Increasing Energy from Nuclear Fuel by a Factor of 134

Next week in Toronto, nuclear scientists and government functionaries from around the world will gather to talk about different ways to bury nuclear waste deep underground, inaccessible to ordinary human activity.

But a retired Canadian professor of biophysics is trying to bring thinking on ordinary nuclear waste into the 21st century. Nuclear "waste" is not dangerous garbage, UT professor emeritus Peter Ottensmeyer asserts. Instead, it is a valuable source of vast and useful energy -- 134 times the amount of energy that was derived from nuclear fuel before it officially became "waste."

The U238 that makes up most of the uranium [in nuclear fuel] is not split, and not used, although the reaction does cause it to morph into heavier elements, including plutonium. The process leaves a residue of highly radioactive materials that emit harmful radiation for 400,000 years.

Keeping this waste safe is the problem that now confronts the nuclear industry.

Ottensmeyer argues that this waste fuel needn’t be treated as waste.

The heavier atoms it contains can indeed be split by the fast-moving neutrons.

But they have to be kept moving fast by using a different coolant or moderator in the reactor.

Sodium or a mixture of the heavy metals lead and bismuth work admirably, he says. The denser moderator keeps the neutrons bouncing around at high speeds, instead of slowing down, as neutrons in water-moderated reactors do.

Harnessing those fast neutrons, and using them to split the bigger, heavier products of nuclear reactors – such as the plutonium that could be used to make nuclear weapons – makes sense, he argues.

In fact, there’s potential to get 134 times more energy from what is now simply discarded as used fuel. He estimates the value of the potential electricity to be in the trillions of dollars.

Moreover, he says, some of the atoms that are split are transformed into valuable platinum group metals.

There’s also a big payoff in decreasing the radioactivity of the spent fuel, once the fast reactor has run its course. Fuel from the fast neutron reactor decays to the level of natural uranium in less than 300 years, says Ottensmeyer.

It also provides a peaceful use for the plutonium now used in nuclear weapons.

GE and Hitachi are currently developing a sodium-moderated fast neutron reactor, the Prism. They’re pitching it to the U.K. as a method of using its excess plutonium. _The Star

Many people who call themselves "environmentalists" appear to be clueless regarding the vast potential of nuclear power to provide abundant, affordable, safe, and clean energy on a large scale. Many of these so-called "environmentalists" are even attempting to shut down all forms of nuclear power altogether. Oddly enough, many of these people are also in favour of a massive implementation of big wind and big solar power -- the exorbitantly expensive intermittent unreliables -- deadly hazards to finely balanced power grids.

Whether in government or outside of government, these anti-nuclear / pro-intermittent unreliables are clearly faux environmentalists, and foes of the Earth's natural environment. Their policies will lead to massive global poverty with its concomitant subsistence-level destruction of the environment through deforestation, over-fishing, and the inevitable toxic waste that comes from the more primitive technologies of collapsing societies and civilisations.

Humans of this planet face a clear choice between abundance and poverty, clean/safe abundant power, and destructive intermittent unreliables leading to a wildly proliferating global poverty wherever the more reliable sources of energy have been cut off by faux environmental zealots.

UK Can Run Power Grid for 500 Years on Waste Plutonium Stores

Britain's huge plutonium stockpile makes it a vast energy resource. David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, recently said British plutonium contains enough energy to run the country's electricity grid for 500 years. _Breakthrough

The UK is going through a difficult, schizoid stage of energy policy planning. On the one hand, the UK government wants to prove how green it is by deploying ruinously expensive arrays of intermittent unreliable forms of energy such as big wind and big solar.

On the other hand, the government truly does want to develop at least one form of energy that actually works -- for that, it is looking at nuclear power.

While most of the world's civilian plutonium waste is still trapped inside highly radioactive spent fuel, much of that British plutonium is in the form of plutonium dioxide powder. It has been extracted from spent fuel with the intention of using it to power an earlier generation of fast reactors that were never built. This makes it much more vulnerable to theft and use in nuclear weapons than plutonium still held inside spent fuel, as most of the U.S. stockpile is.

