*DAMN R6 Forum

Hmmm....now this makes me worry more than I probably should:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Northeast/04/21/nuclear.fuel.missing.ap/index.html

Yeah...and as I read this it seems to have happened before.....so........where do all these fuelrods go? Are there some nuclear gnomes that take these rods to the radioactive never never land?

ask howard dean.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/elec04.prez.dean.terror.ap/

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/1/4/135712.shtml

http://www.atsnn.com/story/28220.html

It sounds like maybe someone working at that plant is very irresponsible or incompetent, but I doubt the missing material is in the hands of terrorists.  It's much more likely that it was misplaced when some of the fuel rods were being replaced with fresh uranium...or something like that anyway.

Depending on the type of spent fuel, they dispose of it differently.  The latest invention are these pucks that by the time they are no longer useful in a reactor, they are low level radioactive.  They are pretty cool, and about the same size as a hockey puck.

Old fuel rods are generally deposited deep (miles) underground.

One thing people have to remember about the fuel rods themselves.  They are part of the earth, that's were we got them from in the first place.  We just concentrated them together is all.  So it's not going to hurt the planet to have them buried a safe distance from us.  

The pieces we have to worry about is items that become radioactive do to exposure to these.  

There was an article in the paper the other weeek talking about disposing of nuclear waste... amazing what some of the ideas are/were/could be.

Burying it in underground shafts encased in concreate and lead lined etc, putting it under the sea, putting it on the sea bed in some of the huge rifts, storing it above ground, recycling it (well some of it) in reprocessing plants... They have been talking about putting it on rockets and firing it into the sun, launching it into low level oribt, then there.
.... oh and the best one: Just give it to a really poor country to deal with in excange for some hard currency!

Thats just a few, can't even remember half the rest

If memory serves me, I think I remember that Sweden currently has the best safe-house for spent nuclear material.  They built these huge underground silos, filled them with water, and then deposit the radioactive material into those when the time comes.  I forget if that was a permanent setup, or just an immediate fix to the problem.

Usually, into Iraqi tanks.

hehehe....I think Ace is referring to the Depleted Uranium cores of 30mm A-10 rounds.  I'm pretty sure they aren't made from nuclear fuel rods, as those are much too radioactive after they have been used.  But hey, would be a great use for them!  lol

Thats the exact problem... concentrated depleted uranium, does NOT act like dead tree, that decomposses, and gets turned into mulch. Because its "concentrated" it posses a serious threat regardless of wether its Miles underground. (which not mention is were most of our ever dwindling fresh water supply is...

     Nope, BS. I've got some news for you: the Earth is radioactive. Stop the presses! Uranium ore is mined (out of the ground, you know), processed, and used in reactors, and then stuck back into the ground. Assuming that the storage facility is not built near the water table, there is absolutely no danger of any sort from buried radioactives. A few miles of rock is probably the best insulator around.

Hey Loth... I know its a substance that exists, albiet in minute traces, in nature. However the isotopes produced in nucular fission are not normally found in any significant concentrations.

The fission reaction of Uranium produces fission products such as Ba, Kr, Sr, Cs, I, and Xe with atomic masses distributed around 95 and 135.

Some of the U-238 in the reactor core becomes plutonium-239 and Pu-240.

Plutonium which has a half life of 24,000 years is a really UGLY material.

Plutonium-239 is a very hazardous carcinogen.  Its combination of properties makes it one of the most dangerous substances. Plutonium-239, while present in only trace quantities in nature, has been made in large quantities in both military and commercial programs in the last 50 years.

Once in the body, plutonium-239 is preferentially deposited in soft tissues, notably the liver, on bone surfaces, in bone marrow and other non-calcified areas of the bone, as well as those areas of the bone that do not contain cartilage.  Deposition in bone marrow can have an especially harmful effect on the blood formation which takes place there.  By contrast, radium-226, another alpha emitter, is chemically akin to calcium and so becomes deposited in the calcified areas of bones.

Experiments on beagles have shown that a very small amount of plutonium in insoluble form will produce lung cancer with near-one-hundred-percent probability.  When this data is extrapolated to humans, the figure for lethal lung burden of plutonium comes out to about 27 micrograms.

So if there is ANY chance this stuff can get anywhere near humanity. It is NOT a good thing.

Damn I would hate even the smallest chance it would be near a water table.

Just my thoughts anyway.

     The last storage proposal I read about (dating from c. 1980, I think there are newer plans now) was to fuse high-level nuclear waste into a high-density glass, stick it into canisters, and store that miles underground. The fusing into glass step was to get the waste into a form which would make it impossible for it to migrate out of the storage area. I believe the newest plans are variations on the same theme: fuse the waste into some tough solid and store that. That way, there's only the radiation to worry about, and not "leaks". High-level waste is stored at the reactor for six months to a year (somewhere around there, I forget exactly) to give the really hard radioactives with short half-lives time to burn out. Once that is done and the waste is emitting "merely" dangerous levels of radiation (instead of instantly fatal levels), then it's fused and stored.

