The problems associated with nuclear waste are immense. While this technique to separate and immobilize radioactive strontium may have potential, its overall effect will be quite limited.

Strontium has a half life of less than 100 years, compared to other nucleotides with half lives of hundreds of thousands of years. Radioactive water volumes are not a major factor, either.

Even if the Strontium can be separated and immobilized with the use of other metals, it will still represent a serious radioactive hazard, with no reduction in its half life.

Better for people to be putting their efforts to finding better alternate energy sources.

The nuclear energy uses small steps like this preliminary report to try to justify the wholesale proliferation of nuclear plants, which contrary to their propaganda, are still immensely dangerous, don't produce any net electrical energy, and are one of the most dangerous things humans have undertaken, threatening millions on a daily basis, and giving cancers to hundreds of thousands of people.

We just don't need it.

Sounds like a swell idea. As much as I liked renewable, I was always against nuclear for this reason. Now there there seem to be a plausible solution to this, I look forward for more research going into this.

This is nonsense! This research is speculative, not yet fully explored.

Furthermore, liquid radioactive wastes are a tiny proportion of the radioactive materials generated by nuclear power plants, all of which are far more radioactive for far longer than the liquid wastes.

Get a sense of scale! Using materials that remain deadly to all life for 25,000 years to boil water is the height of absurdity!

The key to radioactive waste and any contaminants can be baked through a ceramic chamber along with other waste it comes out very black into a" pourous pubble" volcanic like stone. This can then be used for many applications. The end result material from any waste is totally uncontaminated and inert. Why don't we use it and clean up the world. Maybe we should ask Anthony Pratt to get the answers!
Regards Tiger Dunn

Herein lies the problems of Nuclear energy...
the use of water..precious water. where does it come from? and remain..
the use of salt, where does it end up?
the use and disposal of strontium. where does it go?
to capture the elements and their waste is still not cost effective, nor is it entirely safe.
No industry should be allowed to begin to operate unless proven solvent cradle to cradle. the nuclear map is still fraught with uncertainty.
security risks outweigh advantages as well.

So what about re-enrichment processes. Works over in France, why can't we just set up the same facilities here?

No waste + cut back on ore mining = win win

The specifics of this situation are rather different, but an attempt to concentrate radioactive isotopes in liquid waste from plutonium production at the Hanford reactors in Eastern Washington in the 1950s caused more problems instead of solving them:

NY Times

Sometimes, the cause of problems are solutions.

Hi,

"humanity's growing energy hunger may require reliance on this well-established greenhouse-gas-emissions-free technology."

1. There is no requirement to use Nuclear. More than enough wind, solar, geothermal and hydro to meet our needs.

2. What is well established that Nuclear is much more expensive than Green Sources of Power.

3. The waste problem is that Nuclear produces a lot of very toxic waste that remains toxic for a long time. Reducing the amount of waste, even by several orders of magnitude is not a solution to a so far insoluble problem but a reduction in the magnitude of the problem.

Is nuclear power perfect? No. It is, however, a huge improvement over coal power and other fossil fuels.

Fly ash from coal plants produces radioactive elements that are 100 (yes, one hundred) times more radioactive than nuclear waste. And that is radiation being spewed into the atmosphere, unlike nuclear waste, which is managed and stored away. Yeah, we have to bury it somewhere but I would rather it be underground than in my lungs.

Likewise, coolant water in a modern nuclear system operates in a closed loop system, and only becomes radioactive ‘waste’ when the coolant is flushed and replaced--in the best and most modern systems, this occurs once every 20 years.

It's truly unfortunate to see a viable, well-engineered and modern offering of nuclear solutions being 'rejected' by arguments based on the disadvantages of obsolete technology. Waste no longer remains radioactive for 25,00 years because modern nuclear reprocessing reactors so completely deplete the radioactivity of fissile material that the waste remains hazardous for ~100 years. Not to mention the fast breeder reactors that vastly reduce the need to mine uranium from the earth.

Safety is also a virtual non-issue. The one major US accident at three-mile was actually a success story; the safety systems prevented a meltdown. Chernobyl was a horrid Russian design that was pushed by operator negligence to a meltdown. Pebble bed reactors –cannot- melt down, because their design is self-regulating.

Finally, arguments of nuclear power's monetary expense ignorantly focus on startup costs and ignore lifespan, durability, and per-kilowatt costs of energy. Nuclear power -flattens- current alternatives because the economics of scale in nuclear energy are astounding. The economics of nuclear fission is only dwarfed (in theory) by nuclear fusion, and lord only knows when that technology will become viable, if ever.

We already know that a completely renewable energy grid will necessitate an amalgamation of wind, solar, and geothermal. Problem #1: the energy is not located near the consumers, which means that you have to factor in transmission costs. Combine those costs with weather variability, and renewable energy becomes (given current technology) quite expensive, and ultimately, a pyrrhic victory. Solar cells require large amounts of water to produce, not to mention water usage in the mining of silicon. Huge transmission lines would have to be constructed to carry all that southwestern solar energy to consumers, which means...more resources. Finally, there would be a need for redundant generation capacity in the event that it snows in New Mexico (which does happen from time to time) or if the wind stops blowing for a day in eastern Montana. Which means more infrastructure investment, which consumes more resources. Nuclear power plants go offline only for re-fueling or maintenance.