Fast reactors can be run in different ways, either to destroy plutonium, to maximise energy production, or to produce new plutonium. Under the PRISM proposal now being considered at Sellafield, plutonium destruction would be the priority. "We could deal with the plutonium stockpile in Britain in five years," says Loewen. But equally, he says, it could generate energy, too. The proposed plant has a theoretical generating capacity of 600 megawatts.

Fast reactors could do the same for the U.S. Under the presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. launched a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership aimed at developing technologies to consume plutonium in spent fuel. But President Obama drastically cut the partnership's funding, while also halting work on the planned Yucca Mountain geological repository. "We are left with a million-year problem," says Loewen. "Right now there isn't a policy framework in the U.S. for solving this issue."

...The PRISM fast reactor is attracting friends among environmentalists formerly opposed to nuclear power. They include leading thinkers such as Stewart Brand and British columnist George Monbiot. And, despite the cold shoulder from the Obama administration, some U.S. government officials seem quietly keen to help the British experiment get under way. They have approved the export of the PRISM technology to Britain and the release of secret technical information from the old research program. And the U.S. Export-Import Bank is reportedly ready to provide financing.

Britain has not made up its mind yet, however. Having decided to try and re-use its stockpile of plutonium dioxide, its Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has embarked on a study to determine which re-use option to support. There is no firm date, but the decision, which will require government approval, should be reached within two years. Apart from a fast-breeder reactor, the main alternative is to blend the plutonium with other fuel to create a mixed-oxide fuel (mox) that will burn in conventional nuclear power plants.

...Only fast reactors can consume the plutonium. Many think that will ultimately be the UK choice. If so, the PRISM plant would take five years to license, five years to build, and could destroy probably the world's most dangerous stockpile of plutonium by the end of the 2020s. GEH has not publicly put a cost on building the plant, but it says it will foot the bill, with Proponents of fast reactors see them as the nuclear application of one of the totems of environmentalism: recycling. the British government only paying by results, as the plutonium is destroyed. The idea of fast breeders as the ultimate goal of nuclear power engineering goes back to the 1950s, when experts predicted that fast-breeders would generate all Britain's electricity by the 1970s. But the Clinton administration eventually shut down the U.S.'s research program in 1994. Britain followed soon after, shutting its Dounreay fast-breeder reactor on the north coast of Scotland in 1995. Other countries have continued with fast-breeder research programs, including France, China, Japan, India, South Korea, and Russia, which has been running a plant at Sverdlovsk for 32 years.

But now climate change, with its urgency to reduce fossil fuel use, and growing plutonium stockpiles have changed perspectives once again. The researchers' blueprints are being dusted off. The PRISM design is based on the Experimental Breeder Reactor No 2, which was switched on at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois in 1965 and ran for three decades.

Here is how conventional and fast reactors differ. Conventional nuclear reactors bombard atoms of uranium fuel with neutrons. Under this bombardment, the atoms split, creating more neutrons and energy. The neutrons head off to split more atoms, creating a chain reaction. Meanwhile, the energy heats a coolant passing through the reactor, such as water, which then generates electricity in conventional turbines.

The problem is that in this process only around 1 percent of the potential energy in the uranium fuel is turned into electricity. The rest remains locked up in the fuel, much of it in the form of plutonium, the chief by-product of the once-through cycle. The idea of fast reactors is to grab more of this energy from the spent fuel of the conventional reactor. And it can do this by repeatedly recycling the fuel through the reactor.

The second difference is that in a conventional reactor, the speed of the neutrons has to be slowed down to ensure the chain reactions occur. In a typical pressurized-water reactor, the water itself acts as this moderator. But in a fast reactor, as the name suggests, the best results for generating energy from the plutonium fuel are achieved by bombarding the neutrons much faster. This is done by substituting the water moderator with a liquid metal such as sodium. _Breakthrough

Several types of next generation nuclear reactors are undergoing R&D at this time. Some of those new reactor designs will be scalable in nature, allowing much more versatile deployment to power grids, mini-grids, and remote locations.

