This is in response to SDAI's post to the Food Irradiation thread below. I felt it important enough to open a new thread.

I really don’t know where you have been getting your information on nuclear waste transport, but I suspect your sources are overly pessimistic. The technology to do this has been available since the seventies, and although it has never been tested in this country on a mass scale, it has been safely employed overseas, and proven in concept here. The specialized steel containers designed for transporting spent fuel rods are designed to survive truck or train accidents without a breach, and are even equipped with their own backup cooling equipment. With a proper management and monitoring system to support them, I am convinced they are a safe means to transport these wastes and, most importantly, the industry cannot function without them. With today’s technological advances, we shouldn’t have anything to worry about. Whether they will be tolerated by the communities they pass through is another matter…but that is not a technical or administrative obstacle.

Radioactive materials do not “attract” radioactivity, or make other materials radioactive, and if properly contained and shielded, they are safe. (Granted, that’s a big “if”, this is some of the most lethal stuff known to man!) The elaborate dedicated rail line and washing equipment you mention is just not necessary, although I might suggest a platoon of heavily armed guards to protect it from terrorist action, in my opinion, the biggest potential hazard.

To understand just why this problem has not been solved in this country it is necessary to understand the nature of the fuel recycling process. Pressurized water reactors use slightly enriched (about 6%) uranium 235 in solid solution with U238, chemically bound in an oxide such as UO2. Uranium is radioactive, but not particularly dangerous to handle. These fuel pellets are clad in metal and stacked inside long thin metal tubes which are bundled in groups held apart by metal spacers so the optimum geometry to support fission is maintained. A tube assembly is called a fuel rod and at any one time several fuel rods are in the reactor core. Depending on where they are in the core, they get consumed at different rates, so they are periodically moved around, removed and replaced.
It is these spent fuel rods which are currently in pools of water at nuclear plants all over the country, and they are extremely radioactive and highly dangerous. Sooner or later we will have to do something with them. They are literally rusting away as we speak, and it’s only a matter of time before they start leaking. They are also very hot, thermally. That’s why they’re in pools of water.

A spent fuel rod is dangerous because the uranium oxide pellets inside are now contaminated with a lethal cocktail of fission products (the highly radioactive radio-isotopes left over when a U235 nucleus splits. In addition, stray neutrons in the reaction have been absorbed by U238 nuclei to produce Plutonium 239, an almost unimaginably toxic substance which has the additional disadvantage of being great for making weapons. There is still also a lot of useful U235 in this “spent” rod which is recoverable for use as fuel. Those fission products I mentioned compete with the U235 for neutrons so the fuel rod becomes spent long before the U235 is all used up. This stuff is very expensive to make, as the Iranians and the Koreans are learning, so we can’t afford to waste it.

This fuel rod, or element, is extremely dangerous to handle, and all future work with it must be done by remote control.
To process the rod requires dissolving it in acid, chemically separating the inert materials from the fissionables and the fission products, sending the Uranium out to be re-enriched so it can be incorporated into new fuel elements, and sending the Plutonium to the government for storage or weapons manufacture. What’s left, a very toxic chemical slurry of fission products dissolved in a highly corrosive nitric acid, can then be processed to remove the acid and to encase the fission products in water-insoluble glass bricks so they can be stored in some facility somewhere. Salt mines are the current choice because they are geologically stable, dissipate heat easily,and because we can easily recover the stuff if we change our minds.

So essentially we have a highly complex chemical process, as involved as petroleum refining, which must be done entirely by remote control behind heavy shielding. We can’t do this at each reactor site. We need centralized sites, several of them. And we need transport facilities. Most of all, we need lots of money, and lots of monitoring. We can do this (the French have been doing it for decades) but it’s not easy, it’s expensive, and there are a lot of places where things can go wrong. The mess at Hanford Works, Washington is an example of just how bad things can go wrong. Look it up.

The Plutonium recovered in this process has legitimate uses too, besides weapons. It is also useful as reactor fuel, and even the relatively inert U238 can, by neutron absorption, also be converted to Plutonium as I mentioned earlier. Specialized reactors called “breeders” can do this extremely efficiently, and by thus releasing the potential energy in the U238 nucleus could provide an unexhaustable source of energy for when the Uranium mines tap out (yes, natural Uranium is not an infinite resource). This entire energy budget composed of different reactor types, fuels, and fuel processing regimes was all worked out in the early sixties and was well within the technological capabilities of that era. None of this is new, exotic high tech. It is called the “fuel cycle” and it was part of the master plan to gradually replace fossil fuels by atomics as first proposed by the Eisenhower administration. Yes, even then, we knew the oil would not last forever. The plan was worked out so each new technology, like breeders, could be placed on line in time to replace earlier stages, and the profits from each deployment could finance the next step in the process. But none of this happened in the USA like it did in other countries.

The mad rush to cash in on the profits of nuclear generated electricity without making the investment to systematically develop a nationwide nuclear program with the long view in mind is why we’re in the mess we’re in. It is, in my opinion,
one of the most irresponsible things ever done in this country by private enterprise and big government working hand in hand. Private enterprise was greedy, it was not willing to wait for the fuel cycle to develop naturally, and government was too cowardly to go to the taxpayer and say ”this is a 100 year program and it’s going to cost us up front to do it right”. By the early seventies it was pretty clear that the corporate profit part of the process was go, but the government regulatory and fuel cycle infrastructure was not developing to keep up with it. And once it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen, we’re lucky the anti-nuke movement kicked in and put a stop to it all. It was just in time.

Sure, a lot of the anti-nuke propaganda was just that, BS, but what was coming out of the industry and it’s government mouthpieces was worse. I know, because I was one of them.