     The thing is, nuclear waste is indisputably nasty. However, it's nothing compared to coal ash. Nuclear waste has considerable advantages: it is possible to store it in a solid form, and there is very little of it produced by a reactor in the course of operation. A year of operating a 1000 Mw nuclear reactor produces about enough high-level waste to fill the bed of a pickup truck, IIRC. Compare that amount of easily-disposable waste to the thousands of tons of ash that are exhausted--in particulate form, no less--by a single coal-burning power plant over the same period of time. Not to mention that the waste from a coal-burning plant is MORE RADIOACTIVE THAN THE NUCLEAR WASTE (http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html) produced by a nuclear power plant in the same time, and that radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic coal ash which never degrades and will sit around forever is simply thrown into the atmosphere... Yeah, give me nukes any day. More info. (http://russp.org/nucfacts.html)

Hmm...so I guess more gamma radiation is produced by a coal-burning power plant than by a nuclear one....oh wait, I forgot - that's a lie!

Yes, a lot of radiation is produced by the burning of coal.  BUT - the type of radiation produced is much less harmful than that of nuclear waste (the really harmful type is gamma radiation).  Yes, you may get a second degree burn if you stand too close to burning coal for a long time, but you won't be disintegrated on the spot (thats what would happen if you stood next to a pile of fissioning plutonium).

     And standing next to a pile of fissioning plutonium comes up in everyday life, doesn't it, what with said piles falling out of the sky into urban centers. Come on, now you're just being Chicken Little. Yeah, nuclear reactors are inherently dangerous. The design of nuclear power plants seals the radiation away where it can't hurt people. If you stood just outside the fence which surrounds the grounds of a nuclear power plant, you would be receiving scarcely more radiation than the background level. People who live near coal plants receive a larger dose of radiation over time than people who live near nuclear plants. But what about meltdowns? Given the design of Western reactors, which specifically rejected the Chernobyl design because of the possibility of meltdown, a Chernobyl-style meltdown in America is the statistical equivalent of being struck by a meteor while being eaten by a shark. On a side note, a nuclear plant would have to melt down every single day for nuclear power to be as lethal as coal is.

     More to the point, you seem to think that radiation is the be-all and end-all of horrifying byproducts. Look into what is pumped into the air from a coal plant sometime, and keep in mind that 56% of America's power is from coal.

Ok loth, I would actually have to agree with you now that I've gone back and read what you said again...lol.

Also, the meltdown at chernobyl was only partly caused by the flaw in design (slow moving cooling rods, etc.).  Most of the problem in that particular case was severe incompetance on the part of the workers, as well as the Soviet government.  When the reactor at chernobyl was being constructed, key safety components were left untested or uninstalled in a rush to have the reactor set for commercial use on time.  The meltdown occured while tests were being done on a safety component that was supposed to have been tested 3 years earlier, during the beginning of the fuel cycle.  Doing tests near the end of the cycle (when most of the uranium is used up) is a lot more dangerous.  Anyway, error after error occured during the testing, but the people conducting the tests kept on going anyway, leading to the massive explosions and meltdown.

Just a bit of interesting info for you...

Sorry for the long post however.....

A very small radioactive spill can go a very long way. In the understated entry no. 641, dated March 1984 in Juarez, Mexico, a cancer therapy machine (x-ray), was sold to a scrap merchant. People saw some leaking luminous powder and thought it was a healing ointment, and rubbed it on their bodies.

When it started causing radiation burns, they tried to wash it off thereby contaminating their homes, sewers and affecting others. News spread and the town panicked. Pregnant women and other non-involved casualties became contaminated by ambulances that had previously carried contaminated people; in the panic, no one thought to decontaminate the vehicles. While many fled, 30,000 were rounded up in the local stadium and many were screened. Two hundred people were located with high exposure to radiation. Five died from radiation poisoning and were buried in lead lined coffins in six foot concrete graves, to keep them isolated from the environment. The contaminated town stadium, sewerage and other facilities will remain dangerous for many lifetimes. The cost to Mexico in lost exports alone for that year, was $US 70 million. Considering the financial and human costs, the significance of this incident is that it involved an amount of radioactive Caesium 137 powder that would fit into a matchbox.

Now what was that about a Truckload of radioactive waste?

Now I am not arguing that coal burning is not a problem however?..

Looking at the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania.  Despite claims by the nuclear industry that "no one died at Three Mile Island," a study by Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh, showed that the accident led to a minimum of 430 infant deaths

After almost 40 years of cover-ups, the U.S. Government released 19,000 pages of previously classified documents which revealed that the Hanford Engineer Works was responsible for the release of significant amounts of radioactive materials into the atmosphere and the adjacent Columbia River. Between 1944 and 1966, the eight reactors, a source of plutonium production for atomic weapons, discharged billions of gallons of liquids and billions of cubic meters of gases containing plutonium and other radioactive contaminants into the Columbia River, and the soil and air of the Columbia Basin

The Idaho Falls Post Register reported that plutonium had been found in sediments hundreds of feet below the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, an experimental reactor testing station and nuclear waste storage site.

14 March 1997 A 40 gallon tank of toxic chemicals (stored illegally at the U.S. Government's Hanford Engineer works) exploded, causing the release of  20,000-30,000 gallons of plutonium-contaminated water.

Damn I am glad I live in a country where we only have one reactor, and its in another city!

Now then...If I ever bother to read those insanly long post on this topic I bet I'd get insane worrying about those dirty bombs........

Sometimes its just too easy to get carried away.... ;D ;D ;D