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 ...
There really is only one logical solution.
Take a cattle prod to the space vehicle design teams and build an economical means of lifting tons of radioactive material into space and into the sun.
Be it anti-grav, beam it up Scotty, space elevator or giant guns there needs to be a way to get this stuff off planet.
Good point. The larger the nucleus, the hotter you have to make it in order to fuse with other nuclei. The Sun causes significant amounts of fusion among only the first few elements; Hydrogen, Helium, and maybe one or two more.
The heavier elements are produced only when stars explode, there’s a Big Bang, or we make a nuclear explosion. I have read that a nuclear fission bomb creates temperatures that create transuranics—elements heavier than Uranium—all of which are highly radioactive, so they have very short decay times. (Because of those short decay times, no transuranics are found naturally on Earth).
Could we send it into outer space towards the sun and let it encompass it? Would the sun ultimately consume it? Would this be too costly or are there other constraints? Or could we simply send it out into the oblivion of outer space?
I look forward to their upcoming article, “Can we dispose of nuclear waste by grinding it to dust and dropping it out of the back of trucks in residential neighborhoods at night?”
Once we get reliable space craft to put things in orbit at a reasonable cost, they could carry barrels of radioactive materials up and put them in boxcars (used rocket bodies or prefabricated boxcars) which would be linked together like a train.
This is a very old concept but a viable one.
Then all it would take would be one rocket to pull them towards the sun. The sun’s gravity would do the rest and the radioactive material would be consumed.
Next goal: strip wet from water.
Ya know, the whole nuclear waste thing becomes a LOT easier if ya just get over the "weapon" hysteria and just use the stuff in appropriate reactors for making energy.
Costs too much. Subduction zone disposal is the best choice. Encase'em in torpedo-shaped pieces of concrete, and drop'em over the side.
Yeah, but any radioactivity will have long since decayed away by the time that can happen.
And the only reason for that is that the spent fuel has an incredible amount of energy left in it.
The way we operate our nuclear reactors is like throwing a big fat log on a campfire, warming our hands over it until the bark gets a little charred, and then taking it off and throwing it away.
We use only about 2% of the energy available in nuclear fuel, and yet people are talking about throwing it into the sun?? What a waste!!
If you strip out the actual waste products from the spent fuel - instead of treating spent fuel as if it were all waste - the remaining actual waste only has a half-life of a few decades to a few hundred years.
If you use the right technology, nuclear reactors will CREATE MORE FUEL THAN THEY BURN, in some special cases nearly twice as much. In fact in a normal nuclear reactor, over a third of the energy produced comes from fuel that was newly-created inside the core.
In the uranium atom, we have been given the means to supply every last one of billions of humans on this planet, and any other planets, all the energy they need until the sun burns out, if only we are wise enough to use it.
Nope, 'fraid not. Dental x-ray machines use x-ray tubes to generate x-rays. No radioisotopes involved, nor any radioactivity generated. The culprits were pipeline weld inspection sources, which use gamma rays (not x-rays), and contain cobalt-60 or cesium-137 radioisotopes. As I recall, they had been stolen and sold as "scrap metal" in Mexico.
Encase it in glass, steel etc. and sink it in the deepest part of ocean or blast it into space to eventualy go into the sun, make a good job for private space concerns.
Why not wait 100 years or so. By then space technology will have advanced to the point where we can safely ship it into the sun.
The sun won’t care.
Huge camel spiders and Bedouins looking for something to sell at the bazaar
What if the Jovians decided to dump it back on us?
Because after 100 years, technology will have advanced to the point where we can safely and cheaply extract the thousands of tons of still-usable fuel from it to generate quadrillions more kilowatt-hours of electricity, and the leftovers will only be dangerous for a few hundred more years, and so shipping it to the sun would be a waste.
Did you know that there's more potential nuclear energy in coal ASH than was produced by burning the coal?
Why waste it on Jupiter? We can ship it to the Sun. It would take less energy once the gravitational pull takes over.
That worked for PCBs in New Jersey.
For a while at least.
The problem there is lifting it into space. Imagine a disaster like Challenger. I don’t know that they would have the technology down to a point where the risk is under 1% anytime soon. Especially with the clown cutting NASA’s budget.
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