Posted on 02/20/2010 11:09:33 PM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
Dumping all our nuclear waste in a volcano does seem like a neat solution for destroying the roughly 29,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods stockpiled around the world. But there’s a critical standard that a volcano would have to meet to properly dispose of the stuff, explains Charlotte Rowe, a volcano geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And that standard is heat. The lava would have to not only melt the fuel rods but also strip the uranium of its radioactivity. “Unfortunately,” Rowe says, “volcanoes just aren’t very hot.”
Lava in the hottest volcanoes tops out at around 2,400F. (These tend to be shield volcanoes, so named for their relatively flat, broad profile. The Hawaiian Islands continue to be formed by this type of volcano.) It takes temperatures that are tens of thousands of degrees hotter than that to split uranium’s atomic nuclei and alter its radioactivity to make it inert, Rowe says. What you need is a thermonuclear reaction, like an atomic bomb—not a great way to dispose of nuclear waste.
Volcanoes aren’t hot enough to melt the zirconium (melting point that encases the fuel, let alone the fuel itself: The melting point of uranium oxide, the fuel used at most nuclear power plants, is ;. The liquid lava in a shield volcano pushes upward, so the rods probably wouldn’t even sink very deep, Rowe says. They wouldn’t sink at all in a stratovolcano, the most explosive type, exemplified by Washington’s Mount St. Helens. Instead, the waste would just sit on top of the volcano’s hard lava dome—at least until the pressure from upsurging magma became so great that the dome cracked and the volcano erupted. And that’s the real problem.
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
Need to factor the amount of time that it would take to come out - it is in the magnitude of millions of years - not a worry then.
OOPS! Sorry, good buddy.
Yes; I mentioned that in my posts #37 & #49.
Hehehehe. no problem.
Why can’t we put it on a rocket and aim it toward the sun?
Too heavy.
I know. I just wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. I believe it was almost three in the morning here. I also was under the mistaken assumption that Satin Doll’s idea was that the nuke material would be subducted. And that that was how it would be buried or otherwise made safe.
BTW: I didn’t know Godzilla was a FReeper! How on Earth do you manage to type the little keys without smashing the whole damn keyboard?
:)
We can, but we shouldn't, because that'd be like putting barrels of crude oil on a rocket and aiming it toward the sun.
Coal ash has enough nuclear fuel in it to potentially produce more heat than the coal that was burned to generate the ash, due to naturally-occurring traces of uranium and thorium in the coal. So just imagine how much potential heat remains in spent nuclear fuel which has had only about 3% of its potential energy extracted.
Spent nuclear fuel is a natural resource, so why rocket it into the Sun where it'll be rendered absolutely useless?
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