The main obstruction to the development of cheaper, safer, more reliable nuclear reactors, appears to be atrocious government policy-making. So far, no one has developed a cure for that hazard to humanity.

Nuclear Waste More Precious than Gold

Often mistaken for nuclear waste, the spent fuel that's left in a power reactor after the production of electricity is valuable and plentiful. But in our blindness to the enormous energy potential of uranium and plutonium in the 70,000 tons of spent fuel that the Department of Energy says is stored at nuclear power plants in the United States -- 1,500 tons in Tennessee alone -- we are missing an opportunity to recycle nuclear materials into clean energy.

While the cost to produce nuclear-generated electricity, on average, is less than power from a natural gas or coal plant, it might be even cheaper if the reactor fuel were made from a combination of uranium and plutonium. Such is the case in a number of European and Asian countries that extract nuclear materials from spent fuel and chemically reprocess them to produce a so-called mixed-oxide fuel known as "MOX." The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration says that about 30 power reactors in countries like France, Belgium and Great Britain now make use of MOX to generate electricity. _Power-Eng

We currently use less than 4% of the energy in nuclear fuel, and put the rest into storage of various types. This is extremely wasteful use of uranium, but even so nuclear fuel is cheap when compared to coal, natural gas, and oil. Imagine how much more economical nuclear power would be if we extracted 98% of the energy in the fuel, instead of wasting most of it?

After a hiatus of nearly four decades, it's now possible to foresee the day when spent-fuel processing is revived in the United States. But for the time being, MOX for use in TVA power reactors will come from another source -- surplus weapons-grade plutonium from the U.S. stockpile. A facility to blend oxides of plutonium and uranium is being built at DOE's Savannah River site in South Carolina. Once plutonium is turned into MOX, it is no longer useful in making weapons.

Construction of the MOX facility was launched after the United States and Russia signed a landmark disarmament agreement to eliminate 34 metric tons of excess plutonium on each side. Although that's a fraction of the weapons plutonium that either country has in its stockpile, the agreement provides for the elimination of additional quantities in the future.

As more nuclear weapons material is destroyed, and money from its sale is used to strengthen nuclear security, there is less risk that plutonium in Russia's stockpile might be stolen and used by rogue government or terrorist groups to make bombs. And it will help reduce the danger of nuclear proliferation, making the world a safer place.

The fact that spent fuel at U.S. nuclear plants isn't being recycled is shortsighted. If it were reprocessed into MOX, utilities could use the nuclear-generated electricity it would provide to replace aging coal plants and to meet growing demand for power. _Power-Eng

The Obama administration's pet nuclear obstructionist -- NRC chief Jaczko -- has successfully blocked almost all development of nuclear energy during Obama's tenure thus far. As a result, the US will be stuck with fossil fuels for a lot longer than would have otherwise been necessary.

Energy is the lever that multiplies the output of human personal effort to give us our unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Energy builds economies. Whatever its shortcomings, the bonanza of fossil fuels we inherited has given us our present living standards.

...I have been scrutinising alternative energy developments for nearly half a century. It is 35 years since my first letter to The Age attacked the myth that solar, wind and tidal energy are somehow ‘free’. I was involved for 20 years in managing R&D related to the resources industry. Taking ideas and innovative technologies to commercial success is tough. The financial discipline of the private investor is an essential ingredient, so I am especially wary when governments get involved in picking winners. _EnergyCollective

The above is excerpted from a piece written by resource expert Dr. Tom Biegler. Like Al Fin, Dr. Biegler is a sceptic of the intermittent unreliables such as big wind and big solar. And like most intelligent analysts of energy, he wonders how much more resources governments will waste on the futile pursuit of intermittent unreliable forms of energy.

The way forward is clear: In the short to intermediate term, we will have to enthusiastically develop the abundant stores of conventional and unconventional forms of hydrocarbon energy. In the late intermediate and long terms, we must develop advanced nuclear fission technologies capable of extracting almost all the energy contained in uranium, thorium, and bred plutonium.

