License for nuke storage site OK'd

[jpak]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/dossier/nuke/

WASHINGTON -- Utah lost an important battle today in its effort to keep a temporary nuclear waste dump out of its borders, and that could be a blow to Nevada's fight against Yucca Mountain.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted 3-1 to authorize a license to Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of nuclear power plant utilities, for a temporary high-level waste storage site planned on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian reservation, 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

The proposed above-ground site would store up to 4,000 steel storage containers, each of which could hold up to 10 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods.

The commission's decision concluded an eight-year review of PFS's license application.

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[phantom power]

1. Seems like it would make more sense to leave it where it is,

instead of moving it hundreds of miles just to keep it in another temporary facility.

[NNadir]

2. Actually I like Yucca delays.

It's not like the so called "nuclear waste" is actually doing anything whatsoever to harm anyone at all. (Well it does inspire fear and loathing in paranoids and other nut cases but other than that it doesn't do all that much.) The longer it stays above the ground, the easier it becomes to reprocess, and the more valuable the materials within become.

Eventually the price of uranium will rise to a point that the uranium and plutonium inside the fuel rod will be coveted for its fuel value. Also from a non-proliferation standpoint - the use of "once through" uranium is to be (in my opinion) slightly preferred because of the presence of significant U-236. (This gives rise to the important contaminant Pu-238 in any new plutonium generated upon reuse, greatly complicating any attempt at diversion.)

There are also many valuable fission products in these rods: All of the radioactive ruthenium-106 (half-life 373 days) that is in fuel rods removed from a reactor in 1980 has now decayed to palladium. This means that the other isotopes of ruthenium present (99, 100, 101, 102, 104 and 105) are immediately recoverable and usable. The ruthenium in the so called "nuclear waste" in the United States is worth close to a billion dollars if recovered. The rhodium and palladium are worth considerably more.

The US Yucca Mountain delays will result in the defacto proposed Canadian approach to the storage of spent nuclear fuel, which is to keep it above ground until such time as it is necessary to recover the valuable materials in it. It is the approach that makes sense. A better approach is recycling, but it may take a few more years for the population at large to recognize that reality.

[dcfirefighter]

3. Where to find market values

where can I find these market values for metals, etc?

[jpak]

4. The cost of reprocessing spent fuel greatly exceeds any

value of recovered plutonium or uranium or other metals.

The defunct commercial reprocessing plant at West Valley NY reprocessed 640 metric tonnes of spent fuel and produced $35 million of plutonium (purchased by the taxpayers).

The cost of plant decommissioning and disposal of the high level liquid and other radioactive wastes produced at West Valley estimated to be $4-8 billion.

More than $2 billion has already been spent on West Valley with no end in sight.

such a deal...

Reprocessed plutonium for MOX fuel is 20 times more expensive than reactor fuel produced from uranium ore.

http://www.npec-web.org/projects/summary6.htm

Reprocessed uranium is contaminated with 232-U (a gamma emitter) and 236-U (a fission poison) - it is, for all practical purposes, unusable.

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/epfr.html

No country that reprocesses spent fuel uses the recovered uranium - none - and they don't bother recovering palladium or other elements either.

Why??? It is simply not economical - period.

Furthermore, reprocessing would only increase the volume of waste derived from spent fuel - even if actinide burning was employed (note: actinide burners don't exist) - and it would not eliminate the need for "permanent" geological disposal.

Reprocessing is dirty, uneconomic, unnecessary and would create more problems than it would solve - any way you look at it.

[hunter]

5. Yucca Mountain is a boondoggle. Skull Valley isn't that great either.

This is a dry cask storage system:



http://www.me3.org


It's pretty boring. The used fuel rods just sit there. Moving these used fuel rods all across the nation is probably more dangerous than leaving them be for now.

edited to credit photo