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Design for recycling rare earths is urgently needed

 “The situation clearly calls for international policy initiatives to minimize the seemingly bizarre situation of spending large amounts of technology, time, energy and money to acquire scarce metals from the mines and then throwing them away after a single use.”

Yale Researchers Call for Specialty Metals Recycling http://environment.yale.edu/news/article/yale-researchers-call-for-specialty-metals-recycling/ 25 Sept 12 An international policy is needed for recycling scarce specialty metals that are critical in the production of consumer goods,
according to Yale researchers in Science.

“A recycling rate of zero for specialty metals is alarming when we consider that their use is growing quickly,” said co-author Barbara Reck, a research scientist at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Specialty metals, which include rare earth elements such as indium, gallium and germanium, account for more than 30 of the 60 metals in the periodic table. Because they are used in small amounts for very precise technological purposes, such as red phosphors, high-strength magnets, thin-film solar cells and computer chips, recovery can be so technologically and economically challenging that the attempt is seldom made. Continue reading →

September 25, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, RARE EARTHS, Reference, technology, Uranium | 1 Comment

USA’s problem seeking safe disposal of uranium 233

Uranium Substitute Is No Longer Needed, but Its Disposal May Pose Security Risk   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/24/us/uranium-233-disposal-proves-a-problem.html     By MATTHEW L. WALD  September 23, 2012 WASHINGTON — At the dawn of the civilian nuclear age in the 1950s, one of the pressing questions was how to find enough fuel for reactors and bombs. The government and the private sector seized on a man-made substitute for natural uranium, producing about 3,400 pounds of an exotic and expensive material called uranium 233.
Today, the problem is how to safely get rid of it. Continue reading →

September 25, 2012 Posted by | Reference, Uranium, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Daunting tasks for Japan’s new Nuclear Regulation Authority

Nuclear regulatory body faces mountain of urgent tasks http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T120920003922.htm Koichi Yasuda / Yomiuri Shimbun 21 Sept 12, Five members of the new nuclear regulatory commission, headed by Shunichi Tanaka, showed strong determination to ensure the safety of the nation’s nuclear facilities and restore public confidence, based on lessons learned from the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear
power plant.

However, the Nuclear Regulation Authority faces a growing number of urgent tasks, including establishing new regulations for nuclear power generation.

The commission must first determine how to evaluate stress tests that have served as a tentative yardstick for restarting reactors in the aftermath of last year’s disaster.

It must also decide what requirements need to be met to allow nuclear reactors to operate more than 40 years–which would be an exception to the government’s new energy strategy announced earlier this month.

It remains to be seen how the commission will conduct research on active faults under nuclear power plants nationwide.

Lastly, it also needs to introduce mandatory countermeasures for severe accidents, including reactor meltdowns, as well as expand disaster preparedness zones around nuclear plants. The fact that the commission was launched with members who were not approved by the Diet has added to these concerns.

Former Nuclear Safety Commission Chairman Shojiro Matsuura, 76, said establishing the above rules is “essentially a job that would take years for specialists to accomplish.

“I’m worried whether [the commission] will be able to tackle the problems without support of both the ruling and opposition parties,” he said.

Considering the head of the new commission will be given greater command authority during emergencies, Matsuura’s concern is reasonable.

The new commission, which has been granted a high level of independence, must pursue safety improvements at nuclear power plants from scientific and technological viewpoints, and keep a distance from political and economic concerns. The public will closely watch its
every action.

September 21, 2012 Posted by | Japan, Reference, safety | Leave a comment

Facts: Thorium fuel not clean, not safe, not commercially viable

 One reason reprocessing thorium fuel cycles haven’t been successful is that uranium-232 (U-232) is created along with uranium-233. U-232, which has a half-life of about 70 years, is extremely radioactive and is therefore very dangerous in small quantities: 

Thorium Fuel: No Panacea for Nuclear Power, http://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/thorium2009factsheet.pdf     By Arjun Makhijani and Michele Boyd A Fact Sheet Produced by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and Physicians for Social Responsibility
Thorium “fuel” has been proposed as an alternative to uranium fuel in nuclear reactors. There are not “thorium reactors,” but rather proposals to use thorium as a “fuel” in different types of reactors, including existing light-water reactors and various fast breeder
reactor designs. Continue reading →

September 20, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, Reference, technology | Leave a comment

USA Dept of Energy funds shonky science promoting radiation “hormesis” and “adaptive response”

the agency [USA Dept of Energy]  gave a $1.7 million grant to MIT, last month that will address among other things, the “difficulties in gaining the broad social acceptance” of nuclear power. MIT has also received millions of dollars from Tokyo Electric
Power Co (TEPCO), which is responsible for the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Since the turn of the century the US DOE has aggressively pushed the concepts of hormesis and adaptive response. It has spent a lot of money funding research around the world. 