As an added bonus, nuclear process heat from high temperature gas cooled reactors will economically unlock vast unconventional hydrocarbon resources which may otherwise have been too expensive to develop. This huge extra resource will aid the balance between chemical energy, electrical energy, and heat energy, and should pay dividends for tens of thousands of years.

Sometime in those tens of thousands of years, humans should be able to invent an affordable, safe, clean, workable form of nuclear fusion.

Turning Nuclear Waste Into Thousands of Years of Electrical Power

Scientists at Argonne National Labs are developing ways of utilising 95% of the energy in Uranium fuel rods -- rather than the mere 4% or so currently being extracted. They are developing new techniques of chemical separation of waste from fuel, and more efficient ways of burning the recycled fuel after being separated from the waste.

When used fuel comes out of a light-water reactor, it’s in a hard ceramic form, and almost all of it is still just uranium – about 95 percent, along with one percent other long-lived radioactive elements, called actinides. Both of these can be recycled as fuel. The remaining four percent are fission products, which are truly unusable.

Pyroprocessing begins by chopping the ceramic fuel into little pieces and converting it into metal. Then it’s submerged in a vat of molten salts, and an electric current separates out uranium and other reusable elements, which can be shaped back into fuel rods.

The truly useless fission products stay behind to be removed from the electrorefiner and cast into stable glass discs. These leftovers do have to be put into permanent storage, but they revert back to the radioactivity of naturally occurring uranium in a few hundred years – far less than the thousands of years that untreated used fuel needs to be stored. _PO

One of the reasons why so little uranium is used is that almost every commercial reactor today is a type called a light-water reactor, or LWR. While LWRs are good at many things, they aren’t designed to wring every last watt of energy out of fuel. But LWRs aren’t the only type of reactor. Another class, called fast reactors, boasts the ability to “recycle” used fuel to get much more energy out of it. The main difference between the types of reactors is what cools the core. LWRs use ordinary water. Fast reactors use a different coolant, such as sodium or lead. This coolant doesn’t slow the neutrons as much, and consequently, the reactor can fission a host of different isotopes. This means that fast reactors can get electricity out of many kinds of fuel, including all of that leftover used fuel from LWRs. (LWRs can burn recycled fuel too, with some modification, but they aren’t as good at it.) _PO

More on pyroprocessing used nuclear fuel (PDF)

Extracting 30 times more energy from the same amount of nuclear fuel will help to make the same amount of fuel go much further. While we are being more efficient at using the nuclear fuel (and nuclear wastes) that we already have, we can learn many more ways to generate energy from mass.

The limits are in our heads.

Despite Obama: A Slow Revival of US Nuclear Power?

The article excerpted below is a summary and description of a recent report from the Federation of American Scientists: The Future of Nuclear Power in the US (PDF). The FAS report is something of a "good news, bad news" joke: The good news is that a lot of safe new nuclear reactors are being designed and developed; The bad news is that the US government may not allow them to be built. Read on:

Generation III reactors were designed as improvements to those currently operating in the US, emphasizing simplification, standardization, and passive safety features. However, after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents, no Generation III plants were ever constructed. More recently, updated versions of these designs (known as Generation III+) were developed, and are in the process of being licensed. The recently approved Westinghouse AP-1000 is one such example.

The next generation of commercial reactors, Generation IV, are all still in the research and design phase, but promise significantly higher performance, safety features, and sustainability. The development of Generation IV reactors began in the US in 2000, but since then 12 additional countries joined in the research program.


There are six specific reactor concepts that fall in this category: Very High-Temperature Reactor (VHTR), Super-Critical Water-cooled Reactor (SCWR), Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR), Lead-cooled Fast Reactor (LFR), and Gas-cooled Fast Reactor (GFR). The first three are thermal reactors that operate at high temperatures, providing heat for non-electricity purposes. The second three are fast reactors that could function as breeders or nuclear waste burners.

