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Nuclear Denial

September 18, 2008Nuclear Denial RENEWABLE ENERGY WORLD by Michael MellishNuclear power plants have a productive life of at least forty years. Unfortunately unlike other power plants, after forty years they cannot simply be decommissioned, razed and the site redeveloped into other uses.Fuel rods used in nuclear power plants are actively exothermic (generating heat) for up to seventy-five years after removal from the reactor…………………………Today, the fuel rods have to stay in the ponds on the site because there is no other place for them to go. The U.S. doesn’t operate a fuel rod processing plant (like BNFL does for the United Kingdom) and has no current plans for such a vitrification facility (imbedding the active radio active waste within glass). Even then the glass-encased radioactive material must be actively cooled for 75 years, so it must be kept somewhere with human management of the site.
Who is going to pay for this? Consider the cost of staffing for 75 additional years when there is no revenue stream from electrical generation to cover this, and there is no easy way to pass the cost onto the electrical customers. This problem is only starting to be recognized since so few reactors have actually reached the end of life in the U.S. If you check the balance sheets of the major electrical utilities that own and operate nuclear power plants, you will not see any allowances for this future cost. It would be simpler to spin off the plant, let it go bankrupt and leave it to the taxpayers to deal with the mess……………………………The operation of existing nuclear power plants, labs and facilities has been fraught with accidents, incidents and discharges throughout the 50-year history of nuclear power. Full and open disclosure of the accidents and risks taken by operators (including the U.S. government) remains dubious at best…………………………Uranium mining and processing of uranium ore to fuel grade is hardly a “clean” activity. Vast quantities of overburden must be removed to mine the ore (with all the attendant pollution problems). The ore itself is quite difficult to process, separating the useful material U235 from its counterparts clearly produces significant quantities of radioactive waste products, dust and chemical wastes from the separation process, all of which are quite nasty.

Nuclear Denial

September 19, 2008 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | wastes