A Radioactive Conflict of Interest Robert Alvarez on the Conflict of Interest inherent within US DOE radiation research http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-alvarez/mit-radiation-study_b_1623899.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=679403,b=facebook “……..Observations based on radiation-exposed humans have long been considered of greater scientific importance, [than those conducted on mice] some which were obtained with a callous lack of ethics. In March 1954, after the U.S. exploded an H-bomb in the Marshall Islands that released a roughly comparable amount of cesium-137 as the Fukushima accident, Japanese fishermen and Marshallese were exposed to life-threatening doses of radioactive fallout while forcing Japan to confiscate four million pounds of fish.

Two years later, medical advisors to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission  (AEC now DOE) secretly recommended returning the Marshallese people to their homes after being told they would be living in “by far the most contaminated place in the world.” At the meeting an AEC expert stated,” it would be very interesting to go back and get good environmental data… when people live in a contaminated environment… Continue reading →

September 20, 2012 Posted by | Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Don’t believe the lies that Thorium reactors are clean, safe, and cheap

 nuclear weapons are involved at the very BEGINNING of thorium reactors,  because you cannot get the thorium reactor started without mixing the thorium  with some weapons-explosive material — either plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

Thinking About Thorium  by Gordon Edwards, Ph.D., President of CCNR, September 16 2012 On CBC’s “Quirks and Quarks” radio program aired on Saturday, September 15, 2012, there was an enthusiastic endorsement of “thorium  reactors” as a nearly miraculous form of nuclear energy that will avoid all  of the major problems now associated with uranium-based nuclear power.
I have been asked by several people to give my own personal opinion of  this prospect, and accordingly have written the following:
Background:
When nuclear power was first presented to a credulous public, fully conditioned to respect science and admire scientists, people were quick to believe that nuclear power was safe, clean, cheap and inexhaustible — just because scientists said so.  It was also said that “peaceful” nuclear power had nothing whatsoever to do with atomic bombs and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It took decades for people to realize that these are all lies.

I can’t believe that people are now so eager to swallow the hype about thorium  with all its over-the-top claims of being safe, clean, cheap, inexhaustible,  unrelated to nuclear weapons, and even a miraculous way of solving the nuclear  waste problems created by the previous generation of — what? — safe, clean,  cheap, inexhaustible, unrelated to nuclear weapons, nuclear reactors. Continue reading →

September 20, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, Reference, technology | Leave a comment

Thorium reactors – the latest dishonest spin from the nuclear propagandists

   “thorium reactors” — a very old idea that is now being dressed up in  modern clothes and made to seem like a major scientific breakthrough, which it is not.
Thorium Reactors:  Back to the Dream Factory by Gordon Edwards, Ph.D., President of CCNR, July 13, 2011 The Nuclear Dream Factory Every time a nuclear power reactor idea doesn’t work out, and ordinary people get down-hearted and even start to doubt the magnificence andbenificence of  nuclear energy, the nuclear proponents rush back to their well-stocked dream  factory to fetch another idea — one that is sufficiently unfamiliar and sufficiently  untested that ordinary people have no idea whether it is good or bad, safe or dangerous, feasible or foolish, or whether the almost miraculous claims made about it are true or false.
Just a few years ago, nuclear proponents were pushing Generation 3 reactors — enormous plants that would generate huge amounts of electricity, yet be cheaper  and faster to build than earlier models, as well as being safer and longer-lived.
Then Areva ran into a blizzard of problems trying to build one of these behemoths in Finland Continue reading →

September 20, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, Reference, spinbuster, technology | 1 Comment

AS USA’s nuclear wastes pile up, solutions seem further away

Piling up spent nuclear fuel presents future disposal challenge,Fierce Homeland Security September 16, 2012 | By David Perera Even were the Energy Department to resume this year licensing efforts for Yucca Mountain as a permanent nuclear power waste disposal facility, it would still be 15 years before the site could start accepting spent fuel, says the Government Accountability Office.

