no need to recycle spent fuel
no need to recycle spent fuel
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201208250071
Ministry to amend law to bury nuclear waste without reprocessing
August 25, 2012 By TORU NAKAGAWA/ Staff Writer
However, the recycling of spent nuclear fuel presupposes that more nuclear reactors will be built and the use of nuclear fuel will expand. There will no longer be a need to recycle spent fuel if the government decides to scrap all nuclear reactors by 2030. The necessity of recycling will also diminish if the government decides to gradually reduce nuclear power to 15 percent or to maintain its share at 20-25 percent.
Construction of the reprocessing plant in Rokkasho began in 1993, followed by a succession of failures during trial runs. Full operation of the facility is nowhere in sight, which has put the entire nuclear fuel cycle policy at an impasse. About 14,000 tons of spent fuel has piled up on the grounds of nuclear power plants across Japan. Storage spaces are expected to reach full capacity within four years at some nuclear plants if they continue to operate.
WRONG!!! WRONG!!! WRONG!!!
The above poster states:
However, the recycling of spent nuclear fuel presupposes that more nuclear reactors will be built and the use of nuclear fuel will expand. There will no longer be a need to recycle spent fuel if the government decides to scrap all nuclear reactors by 2030.
Recycling of spent fuel does NOT presuppose that new reactors will be built. You can recycle spent fuel with ONE reactor that recycles its own spent fuel.
The reason you recycle spent fuel is to get rid of the Plutonium.
If you don't recycle spent fuel; then the spent fuel has Plutonium in it; and Plutonium is a very long lived waste product. This is what the anti-nukes have been complaining about with regard to Yucca Mountain. They say, "How are you going to guarantee that the Plutonium in the repository is going to remain safe and out of the environment for the extremely long time it takes for the Plutonium to decay."
Courtesy of PBS's Frontline, you can read the interview with nuclear physicist and then Associate Director of Argonne National Lab, Dr. Charles Till; how spent fuel reprocessing and recycling will work:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Q: And you repeat the process.
A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.
Additionally, there is a proliferation issue. Suppose you bury the spent fuel as it is now; which consists of high radioactivity fission products and low activity Plutonium. The fission products make the spent fuel hazardous to anyone that would like to get at that Plutonium for use in weapons. You need a very expensive chemical processing facility to separate out Plutonium from very radioactive fission products since the chemistry has to be done remotely.
However, with the spent fuel buried in a repository, in a relatively short period of time, the fission products decay leaving just the Plutonium without the hazard of the fission products. In essence, what you create when you bury spent fuel in a repository without reprocessing; is you create a "Plutonium mine".
The whole purpose of reprocessing is to get rid of Plutonium If you say that you won't allow reprocessing, then you better tell us how you are going to deal with the environmental and proliferation threat posed by the Plutonium!
Or haven't you thought that far ahead.
Scrap nuclear power soon
more than ½ of Japanese people say
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201208250069
Survey: Scrap nuclear power soon, more than half of Japanese people say
August 25, 2012 THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
Fifty-eight percent of people want Japan to abolish nuclear power within a decade, sooner than the earliest government proposal of 2030 and reflecting widespread fears for another nuclear disaster, an Asahi Shimbun survey has found.
The postal poll found 16 percent want nuclear power abandoned immediately; a further 21 percent want it phased out within five years; and an additional 21 percent within 10 years. Only 8 percent of respondents favored retaining nuclear power indefinitely.