This is what 44 years of spent nuclear fuel looks like, remember 96% of that is still fuel when reprocessed each gram of that reprocessed spent fuel is 83.6 gigajoules worth of energy. One gigajoules is 277.78 kilowatt hours. That’s per GRAM.
The coal ash pile to generate 45 years worth of equivalent energy stacked in the same surface area as those casks would be 14,000+ feet high yeah read that again and get it through your coal brain coal is never the answer once humans split the atom nothing else matters except geothermal energy,and storage, solar in the deserts and wind in the high and low Hadley wind cells that’s it those are all thousands and millions of exajoules worth of energy forever they can never run out based on physics.
https://x.com/GovNuclear/status/2000644567591243934
Spent fuel is a political problem not a technical one. Besides even without reprocessing your lifetime electricity per CAPITA including all industrial use in the USA not per person would fit in a coke can. Using fast reactors its 6% of a coke cans volume.
That 6% is fission products with fast reactors and they only need 300 years of storage to fall back to natural uranium levels of activity at which they could be put back in the uranium mine hole.
Better would be to drill into shale in say the 200+ million year old Permian its impervious to liquids and been geologically stable for at least 200 million years. Drill a 20,000 foot lateral now common in that basin. Heel down toe up at a 3 degree rise. Drill it with a triple string 8” final inside casing. Pack it toe to 100 feet before the heel with stainless steel waste canisters filled with borosilicate glass that’s 13% by mass of fission products and then cement the whole string in. Walk away problem solved forever. You could use the same design to foolishly put while spent fuel rods down bore but you are wasting trillions of megawatts worth of energy in the uranium and actinides which are 96 of spent FUEL its not nuclear waste its still FUEL and 99% of the original fuel energy is still in it by mass.
https://whatisnuclear.com/calcs/how-much-nuclear-waste-per-capita.html
[Volumetrically, the uranium oxide waste has a density around 10g/cm^3
, thus, if you got 100% of your electricity from nuclear power, then:
For a lifetime, the average life expectancy at birth is 76.4 years according to the CDC, so if you got 100% of your electricity from traditional nuclear power plants for your entire life, you’d be responsible for 2.6 kg (5.7 lbs) of waste.
You’d make 0.11 fl. oz of nuclear waste per year
You’d make 8.7 fl. oz of nuclear waste per lifetime (less than a 12 floz soda can)
These calculations assume you’re using traditional reactors without recycling the nuclear waste. However, if and when nuclear power makes that much electricity, we plan to shift to breeder reactors that get much more energy out of each kg of fuel. If we used breeder reactors and full recycling, the average burnup would approach 800 GWd/tonne, and the thermal efficiency will approach 39%. The waste density would be lower, since more of it would be converted to fission products.
Then, the conclusions are even wilder. If you got 100% of your electricity from nuclear breeder reactors:
You’d make 0.011 fl. oz of nuclear waste per year
You’d make 0.83 fl. oz of nuclear waste per lifetime (6% of a 12 floz soda can)]
Storing it is not hard , dry cask storage is good for 100 years in the same cask plenty of time for the waste to cool for final geological entombment...which burying while spent fuel should be a crime against humanity for the energy lost alone.
You can put fuel rods down a triple string well bore into any geologically stable impervious strata and just leave it there. Permian salts and shales are 250+ million years old and stable for at least that timeframe. You need 1 millon more years for spent fuel to decay to natural uranium levels. That is a blip in geological time. I have my students do the freshman geology 1301 paper tape exercise even at the graduate level to remind them of how short human time is. Once millimeter is one million years of time. The whole strip is 4.5 meters long or 14.76 freedom units. All of human history is invisible in the last 15 microns or 15 millionth of a meter a human hair is 17 microns at its thinnest for comparison our entire species existence at this scale is only .25 mm or 250 microns. Spent FUEL only needs 1mm of storage time the Permian has been stable for 250mm or 250 times as long Central Texas Granite has been stable for 1.7 billion years again you only need 300 for fission products or 1 millon for whole rods.
Spent fuel is a political problem noting more.
https://x.com/Dr_Keefer/status/1391937720503652356
[This is all of the waste produced by Vermont Yankee NPP in its 28 years during which it produced 110 million MWh. A similar coal plant would’ve made 110 million tons of CO2 and 6 million tons of toxic ash which If confined to this pad would be 7000ft high]
seven thousand feet ash pile vs a few dozen concrete casks that are good for 100 years and hold 96% of their fuel energy value by mass. Again its a crime against humanity to just bury this fuel.
No no and NO do not dilute this precious resource down. You keep it nearly pure Pu 239 and mix it with depleted uranium metals both inside stainless steel fuel pins at a 13-20% Pu to U ratio. Then put those pins into a integrated fast reactor you know the type that ran until 1997 until the traitor Clinton shut it down.
That reactors was successful in all its program objectives. It proved without doubt sodium cooled fast pool reactors are melt down proof.
First they pulled all the control rods out and waited for it to overheat and run away it did no such thing it heated up slightly and the negative Doppler coefficient of metalic fuels kicked in and shut it down as the physics predicted it should.
Then while running it at 100% power they suddenly shut off the cooling pumps and waited for it to overheat and meltdown...nope again the temp rose abd Doppler kicked in stopping the reactors chain reaction the large mass of sodium in the pool served as thermal inertia so the temp rose but it also was being radiated from the tank to the guard vessel wall which was air cooled on its outside wall...this air cooling is enough all by itself to keep the sodium from reaching temps where it could boil which is still less than half the temp to melt stainless steel fuel rods inside that liquid sodium.
This was the first walk away safe reactor to be put to the actual test of lets try to melt it down.
They then did the absolute insanity for a PWR or BWR reactor they ran up to full power then pulled the rods AND cut the cooling pumps this is way beyond worst case its deliberate madness... The IFR just shut itself down via the immutable laws of physics and then thermodynamics carried away the decay heat. Simple elegant and genius.
The IFR also proved out pyroprocessing onsite spent fuel never left the plant it was pyroprocessed into new fuel by removing fission products and adding depleted uranium to the fuel and back to be burnt again. Only fission products in glass form left the plant it forever proved this process.
^^^^^^^ THIS IS THE WAY