[HN Gopher] US companies partner on nuclear recycling technology
___________________________________________________________________
US companies partner on nuclear recycling technology
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 36 points
Date : 2022-07-11 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.world-nuclear-news.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.world-nuclear-news.org)
| LatteLazy wrote:
| If we push ahead with nuclear as people want, there will be
| trillions in clean up costs to be claimed.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Humans already emit 35 billion metric tons of CO2 a year with
| what ultimately will be deadly effect. (Just a matter of time
| before a hot summer kills 1 million plus people in India.) $100
| per ton is an optimistic figure for capturing it out of the
| atmosphere and injecting it underground, so that is $3.5
| trillion a year to clean out the stuff we put in that year.
|
| Fossil fuels: what are you going to do with the waste?
| fundad wrote:
| Money Printer Go Brrr
| narrator wrote:
| There will also be a lot of really cool work in tethered and/or
| autonomous robotics.
| ge96 wrote:
| Automata (film)
| narrator wrote:
| I was reading about a lot of these nuclear cleanup projects
| at Hanford and Fukushima and the only way to do it is with
| specially designed robots that are highly radiation
| resistant. This is difficult since the radiation regularly
| causes them to glitch out permanently and radio
| communication doesn't really work with that much radiation
| around. They usually have to be tethered to be
| controllable.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/26/16030222/fukushima-
| nuclea...
| ge96 wrote:
| I see that is pretty interesting. Surprised hardening
| isn't enough.
|
| My comment was more on humanoid robots being powered by
| small nuclear batteries.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Hanford is a different situation from Fukushima in that
| the wastes have had a long time to decay at Hanford but
| Fukushima is still pretty fresh.
|
| The trouble at Hanford was that the current methods for
| reprocessing produce a stream of fission product
| raffinates that they originally stored in liquid form in
| tanks. Later on the technology was developed to trap the
| fission products in glass which is not too hard to
| dispose of (and that decays mostly in 500 years) but the
| Hanford tanks had started to fail before then.
|
| Future reprocessing plants will store liquid waste
| temporarily but like THORP in the UK and COGEMA in France
| they will plan on vitrification from day one.
| omginternets wrote:
| Are you suggesting this is somehow different from coal, oil and
| gas? The only difference is that nuclear waste actually _can_
| be cleaned up and /or contained in the first place. You are
| simply externalizing the health and environmental impact of
| fossil fuels and calling it a day.
|
| (I am charitably assuming that you know enough about renewals
| to know that they are not currently a realistic replacement for
| the entirety of FFs.)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-11 23:00 UTC)