A Promising Process For Nuclear Fuel Re-use and Disposal? (autonocion.com)
- Reference: 0184695630
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/07/26/0456203/a-promising-process-for-nuclear-fuel-re-use-and-disposal
- Source link: https://www.autonocion.com/us/canadian-lab-nuclear-fuel/
> The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, sit them in a pool of water for seven to ten years while the heat and radiation come down, seal them in concrete casks, and look for somewhere deep and geologically dull to leave them for the next hundred thousand years. Canada has been hunting for that burial site since the 1980s and still doesn't have one in the ground.
>
> A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all. [2]Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls [3]WATSS can strip 90% of the long-lived material out of used Canada Deuterium Uranium [CANDU] fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn't a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, [4]World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90% figure.
>
> None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem.
"The chemistry has a lab result behind it. The reactor does not exist..." the article points out. "Moltex is aiming to have its first WATSS and SSR-W units running at Point Lepreau by the early-to-mid 2030s... Not everyone buys the pitch. Critics have argued the reprocessing creates its own stream of byproducts, that the economics are unproven, and that a single site's stockpile is finite."
But Moltex "isn't alone in trying to burn nuclear waste instead of bury it," the article notes, with Switzerland and Denmark "chasing the same goal a different way."
> [5]Switzerland's Transmutex drives a subcritical reactor with a particle accelerator, feeding it spent fuel alongside thorium... Denmark's Copenhagen Atomics is building a [6]thorium molten-salt reactor that fits inside a shipping container and runs on the leftovers from conventional plants.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader [7]kwelch007 for sharing the article.
[1] https://www.autonocion.com/us/canadian-lab-nuclear-fuel/
[2] https://www.moltexenergy.com/
[3] https://www.moltexenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/watss-brochure.pdf
[4] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/pivotal-moment-for-moltex-recycling-process
[5] https://www.autonocion.com/us/swiss-reactor-burn-nuclear-waste/
[6] https://www.autonocion.com/us/danish-thorium-reactor/
[7] https://www.slashdot.org/~kwelch007
Re: (Score:2)
This isn't US specific. South Korea and France have had a lot of successful use of nuclear power. And if you look at different types of power and the negative externalities they produce, nuclear power is very low. See [1]https://janrosenow.substack.com/p/the-bill-we-never-see [substack.com] for a good run down of the different power types and their actual costs.
[1] https://janrosenow.substack.com/p/the-bill-we-never-see
For those unfamiliar.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Moltex has been pitching this concept for some time now. They moved from the UK to NB because the province was trying to figure out what to do with their CANDU replacement and put up some money for alternatives willing to move to the province. Moltex, and two others, obliged.
Moltex claims that a WATSS + SSR reactor can produce electricity for about 14.5 cents/Wh. That is twice the current going rate, let alone the rate from the paid-off CANDU6. However, they also claim that by burning the waste from other plants that the cost would come down into the 8.5 range, which is competitive with CANDU's like Pickering.
However, all of this depends on the capital cost of the WATSS being around 850 million. There is absolutely no way that will happen. Everything takes place in hot cells, the plant structure itself has to be safed, the resulting fuel has to be moved to the SSR for round-trip processing, and you HAVE to include general cost overruns one has to bake into any nuclear plant, let alone first-of-type.
20 years ago everyone was pitching their energy ideas by claiming the result would be cheaper than coal, but these days most things are cheaper than coal so when you see someone making that claim you know they're full of BS. So when I see Moltex claiming "cheaper than PUREX" I don't see "economically viable" I read it as "less unviable" and that's not inspiring. It's simply not a useful comparison in an era where 20-year PPA's on solar are 2 cents and 4 cents with 4-hour firming.
One can twist the claims a little to be more about the timelines of the waste than the electricity cost itself, but no matter the protestations one reads around these parts of the 'net, people don't *really* care about waste. It's been sitting around in casks and pools for decades and no one's doing anything, and no one's really asking them to. So while we might all think this is a great idea, finding the money for it, and the political capital, seems like the difficult part. Ultimately the pitch comes down to that, we burn your waste, and I'm not convinced this is a big enough issue for the ratepayers of NB to consider doubling the cost of their wholesale power.
Re: (Score:2)
Everything about nuclear energy is expensive. This is the first time that an actual solution to disposing of nuclear waste, has been achieved. The cost may be high, but the importance is also high. So in the cost/benefit equation, it still makes sense.
Re: (Score:2)
> Everything about nuclear energy is expensive.
Only if the cost of oil wars are presumed to be zero and light water reactors are the only data point.
Solar probably still has the advantage for electrical usage in suitable climates.
Also, the Globalists seem to be destroying the hydrocarbon system across the planet right now. Some day the CoVID depopulation plan failed. A billion might die in Africa from lack of fuel and fertilizer in the coming years.
Re: (Score:2)
> Only if the cost of oil wars are presumed to be zero
As opposed to the cost of wars about nuclear technology?
> Some day the CoVID depopulation plan failed
Now you are *really* off the deep end. You probably think the earth is flat too, the space race was just a conspiracy, right? And powerful people drink the blood of children? Conspiracies are real, but vague conspiracy theories that don't name names and identify conspiratorial acts, are just that, fairy-tale conspiracy theories.
There are a couple of countries (Score:2)
That still need nukes. Basically Japan comes to mind because they just don't have the land to build out the massive wind and solar farms that the United States can.