...The VHTR is designed to operate at temperatures as high as 1000°C in order to provide the heat needed for industrial processes such as steam reforming of natural gas, coal gasification, and hydrogen production via the sulfur-iodine cycle. This would allow the reactor to serve as a source of both electricity and alternative liquid fuels. However, conventional light water reactors are limited by the boiling point of water, so instead coolants such as gases, supercritical water, or molten salt must be used to reach such high temperatures. In addition, new construction materials would be needed to withstand high-temperature operation.

The US actually built two prototype VHTRs using helium as the coolant: Peach Bottom 1, which operated from 1966 to 1974, and Fort St. Vrain, which operated from 1977 to 1992. Helium is used in most VHTR designs since it is inert, remains in the gas phase, and doesn’t become radioactive (unlike most other coolants). Research on helium-cooled VHTRs is ongoing, funded by the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy. The main challenges are sustained operation at such high temperatures.

...The NRC hasn’t yet approved any SMR designs, but multiple companies and research groups have been developing them since the 1970s. Designs using water, helium, sodium, lead, and fluoride salt coolants are all being considered, although the first commercial reactors will likely use the familiar light water reactor technology.

To give you an idea of the size, Westinghouse designed an SMR based on their larger AP1000 reactor. Compared with the AP1000’s 1100 MW electrical power output, the SMR would generate around 225 MW. All of the reactor components fit inside a containment vessel a little under 30 meters high and 10 meters in diameter. Like the AP1000, in includes passive safety systems. This design could remain cooled for seven days without any human intervention.

Many other companies are also designing SMRs. Babcock & Wilcox is working on a 160 MW, pressurized light water reactor design called mPower that might cost $600 million.

NuScale Power is developing an even smaller pressurized light-water SMR (creatively named NuScale) that would sit in in an underground water-filled pool. Each NuScale reactor module, at 45 by 9 meters, would generate 45 MW; a combined reactor building with 12 SMRs would generate a total of 540 MW. Unlike other designs that use pumps to circulate water, the NuScale reactor relies on natural convection.

...Another company, Hyperion Power Generation, is developing a 25 MW fast SMR that uses a lead-bismuth eutectic liquid-metal coolant (this falls in the Generation IV LFR class). Unlike most other reactors that use uranium dioxide as fuel, the Hyperion Power Module would use uranium nitride. This has a higher melting point and thermal conductivity than the typical fuel, which is beneficial at the higher operating temperatures of liquid-metal cooled fast reactors. With this SMR, instead of refueling every couple years, the entire 20-ton module is designed to be replaced every 7-10 years.

Low-cost SMRs may offer a solution to the cost problem, and help revitalize the industry. However, none have yet been approved by the NRC.

According to David Biello at Scientific American, only the two plants in Georgia plus another three elsewhere are likely to be constructed in at least the next decade. If there is a nuclear revival, it’s likely to be a slow one. _Arstechnica

The article above also links to a recent MIT report on the nuclear fuel cycle (PDF).

Clearly the two issues of new reactor technology and new fuel cycle technologies, are intertwined. The ideal reactor : fuel cycle duo would allow maximum extraction of energy from mineral ores (uranium and thorium) with minimal processing, minimal waste, minimal costs overall, and minimal risk of proliferation.

For the US to contribute to reaching that goal, it will be necessary to eject anti-nuclear bureaucrats and functionaries from the NRC with all due haste. Any politicians who are unwilling to take the necessary steps toward streamlining the path to a safer and more abundant future of nuclear power, should likewise be ejected with all due haste.

Australian-USA Laser Enrichment vs. Russian Centrifuges

SILEX v Existing Technologies
	SILEX	CENTRIFUGE	GAS DIFFUSION
DEVELOPED	2000’s	1940’s	1940’s
PROCESS	Laser Excitation	Mechanical (‘centrifugal force’)	Mechanical (‘brute force’)
ENRICHMENT EFFICIENCY	2 to 20(1)	1.3	1.004
COST COMPARISON	Potentially Attractive	Capital Intensive	Very expensive
% OF EXISTING MARKET(2)	0%	54%	33%
STATUS	Under Development 3rd Generation	Proven 2nd Generation	Obsolescent 1st Generation

Source: Silex Systems

Above, you can see a tabular summary of three different ways to enrich uranium isotopically. The new Silex-GE laser enrichment venture to be located in Wilmington, North Carolina, has recently passed a milestone toward receiving regulatory approval from the US government.