By then, about 50,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored roughly equally in wet and dry storage will have accumulated, assuming that no new nuclear power plants open in the interim, according to Nuclear Energy Institute estimates cited by the GAO in an Aug. 15 report  (.pdf) not posted online until Sept. 14……. Continue reading →

September 17, 2012 Posted by | Reference, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Japan’s science panel calls for a curb on nuclear waste production

The recommendation said it is essential to set an upper limit on the total amount of radioactive waste and to implement controls to prevent it from increasing without limits. 

Science panel recommends delaying burying radioactive waste http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201209120009 September 12, 2012 THE ASAHI SHIMBUN, Jin Nishikawa contributed to this article. Citing the country’s geologically unstable archipelago as a threat, the Science Council of Japan is recommending that the government build temporary storage facilities to hold more than 27,000 cylinders of high-level radioactive waste.

The council on Sept. 11 completed a report that calls for regulating the total amount of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and storing it temporarily. Continue reading →

September 17, 2012 Posted by | Japan, Reference, wastes | Leave a comment

USA public waking up to the dangers of MOX nuclear fuel reprocessing

MOX or not? Gov’t likes weapons fuel, public doesn’t  Equities.com, By Eric Fleischauer, The Decatur Daily, Ala. McClatchy-Tribune Information Services Sept. 14--The Energy Department believes it is safe to use weapons-grade fuel at Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant, but not many residents attending a public hearing Thursday agreed.
“They don’t need to have it here,” said Sara Crossfield of Athens, who has a farm near the Limestone County plant. “TVA’s charter requires them to protect us.”

U.S. treaties with Russia require the disposal of 50 tons of surplus plutonium. The treaties authorize disposal by recycling the weapons-grade plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX, for use in nuclear reactors. MOX is a mixture of plutonium and low-enriched
uranium.


The purpose of Thursday’s public hearing was to receive comments on a draft document describing the environmental impact of using MOX. About 60 people attended.

While MOX is the Energy Department’s preferred alternative for most of the surplus plutonium, the Tennessee Valley Authority said it has no preference. Sachiko McAlhany, document manager for the U.S. Department of Energy, presented a summary of the environmental impact statement. She said the department concluded using MOX “does not appreciably change” the risk posed by conventional uranium fuel.

Neither McAlhany nor a TVA representative, Mick Mastilovic, answered questions at the hearing. The comments from the public will be incorporated into the final environmental impact statement, scheduled for a spring 2013 release.

The plutonium would be reprocessed into MOX at a $6 billion plant in South Carolina, operated by France-based AREVA. It would then have to be transported to Browns Ferry.

Many of the concerns expressed by those attending the hearing involved the cost of creating MOX and the risks involved in transport.
Concerns specific to Browns Ferry focused on the impact of the fuel — which burns at slightly higher temperatures than conventional fuel — on the reactors and the possibility that Browns Ferry would become a terrorist target. Continue reading →

September 15, 2012 Posted by | Reference, reprocessing, USA | Leave a comment

Russia’s nuclear waste storage ship

Nuclear waste storage ship Lepse leaves Murmansk for decomissioning, Kola Peninsula, Russia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guPem_guPUk
Nuclear waste storage ship Lepse leaves Murmansk for decomissioning, Kola Peninsula, Russia   Sep 14, 2012 by bellonafoundation
The Lepse, which in its heyday had been used as a support vessel for Russia’s nuclear icebreaker fleet, has been bobbing at dockside at the Atomflot port four kilometers north of Murmansk’s more than a quarter of a million-strong population since 1988. In the holds of the Lepse are filled with casks and caissons holding 639 spent nuclear fuel assemblies –equaling hundreds of tons of radioactive materials — a significant portion of which have been damaged, including assemblies that were damaged during offloading from the nuclear icebreaker Lenin. On September 14, 2012, Lepse was towed to Nerpa shipyard on the Kola Peninsula for decommissioning. Bellona has been instrumental in Lepse project. Bellona’s President Frederic Hauge is in Murmansk to see Lepse leaving the Kola Bay.

September 15, 2012 Posted by | oceans, Reference, Russia, wastes | Leave a comment

The world’s most dangerous nuclear reactor – Monju, Japan

Problem plagued nuclear reactor called world’s most dangerous via ABC News, The Atomic Age, May 2012 http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/atomicage/2012/09/10/problem-plagued-nuclear-reactor-called-worlds-most-dangerous-via-abc-news/
Japan’s Monju nuclear reactor was supposed to be a model of power generation in the future, but it’s had many problems and in two decades it’s only generated one hour’s worth of electricity.

EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: It’s supposed to be the future of nuclear power generation, a reactor that produces its own fuel in a self-sustaining cycle. Known as Monju, the reactor on the country’s west coast is held up as the saviour of a nation without energy resources. But Monju has been plagued with problems and many call it the most dangerous reactor in the world. In part two of his series on Japan’s so-called nuclear alley, North Asia correspondent Mark Willacy was given an exclusive look inside Monju.

MARK WILLACY, REPORTER: People frolic in its shadow, a reactor its critics call the most dangerous in Japan. The name Monju comes from one of Buddha’s chief attendants, a purveyor of enlightenment depicted resting on the back of a lion, a beast whose phenomenal powers are controlled only by Monju’s wisdom.

But opponents of this prototype reactor fear its operators do not have the wisdom to harness its enormous energy.

KEIJI KOBAYASHI, FAST-BREEDER REACTOR EXPERT (voiceover translation): If a meltdown happens, it will get out of control very quickly. If the reactor core was to melt, the explosive energy would produce a blast like a nuclear bomb.

FUKIKO IKEJIMA, ‘STOP MONJU’ GROUP (voiceover translation): If a big accident were to happen, the impact would not stop in Japan, but spread around the world. It is our most dangerous reactor.

MARK WILLACY: And this is one of the reasons many Japanese fear Monju, because it uses sodium to cool a reactor, the substance that can ignite upon contact with oxygen. In 1995, a sodium leak at Monju caused a serious fire, one that resulted in the plant being out of operation for 15 years.

Lateline was given an exclusive tour of Monju, including an interview with the plant’s director-general, Satoru Kondo.

Continue reading at Problem plagued nuclear reactor called world’s most dangerous

September 12, 2012 Posted by | Japan, Reference, safety | Leave a comment

Thorium’s radioactive fission products

the fission products from a Thorium reactor are a worry, Technetium-99 has a half life of 220,000 years, uranium-232 produces thallium-208 (a nasty wee gamma emitter), Selenium-79 (another gamma emitter with a 327,000 year half-life), evenThorium-232 is a problem with its half life of 14 Billion years (and while the T-232 isn’t a major worry, all the time during this 14 Billion years it will be decaying and producing stuff that is!).

Thorium Cycle questions and problems http://daryanenergyblog.wordpress.com/ca/part-8-msr-lftr/8-3-thorium-lftr/ Questions have also been raised by some nuclear scientists about the Thorium cycle, in particular the proposed one that the LFTR would use. I’m not a nuclear physicist so I’ll merely forward you on to the relevant paper here , and a rebuttal here . The crux of the argument seems to be the proliferation risk (I’ll come back to that one later), the fact that a number of its spend fuel outputs (such as Technetium-99) are “nasty stuff” with a long half life and the fact we’ll still need supplies of Uranium to get Thorium reactors going again whenever we have to turn it off (which will happen at least once a year or so during its annual maintenance shutdown). They also highlight a number of technical issues, which I discussed in the chapter on HTGR’s. Continue reading →

September 12, 2012 Posted by | Reference, Uranium, wastes | 1 Comment

Nuclear industry says it will take 40 years to decommission Fukushima nuclear reactors

It will take 40 years, the nuclear industry says, to decommission the reactors. (Not the 6 months the industry claimed would be required to bring the “slightly damaged” reactors back online.)

Slow progress containing problems at Fukushima, new ones arise   http://nuclearhistory.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/slow-progress-containing-problems-at-fukushima-new-ones-arise/  September 11, 2012 The Asahi Shimbun Japan By TAKASHI SUGIMOTO/ Staff Writer The operator is having difficulty pumping water into destroyed reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 plant, tanks are rapidly filling with radioactive water, and hundreds of potentially volatile uranium fuel assemblies remain in a precarious storage pool that some warn could collapse in another strong earthquake. Continue reading →

September 12, 2012 Posted by | Fukushima 2012, Reference, safety | Leave a comment

What do Tony Blair, nuclear power, depleted uranium, radioactive tobacco and the Nobel family have in common?

The real point of this wide ranging article is to highlight the international scope of this cover up on contamination issues and allowing high levels in the rest of the world while showing the low levels in japan.

Op Ed by Arclight2011,  9 September 2012

In a previous article I posed the question concerning the whereabouts of Japans contaminated food supply. Continue reading →

September 10, 2012 Posted by | 2 WORLD, environment, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties | 1 Comment

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