France’s nuclear waste disposal methods – costly and unsafe

No easy way to dispose of nuclear waste
TheDay.comBy Los Angeles Times 9/21/2009 By Frank Von HippelThe Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project is now comatose, if not dead. And that puts us back at square one on a crucial question: What are we going to do with all the radioactive waste being discharged by U.S. nuclear power reactors?

Many conservatives on Capitol Hill favor the French “solution”: spent-fuel reprocessing. But reprocessing isn’t a solution at all: It’s a very expensive and dangerous detour.

Reprocessing takes used or “spent” nuclear fuel and dissolves it to separate the uranium and plutonium from the highly radioactive fission products. The plutonium and uranium are then recycled to make new reactor fuel, thereby reducing the amount of fresh uranium required by about 20 percent. But based on French and Japanese experience, the cost of producing this recycled fuel is several times that of producing fresh uranium reactor fuel.

In the past, about half of France’s reprocessing capacity was used to process spent fuel from foreign reactors. Because of the high cost, however, virtually all of those foreign customers have decided to follow the U.S. example and simply store their used reactor fuel.

The French reprocessing company AREVA claims that its method reduces the volume and longevity of the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power reactors. But when you take into account the additional radioactive waste streams created by reprocessing and plutonium recycling, the volume of the long-lived radioactive waste is not reduced. And most of the recycled plutonium is neither destroyed nor reused. Its isotopic makeup makes it difficult to use in existing reactors, so AREVA simply stores most of it at the reprocessing plant.

Reprocessing as practiced in France amounts to an expensive way to shift France’s radioactive waste problem from its reactor sites to the reprocessing plant……………… Reprocessing is enormously dangerous. The amount of radioactivity in the liquid waste stored at France’s plant is more than 100 times that released by the Chernobyl accident. That is why France’s government set up antiaircraft missile batteries around its reprocessing plant after the 9/11 attacks.

TheDay.com – No easy way to dispose of nuclear waste

September 22, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 1, France, wastes | antinuclear, AREVA, nuclear, nuclear wastes, radioactive, wastes

1 Comment »

Seems like THEY are kind of ignorant to be so intelligent. That Is like me dumping my dung in the back yard untill I start a plague. THEY do not let you get away with that at my level. But since it involves money and pride THEY get to risk everybody else’s lives, too. I do believe I know what their response would be: THEY are altruists looking out for the future needs of a growing world population.THEY have there own language. On his late night show, Dick Cavett asked Jimi Hendrix what his thoughts were about politics and a possible relationship to music. Hendrix said that politics is similar to music because they both have in common, the art of using words. Same thing applies to scientists and others who go to school long enough to learn a bunch of words. Don’t get me wrong, I do know that science is a good thing. But in the hands of the wrong people with a screwed-up philosohy and just because they live anywhere else besides Iran does not make them an Honest Joe. They can sound awfully intelligent and convincing, too. The hard part for me to take is that the rest of us do not do something about it. If it is about money….it is about politics. Politicians sell us out. If we had people investigating each one of them every day they would be paying them off: kind of like lobbying. in a way, don’t you think? There’s no law against that, is it? But there is against vote-buying and what’s the difference? The Art of Using Words, like Hendrix said.

Comment by Randy Joye | December 9, 2012 | Reply