Tuesday, April 16, 2013

All US Reactors Flawed





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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