According to Silex, the new laser enrichment process might prove to be up to 15 times more efficient than the old centrifuge approach, which Russia favours.

Here is more on the Russian viewpoint:

The gas uranium centrifuge - despite its seeming simplicity - is extremely complex and high-tech equipment. Not everyone, even the well-known engineering companies such as Samsung, can build those. Uranium enrichment has many unapparent obstacles and non-trivial problems in the operation. Russia is a recognized leader in uranium centrifuges.

"The characteristic feature of the Russian technology is the production of high modulus and high strength carbon fiber, a critical structural material for gas centrifuges. Carbon fiber is produced at "Argon", "Plant of carbon structural materials," and "SNV." The details are developed in three design bureaus: "Centrotech - St. Petersburg," OKB "Nizhny Novgorod" and Novouralsk Science and Engineering Center.

Production of gas centrifuges in Russia is managed by Engineering Center "Russian Gas Centrifuge." Firms engaged in the uranium enrichment are part of fuel company "TVEL," that brings together all organizations in one way or another associated with the production of nuclear fuel.

...Not all countries that have nuclear power plants have their own enrichment plants. Even the U.S. does not have such plant, and all enriched uranium is imported to the U.S., including from its "sworn friend" - Russia.

Currently there are only a few players on the world market of enriched uranium. There are only two main players - Russia and the EU. But this is not a classic oligopoly. There are a number of important points. First, as such, the global market of gas centrifuges or separating plants does not exist, primarily because of the sensitivity of this sector in terms of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Accordingly, manufacturers of gas centrifuges do not enter in direct competition in the international markets.

Second, in addition to Russia, only West European consortium Urenco has advanced and cost effective gas centrifuge technology. To be exact - it is ETC company joint with the French nuclear engineering holding Areva. U.S. Enrichment Corporation - USEC - is only unfolding its project "The American Centrifuge," and it is too early to tell what the economic indicators of the Americans will be.

Third, neither Russia nor its main competitor - Urenco / ETC - aspire to replicate innovative separation plants and conduct "unaddressed" sales of gas centrifuges. Third countries are sold only outdated technology and equipment. _Pravda

It will require years of work and testing before it is known if the new Silex-GE laser enrichment approach will prove competitive. In the meantime, the various centrifuge technologies will continue to do the bulk of the enrichment work globally.

Fast Nuclear Reactor Technology Still Alive in UK

Nuclear Street
Despite rumours to the contrary, Britain has not rejected the fast reactor concept as presented by GE Hitachi (PRISM). Talks will continue for at least 6 months, according to Nuclear Decommissioning Authority officials.

Britain's large stockpile of nuclear waste includes more than 100 tonnes of plutonium and 35,000 tonnes of depleted uranium. The plutonium in particular presents a security risk as a potential target for terrorists and will cost billions to dispose of safely...The engineering firm GE Hitachi has submitted [a] ... proposal based on their Prism fast reactor, which could consume the plutonium as fuel while generating electricity.

"It's a very elegant idea that we should try and use [the waste] as efficiently as possible. I definitely find it an attractive idea", said Prof David MacKay, Decc's chief scientific adviser.

Recent news reports have suggested this proposal has been rejected by the government and Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) on the grounds of being too far from commercial viability.

However, the Guardian has confirmed that talks between GE Hitachi, Decc and the NDA are continuing. MacKay told the Guardian: "My position as chief scientific adviser at Decc is that I think Prism is an interesting design and I'd like to see [details about its credibility] worked out." A spokesperson for the NDA said: "The statement that the NDA has rejected the GE Hitachi Prism reactor is completely without foundation." He added that the current round of discussions "might last about six months". _Guardian

Current commercial nuclear reactors generate large amounts of so-called nuclear waste, which is actually extremely valuable nuclear fuel. Advanced generations of nuclear reactors will be able to burn this "waste" as an integral part of their fuel.