Don't get me wrong, I would -love- to emancipate humanity from non-renewable and live entirely from solar/wind/geothermal; however, unless people move closer to the energy, or 2-3 billion people die off, or Americans learn to live on less (I’m not holding my breath), it just isn’t going to happen.

France and re-enrichment?

My understanding is that France ships a lot of its nuclear waste to Russia.

Ten percent of that waste is cleaned up/re-enriched and shipped back. The other 90% is ....?

Anyone got different data?

I am very disappointed that a site that should be expert in the issues of greenhouse-gas-emissions still promotes the nuclear industry´s false line that it is a ¨greenhouse-gas-emissions-free technology¨. Although operating a plant produces little emissions, the production (mining, enrichment and transport) of nuclear fuel produces GHG levels similar to gas-fired power production. This does not include the GHGs also emitted from the waste disposal, accidents, and military applications of nuclear materials produced in power plants.

For more info, see:
http://www.votenuclearfree.net/climate-change
http://www.icanw.org/climate-hope

Nuke energy a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. Me, I think not.

Here is one very sobering take from a Russian.

http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html

Lots of current photos of the area around the "Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130kms from the bloggers home.

If you think Nuke power is great, look HARD at teh photos. He doesn't show the graves of thousands who died tring to control this disaster.

Worth the time to look at read.

first
france reprocesses its own nuclear fuel....
eg read this
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb07/4891

second
long half-lifes means lower radiation....not more radiation. it is short half-life that is associated with greater radiation.

three....
nuclear power is a much safer alternative to filthy fossil
fuels
eg read this...
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/

four
storage is a minor problem...the main reason no deep dedicated storage has been built yet is the remarkably small amount of waste produced...(aside from watermelon scare stories and legal challenges)...
storage is not commercially urgent

regards.

B posted:

[quote]It's truly unfortunate to see a viable, well-engineered and modern offering of nuclear solutions being 'rejected' by arguments based on the disadvantages of obsolete technology. Waste no longer remains radioactive for 25,00 years because modern nuclear reprocessing reactors so completely deplete the radioactivity of fissile material that the waste remains hazardous for ~100 years. Not to mention the fast breeder reactors that vastly reduce the need to mine uranium from the earth.[/quote]

We began stockpiling nuclear waste at the end of WW2. We let the nuclear genie out of the bottle then creating waste that is very hazardous for thousands of years.

Whether we build more reactors or not is a moot point. We need to render our existing nuclear waste stockpiles to isotopes that are only hazardous in the short term. This would be a much more manageable storage solution.

Breeder reactors can utilize these "wastes" to produce more fuel. New nuclear plants based on new technology can be one part of the green solution of energy generation.

I really wish treehugger would stop running pro or neutral articles on nuclear. You are never afraid to editorialize on other topics.

1. What about the mining?
2. What about the COAL they burn to process the fuel?
3. What about the enomous cost to build the plants, and the government handouts needed to build and keep them running?
4. What about the 40,000 metric tons of waste we ALREDY HAVE?
5. At least in the US this disproportionately harms people of color, especially Native Americans.

This is a dangerous diversion from renewable, ACTUALLY clean power.

Sheesh. Sorry, this is really frustrating for someone with a nuke UPSTREAM from me and on my drinking water source.

First, Sr90 is one of the more troubling waste products from uranium fission. As one post states, it's half life is less than 100 years, the actual number is 29 years.

Solid waste from nuclear reactors is maintained in intact fuel assemblies. These consist of arrays of tubes containing spent fuel pellets. The pellets are ceramic in which the waste is trapped and immobilized. This is where greater than 90 percent of all the Sr90 is, in storage where we know where it is. The ion exchange technology above is only useful if we were to reprocess the fuel to get retrieve the remaining, unused U235. With Uranium prices being what they are, we will continue to collect spent fuel bundles, storing them in hermetically and overly engineered cask in dry storage.

The average nuclear plant produces several tons of waste a year. This may sound like a lot to someone who is convinced that any amount of radioactive waste is too much. Sorry, I am biting my tongue at the moment. There is so much base stupidity surrounding this issue it makes my head spin. Coal fired plants have currently produced 40% of all the environmental mercury pollution that is on the planet. Long after a vast majority of the waste products from nuclear reactors (approximately 1000 years) have decayed to the original level of the ore from which the fuel was derived, this mercury will continue to be circulating in the environment. The average coal fired plant also spews tens of thousands of tons of uranium and thorium into the environment every year along with carcinogenic chromium and heterocyclic hydrocarbons. Then there is CO2 and sulfuric acid. Anyone who thinks that the alternative to coal is wind and solar simply doesn't know what they are talking about, full stop. The average coal plant in this country burns 120 million tons of coal a year. There are over 100 of them at this level. They extract the energy from coal far far more efficiently than a wind mill or solar panel can do so or ever will be able to do so from their respective sources. Its not a fair fight between the might of coal and these other flaccid sources, and yes, you burn all that coal just to boil water (straining to be civil). The Bush administration, not an opponent of coal utilization by any stretch of the imagination, claims that coal burning in the US will result in the deaths of 25,000 Americans. With all the hype about the dangers of nuclear power and its waste, how many people in the US die on account of civilian nuclear power per year? ZERO. I guess if you are dying an untimely death due to coal, you can be reassured that it wasn't because of nuclear waste. That will make you feel just as good as your morphine drip, I'm sure.

