Nuclear Waste

[JHAQ]

Opponents are always talking about nuclear waste disposal problems & the Nevada national disposal site is still not open . The French generate 80% of their electric power needs by nuclear energy . Does anybody know what they do with their waste ?

[Gilded]

So _that's_ why Dijon mustard glows in the dark.

 

To be honest, Dijon mustard is teh pwnz. But for the waste disposal, that's an interesting question. See http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0411.shtml for some answers, although I guess it doesn't differ too much from what other countries do with their waste.

[weknowthewor]

no idea...

[K@meleon]

Well, they treat their waste in La Hague, vitrify it, and store on site, or sometimes back at their plant sites. They are busy with pilot studies for deep geolgical burying, like in the states. But the process of finding a site, convincing the locals and then testing whether the site is really what they are looking for, is quite a long one. Don't know exactly how far they are, but I think they are up to site testing now.

[Bazza]

yes the french send it to the UK as we are the dumping ground for europe, but hey ho we will always find a use

[insane_alien]

i wonder if it would be practical to make a massive RTG out of it under ground so we can extract some energy from it.

[K@meleon]

yes the french send it to the UK as we are the dumping ground for europe, but hey ho we will always find a use

 

For as far as I know the French keep it nice and safe on home ground. And the Brits, they dump it in the sea..

[SkepticLance]

Thanks, Gilded, for the reference to the French fact sheet. Looks good.

 

I was interested in the fact that they store the waste for three years under water before further treatment. It is often stated that the most dangerous thing about nuclear waste is the long period taken to render it safe - about 10,000 years. However, the most dangerous time is the first few years. In that period, short half life isotopes are spitting out radioactivity at a high rate. Storing the waste for a time reduces the most dangerous isotopes to a much safer level.

[insane_alien]

yeah, a safER level. its still pretty dangerous stuff.

[K@meleon]

yeah, a safER level. its still pretty dangerous stuff.

 

Yeah, high level waste needs heavy shielding and sometimes even remote handling when manipulated...

And a 1000 MWe power plant produces around 30t of it a year.

[SkepticLance]

About 15 years ago, there was a news item that stated the results of an American investigation. Apparently the Soviets had been dissolving nuclear waste and pumping it down a pipeline into the Arctic Ocean. An American team (now buddies with Russia) were invited to carry out an ecological investigation to look for environmental damage in the ocean. They found none.

 

I was curious, and checked on the expected dilution rate, which was enormous. There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of sea water in the oceans, and even a small bit of ocean contains enormous quantities of water.

 

My question. Would informed people please comment. If we were to take nuclear waste, store for a few years to allow short life isotopes to decay, and then dissolve it in acid, and heavily dilute it, and pump it well out to sea, how much ecological damage would result, if any?

[swansont]

I don't know the answer, but we tried the same dilution approach with other forms of pollution and it didn't work. There is a biological half-life to consider as well as the radiological, and the effects of concentration through the food chain, as with e.g. mercury and DDT.