The Lonely Goatherd Blog And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats - Matthew 25:32
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October 15, 2008
Nuclear Energy Facts Just a quick note to recommend special attention to a National Reviewarticle about nuclear energy. It is written by a man named William Tucker, who is the author of the book Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey. It's a fairly lengthy article, and explains pretty much about the issues involved to some degree of technical specificity - but written simply enough that an intelligent layman can reasonably understand it.
Some of the basic points are well known, for example that nuclear energy produces no greenhouse gases. But he's also really good even there in putting numbers to the environmental issues - not just CO2.
But the part that was more newly informative to me was the last third of the essay, explaining about issues of nuclear waste and disposal. Here's the nut of that:
Now how about that matter of nuclear waste? Once again it pays to know what you're talking about. Basically, there is no such thing as "nuclear waste." It's not like you're burning coal - where you end up with gargantuan amounts of something you can't use, like carbon dioxide. Nearly all the material in a spent fuel rod is recyclable or easily handled. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is U-238 - the same natural uranium that comes out of the ground. We could just put it back where it came from. The other 5 percent is fissionable U-235 (1 percent), various "fission products" from the breakdown of U-235 (2 percent), plus a group called the "minor actinides" which are formed when U-238 is transmuted into heavier, man-made elements (2 percent). Among the minor actinides is plutonium (1 percent), one of whose isotopes can be used for making bombs.
So why are we do we need Yucca Mountain, a huge repository designed to "bury" 77,000 tons of "nuclear waste," when 95 percent of the material is non-fissioning natural uranium? We're doing it because in 1976, President Jimmy Carter - a President many people feel Barack Obama may eventually resemble - got cold feet and outlawed the reprocessing of spent fuel. Instead of treating it in an environmentally efficient way and recycling, we ended up with huge, mixed-up gobs of material that we can't think of anything to do with except "throw it away."
Almost everything in a spent fuel rod can be recycled. The U-235 can be used again for fuel. So can the plutonium. Among the fission products and minor actinides there are lots of useful isotopes used in medicine and industrial procedures. Forty percent of all medical procedures now involve some radioactive isotope and nuclear medicine is a $250-billion industry. Unfortunately, we must now import all our medical isotopes from Canada because ours are all being treated as "nuclear waste."
The French have complete recycling. (I know you talk about France's nuclear power a lot but I doubt you know this.) They take plutonium from spent fuel, mix it with uranium depleted by enrichment, and call it "mixed oxide fuel." It's sold all over Europe and Japan. They're also importing bomb-grade uranium from old Russian nuclear weapons, mixing it with the tailings from uranium mines (another "waste product") and shipping it to the United States of America as reactor fuel. It's a treaty engineered by your old colleagues Senators Pete Domenici and Sam Nunn in the 1990s. One out of every ten light bulbs in America is now being lit by a former Soviet weapon! It's the greatest swords-into-plowshares effort in history - although very few people know about it. Things nuclear, of course, are not the subject of polite conversation.
So what's left when all this reprocessing is done? Essentially nothing. All of France's nuclear waste from 25 years of producing 75 percent of its electricity is stored beneath the floor of one room at Le Hague. The lifetime output for each French citizen would fit in a soda can. That's what the incredible energy density of nuclear power can do for the environment.