What I would be looking for is a businessman proof reactor. Basically a reactor that no matter how many corners a businessman cuts you don't get another Fukushima. This seems to be one step in that direction if it works which would be fine for The limited use cases nuclear still works in.
The problem with nuclear is that wind and solar mak
Probably not (Score:1)
This has been tried many, many, many times. It has never worked out. It is not the fundamental process that is the problem, it is the details that make the process dangerous, expensive and unreliable. The primary reason the industry settled for direct long-term storage eventually is that long history of failure.
But I guess the nuclear fanatics will be as ignorant about the history and technological realities of their fetish as ever.
Re: (Score:2)
You are the fanatic who is not aware of technological realities. You are correct that recycling nuclear waste is not new and has been tried many times in the labratory. Everything else you wrote is wrong.
The main reason it never was used is that this technique can be used to create nuclear bombs.
Basically, what they are doing is concentrating radioactive materials. Which happens to be the hardest part of making a nuclear bomb.
For this reason, the USA vetoed using this method. A few other countries tried
Re: (Score:1)
Take a look at the above posting for a nice extreme example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Somebody with no clue at all confidentially stating complete lies.
Re: (Score:2)
> the Dunning-Kruger effect. Somebody with no clue at all confidentially stating complete lies.
Ain't it funny how many people confidently cite Dunning-Kruger, clearly having never read the paper, and with no clue what they were actually saying?
Re: (Score:2)
Nuclear "fanatics" remember how cold winter was 15-K BP and are damned if they will tolerate that suffering again. Likewise the remaining "reptile brain" remembers those blazing-hot eons when even being a lizard required gallons of sun-screen ... AC is not just nice but a scream of human vengeance against Gaia and her minions. Which is a poetic way of saying prudent humans want control over their environment, and that boils down to generating lots of bullet-proof energy. The only know bullet-proof sol
Lab results (Score:2)
> Critics have argued the reprocessing creates its own stream of byproducts
"We finished the demonstration sucessfully. Now just a sec while we rinse these test tubes out."
Just great. Now scale that up 10^5 times.
Long life (Score:1)
Something with a half life of 100000 years, you can probably hold safely in your hand.
No sorry NIMBY never ever nuclear is crap (Score:1, Interesting)
And of course it does it's always that they underestimated just how fucking crazy and senile Trump is. They also underestimated how much Putin is willing to murder and hurt and kill his own population for his stupid boyhood dreams of imperial America. Because of that they got caught flat footed. They could turn to nuclear but they don't trust their private sector to do it safely after Fukushima and they don't trust their voters to keep it in the hands of the government. All that is a political problem not a
Re: (Score:2)
> Nuclear disasters are huge. Fukushima was evacuated for a decade. Everyone involved lose their homes. The psychopath CEOs r
Who modded up this incoherent conspiracy nonsense? Fukushima Prefecture has 1.7m people. Fukushima city was never evacuated.
Several towns were, but that was a big mistake causing unnecessary harm to people.
Perhaps AC is confusing it with Chernobyl ?
Re: (Score:2)
If it is only that material (due to stochastic decay you always have all decay products), that would be about 0.08 mrem when holding it for 5 minutes. The annual limit you should be exposed to is 100 mrem. So one might say you can hold it for some time, but don't make it a habit.
Re: (Score:1)
100 mrem/yr is highly conservative. But yes, don't sleep on that stuff if you can help it.
Re: (Score:2)
Not very conservative. But you get an average of 0.3 rem per year or so from natural sources anyways. So the reasoning is that the 0.1 rem in addition should only increase your cancer risk by 33% or so. Of course that is for full-body exposure and some radiation is far, far worse than the natural background radiation.
Now your base cancer risk is about 25% per lifetime. Do you really want it to get significantly higher?
Re: Long life (Score:2)
Except that's not how it works at all, because a) risk doesn't scale linearly with exposure, b) there's a huge difference between external and internal exposure, and c) you seem to be assuming that all cancer/cancer is can be traced to radiation exposure, which is nowhere close to the truth. In fact, it's a tiny fraction, far behind things like chemical exposure and plain old random genetic mis-transcription.
Heck, even in the hardest hit areas in Japan from the Fukushima disaster, the WHO estimates only
Re: Long life (Score:2)
If that's using the linear no threshold model of radiation exposure, that's been debunked.
Re: (Score:2)
> But yes, don't sleep on that stuff if you can help it.
You will be thinking of the Kramatorsk radiological accident. That was Cs137, a 30 year half-life and a gamma emitter. Scary stuff.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accident
Re: (Score:2)
Also remember that those 0.1 Rem are for full body exposure. Concentrated exposure comes with much lower limits and much higher cancer risks. Cancer in your hand is probably not fun.
Re: (Score:2)
The summary doesn't say that the half-life is 100,000 years, but that the material is dangerous for 100,000 years.
Re: (Score:3)
Don't conflate "forces a burial site to last 100,000 years" with the half-life.
I'd assume the majority of the elements' half-lives are much shorter than 100,000 years, so that they will have dropped in population enough after 100,000 years for the waste to be considered 'safe'.
[1]Wikipedia: Radioactive waste [wikipedia.org] gives a run down of the isotopes of concern and their half-lives.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, you probably can. Just do not breath even a microgram of it or you are toast. For comparison, holding Asbestos in your hand is absolutely no problem whatsoever. Not everything that is an absolute killer is also a contact-poison.
Hence I vote this "most insightless comment of the whole discussion".