You have several options to generate the near Terawatt baseload we currently require to make sure that when you push your microwave oven's button you food gets hot and your TV still works and you can read this post. Coal, geothermal, hydro, oil, gas, and nuclear. Coal is unacceptable, geothermal is attractive if you have the right geology to make it work at scale, do we want to dam(n) more rivers? oil and gas are getting so expensive that the gulf states are turning to nuclear. For all the hype about waste (and that is what it truly is if you look at the mass that is produced and see that the scary isotopes that will be around for ever are low level emitters and the high level emitters burn themselves out rather quickly), nuclear is the cleanest of all the options. People posting here against nuclear obviously have no problem continuing using coal, they likely see it as the lesser of two evils. It is not. Global warming is not the largest problem with coal, its the massive amount of heavy metal exposure that we and every living creature on the planet has to put up with. In relative terms, western commercial nuclear power production has yet to cause any substantial harm. All the fear mongering is so disproportionate to the real risks it is simply amazing.

In my utopian dream we would build nuclear plants to power the economy for say 50 years and use that relatively "clean" energy to mass produce and establish alternative energy installations. (the production of solar/wind etc requires vast amounts of energy and I would rather see it coming from a source that doesn't produce GHG). And If we could keep true to the commitment, that by the end of the useful lifetime of the nuclear plants we can switch over to renewable energy, the I would be willing to accept the fact, that somewhere, deep underground, we have buried our ecological guilt and hid it from our children.
But if the plants are built and hailed as the final solution, rather than a (radioactive) steppingstone, then we have failed!

Here is another article on TH concerning nuclear:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/state-of-the-planet-conference-nuclear.php

If we were to switch from uranium with its long lived waste to thorium, which produces very little transuranic waste and whose other products are greater than 98% decayed well before 500 years, I think that burying the waste from thorium burning reactors in a safe depository would constitute no guilt at all. In a mere 30-50 years it is pretty low level. After this initial hot period, putting it underground in an old mine would just short term storage to keep it out of the way until it is colder than the ore from which it was derived. This would constitute a small fraction of one percent of the current damage we are doing by burning fossil fuels, whereas current uranium based fuels constitute a small faction of the damage, not that anyone as firm figures, but in my mind, nuclear is probably 1% as hazardous along its entire life cycle as coal. If we were running thorium based reactors, I would be comfortable with nuclear becoming the bull work of our energy production. Thorium is also easier to get than uranium and there is no proliferation risk to it.

Thanks, Ken for a gratefully sound argument FOR nuclear power. The general mass of "environmentalists" have been turned against the idea of nuclear due to antidistablishment principles, basically political ideas that nuclear is a conservative conspiracy, and not to inherent hards facts.

All the naysayers of nuclear need to actually learn the facts, not spew forth what their local hippy organization told them in the 80's. The sad thing is that nuclear is the ONLY power than can saitsfy the energy needs of the world, and the US is going to get left behind as other countries (like China) are ramping up production, guaranteeing themselves cheaper, safer energy. In 25 years, it will be the US with its anti-nuclear holdouts that will be wondering why China has cleaner (and cheaper) energy than the US.

If you are anti-nuclear, than YOU ARE PRO COAL. There is not other way to put it. And you can't really be an environmentalist and be happy about coal fired energy. We need someone like Al gore to start teaching the masses the myths about nuclear that these enviro-nazi's are creating are making us MORE coal plants, and less clean nuclear. And Treehugger seems to not be helping much in that area of nuclear misinformation....

nuclear energy is the way to go. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4092

Dan, I'm not that doctrinaire concerning nuclear either. I think that it is a necessary component. I think that geothermal is a perfectly good source of power. I think that wind and solar are perfectly appropriate for reducing the amount of peak and base load demand, even though they are very expensive per unit output. I don't like hydro because of habitat disruption. There are tidal plants that are interesting as well. You have to separate out what can yield baseload current and what can locally reduce demand and not confuse these issues. I would like to see more geothermal where it is feasible, but I don't know if there is any adverse effect that could dissuade me, I don't know enough about it, but it seems attractive. I guess you need the right fracture zone near to a local upwelling of magma. That being said, the geothermal plants in operation today are not as large as nuclear and the technology would have to improve to compete well enough to displace our need for new reactors.