Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Originally Posted By: SilverC6
I've always had problems with nuclear power due to disposal issues with depleted fuel.
Just burying it somewhere doesn't cut it to me.
I'd much rather have coal power and its related pollution that can be ameliorated in a relatively short period of time.
Nuclear fuel can be recycled. What are your thoughts on the mercury emissions from the coal plants?
Actually, the better answer is nuclear waste can be used as fuel in the right kind of nuclear plant. Recycling is not as bad but you don't burn all the isotopes that could have been used in fast reactors.
China is doing the right thing pushing for the best and latest nuclear plants. They have to if they don't want to be dragged into wars in the future for energy. I really hope they can do the right thing and use up as much long half life waste the rest of the world generates.
Perhaps I should have been more verbose in my use of the term recycled as I was thinking of not only the reprocessing of the fuel rods but also the re-purposing of them in the fast breed reactors along with other things currently being developed that greatly reduce the "waste" from a nuclear plant and what IS left is nothing like what comes out of a current plant.
I read a great article on it here a few weeks ago:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Fuel-Recycling/Processing-of-Used-Nuclear-Fuel/
Quote:
Used nuclear fuel has long been reprocessed to extract fissile materials for recycling and to reduce the volume of high-level wastes.
Recycling today is largely based on the conversion of fertile U-238 to fissile plutonium.
New reprocessing technologies are being developed to be deployed in conjunction with fast neutron reactors which will burn all long-lived actinides, including all uranium and plutonium.
A significant amount of plutonium recovered from used fuel is currently recycled into MOX fuel; a small amount of recovered uranium is recycled so far.
A key, nearly unique, characteristic of nuclear energy is that used fuel may be reprocessed to recover fissile and fertile materials in order to provide fresh fuel for existing and future nuclear power plants. Several European countries, Russia and Japan have had a policy to reprocess used nuclear fuel, although government policies in many other countries have not yet come round to seeing used fuel as a resource rather than a waste.
Over the last 50 years the principal reason for reprocessing used fuel has been to recover unused plutonium, along with less immediately useful unused uranium, in the used fuel elements and thereby close the fuel cycle, gaining some 25% to 30% more energy from the original uranium in the process. This contributes to national energy security. A secondary reason is to reduce the volume of material to be disposed of as high-level waste to about one-fifth. In addition, the level of radioactivity in the waste from reprocessing is much smaller and after about 100 years falls much more rapidly than in used fuel itself.
These are all considerations based on current power reactors, but moving to fourth-generation fast neutron reactors in the late 2020s changes the outlook dramatically, and means that not only used fuel from today’s reactors but also the large stockpiles of depleted uranium (from enrichment plants, about 1.5 million tonnes in 2015) become a fuel source. Uranium mining will become much less significant.
*snip*
