLY REDUCE THE RADIOACTIVE LIFETIME OF THE MATERIALS. Richard Harris April 9, 2010 (award winning NPR journalist, Nuclear Waste MayGet A Second Life, National Public Radios Science Desk, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2100631) The idea is to send this material back into a reactor. There it will generate more energy. And in the process, the long-lived radioactive materials will breakdown into elements with much shorter lifetimes. The resulting experimental fuel pellets look like bullets. "These are the first pellets that have been produced from commercial nuclear fuel" Greene says, "in which we did not produce any pure separated plutonium in the process" Greene says if waste weren't such a hot-button issue, nuclear power would actually look pretty attractive. One person's lifetime nuclear waste would fit in a Coke can — which is tiny, compared with the many tons of carbon dioxide the average American dumps into the atmosphere each and every year. And even on a national scale, Greene says it's not as much as you might think. "If I put in one place all of the spent fuel generated by all of the commercial power plants in the United States throughout history" he says, all of that spent fuel could befit into a pool of water 25 feet deep and 300 feet on aside" The size of a football field. Right now, that pool would need to remain reliable fora million years — which is one reason even putting it in Yucca Mountain seemed like less than a sure thing. Reprocessing the waste wouldn't reduce its volume — but it would dramatically reduce its radioactive lifetime. And that could make waste storage a much easier problem to solve. |