If the material we have seen until now as waste is instead seen as fuel, it has the potential to solve three problems at once: the UK's contribution to climate change, possible future energy shortfalls and a significant component of the massive bill - and massive headache - associated with cleaning up the current nuclear mess.

The technology with the potential to solve these problems is the fast reactor, ideally the integral fast reactor (IFR), which I wrote about in December. It exploits the fact that conventional nuclear power plants use just 0.6% of the energy contained in the uranium that fuels them. IFRs, once loaded with nuclear waste, can, in principle, keep recycling it until only a small fraction remains, producing energy as they do so.

The remaining waste is both unusable for anyone who might hope to make a weapon from it and presents much less of a long-term management problem, as its components have half-lives of tens, not millions, of years. An IFR plant could melt down only by breaking the laws of physics: if the fuel pins begin to overheat, they expand, stopping the fission reaction.

GE Hitachi has offered to build a fast reactor to consume the plutonium stockpile at Sellafield, though not yet the whole kit (the integral fast reactor). It has offered to do it within five years, and to carry the cost if it doesn't work out. This is the proposal the government is now considering. I would like to see it go further and examine the case for the full works: an integral fast reactor (incorporating a reprocessing plant) that generates much more energy from the waste pile. _G.Monbiot

Monbiot is a curious example of the growing number of leftist greens who have adopted advanced nuclear energy as a viable path forward for human civilisations. While still believing in the orthodoxy of carbon hysteria, such pro-nuclear greens have seemingly rejected the "dieoff.orgiasm" of their brother and sister greens.

As for the integral fast reactor which Monbiot mentions, it is an idea that needs to be developed and put into commercial use as soon as safely possible. A well-planned and phased move from light water reactors to integral fast reactors, molten salt thorium reactors, and gas cooled reactors -- at all scales from the MW to the GW ranges -- would provide a safe and solid energy foundation under future societies and civilisations.

Wikipedia Integral Fast Reactor

IFRs Q&A

Stop Wasting Valuable Nuclear Fuel

If reprocessing is revived in the United States, used fuel could become an important energy source. If not, it will remain in storage indefinitely as a lost opportunity._William H Miller Professor of Nuclear Science & Engineering

In spite of the doubts from skeptics, reprocessing is a game-changing technology that could turn a huge amount of used fuel left over from the production of nuclear-generated electricity into a significant energy resource. _William H Miller

Often mistaken for nuclear waste, used fuel contains large amounts of valuable plutonium and uranium that can be extracted and then chemically reprocessed into a so-called mixed-oxide, or MOX, fuel that can be used in a nuclear plant to produce more electricity. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter ended reprocessing in the United States, citing proliferation risks and hoping other countries such as France and Great Britain would do likewise. They didn’t.


They have continued to reprocess used fuel — in the case of France, using recycling as part of its nuclear program to obtain 80 percent of its electricity and to sell surplus power to neighboring countries.


Reprocessing has great potential value for the United States. Using it along with breeder reactors would recover 90 percent of the original energy that remains in the fuel after one use in a reactor. And it would extend uranium resources for hundreds of years and reduce by at least 50 percent the amount of long-lived nuclear waste that would need to be stored in a deep-geologic repository. Additionally, the heat and toxicity of such waste would be reduced, enabling the United States to store all of the long-lived waste from power reactors and the weapons program in a single repository instead of having to find sites and pay for the construction of multiple repositories. _William H Miller

Users of nuclear-generated electricity already have paid $17.9 billion into the trust fund since it was established more than 30 years ago. The fund continues to grow by $800 million annually to cover the costs of nuclear waste management. Considering the uncertain future of the Yucca Mountain project, now is the time to resurrect used-fuel reprocessing. This would simplify the challenge of nuclear waste storage and disposal. _William H Miller

Used fuel

With time, the concentration of fission fragments and heavy elements formed in the same way as plutonium in the fuel will increase to the point where it is no longer practical to continue to use the fuel. So after 18-36 months the used fuel is removed from the reactor. The amount of energy that is produced from a fuel assembly varies with the type of reactor and the policy of the reactor operator.

When removed from a reactor, the fuel will be emitting both radiation, principally from the fission fragments, and heat. Used fuel is unloaded into a storage pond immediately adjacent to the reactor to allow the radiation levels to decrease. In the ponds the water shields the radiation and absorbs the heat, which is removed by circulating the water to external heat exchangers. Used fuel is held in such pools for several months to several years. It may be transferred to naturally-ventilated dry storage on site after about five years.

Depending on policies in particular countries, some used fuel may be transferred to central storage facilities. Ultimately, used fuel must either be reprocessed or prepared for permanent disposal.

Reprocessing

Used fuel is about 94% U-238 but it also contains almost 1% U-235 that has not fissioned, almost 1% plutonium and 4% fission products, which are highly radioactive, with other transuranic elements formed in the reactor. In a reprocessing facility the used fuel is separated into its three components: uranium, plutonium and waste, which contains fission products. Reprocessing enables recycling of the uranium and plutonium into fresh fuel, and produces a significantly reduced amount of waste (compared with treating all used fuel as waste). See page on Processing of Used Nuclear Fuel.

According to Areva, about eight fuel assemblies reprocessed can yield one MOX fuel assembly, two-thirds of an enriched uranium fuel assembly, and about three tonnes of depleted uranium (enrichment tails) plus about 150 kg of wastes. It avoids the need to purchase about 12 tonnes of natural uranium from a mine.

Uranium and plutonium recycling

The uranium from reprocessing, which typically contains a slightly higher concentration of U-235 than occurs in nature, can be reused as fuel after conversion and enrichment.

The plutonium can be directly made into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, in which uranium and plutonium oxides are combined. In reactors that use MOX fuel, plutonium substitutes for the U-235 in normal uranium oxide fuel (see page on Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel). _World-Nuclear

A spent fuel (recycling fuel) that was once used at a nuclear power station contains 94% of unburnt uranium (about 1% of uranium 235 and about 93% of uranium 238), and about 1% of plutonium produced by uranium 238 that absorbed neutrons. They can be used again as fuels, if they are reprocessed. In Japan as a country poor in natural resources, the “nuclear fuel cycle” that reprocesses spent fuels, recover uranium and plutonium, and repeatedly use them for power generation is the basis of nuclear energy policy.

MOX Fuel Utilization (Pluthermal Plan)

Using the fuels that are made by mixing the plutonium extracted from reprocessed spent fuels with uranium in a light-water reactor (MOX fuel) is called “pluthermal process.” Pluthermal process already has a long track record of about 40 years, and continues to be practically used in France, Germany and Switzerland, etc. Japan's electric power companies are scheduled to introduce and start pluthermal process in 16 to 18 nuclear reactors by FY2010. Tohoku EPCo plans to start pluthermal process at one unit of Onagawa Nuclear Power Station by FY2010. To realize pluthermal process, Tohoku EPCo is intended to promote the activities to win the understanding of people, taking various opportunities for this purpose. _Tohoku Epco

Nuclear power requires a complex high technological infrastructure, utilising the highest standards of safety and quality control. In a society where the average IQ is 100, efficient nuclear power with fuel recycling can be safely utilised as long as the proper training and supervision is in place.

In a society with an average IQ of 85 -- such as most of the third world -- or in societies with average IQs under 80 -- such as most of Sub Saharan Africa -- nuclear power should probably not be used, due to the inability of such societies to field sufficient numbers of qualified scientists, engineers, and technicians. One exception to that rule of thumb would be oil-rich or mineral rich nations, which were willing and able to pay for outside ongoing technical assistance. But such a commitment would need to be open-ended for the indefinite future, or at least until decommissioning of the plant and auxiliary facilities.