Samuel Brinton is the Biden Administration's pick for deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy.
Brinton is flamboyant. In LGBTLMNOP lingo, that means his lifestyle choices are in-your-face, almost as a dare.
I delayed writing anything about this issue because it was getting barrels of ink from the mainstream media. I also delayed because, well, I could not get a good fix on how this needy person fits into Biden's team's agenda.
Possibilities:
Enrage the conservatives
Much of the ink spilled by the mainstream would have you believe the right is "losing their minds" but I have not seen much of that from the serious right authors. If that was the reason Biden's team chose Brinton then I am not sure it is working.
Brinton is the best man for the job
Allow me to express a little skepticism. The TECHNICAL problem in handling nuclear waste involves finding stable geographical formations where water does NOT infiltrate. There are hundreds of salt and gypsum domes and depleted petroleum formations that meet those needs.
The fact that pressurized natural gas was retained by these formations is a pretty good indication of their stability. Given these realities, most qualified candidates are geologists who work in the petrochemical or coal industry.
Another technical problem is in transporting hot nuclear waste.
The biggest problem, overall, is POLITICAL. Nobody wants a tanker truck loaded with toxic soup traveling over the same freeways they commute to work on. Nobody wants the oil-field near them pumped full of hot, glass pellets.
Since most of the formations that might be useful for disposal of waste are located in conservative areas (the South and the West), picking a flamboyant is a thumb-in-the-eye of the people most likely to be impacted.
I fail to see how having an official like Brinton solves the technical problem or relaxes the political ones.
Creating new industry
Binton's technical specialty seems to involve extracting some of the radioactive isotopes from the waste, packaging into some dimensionally stable form and then re-inserting it into the core of a nuclear reactor to be used as fuel.
Moving the Overton Window
This seems to be the most likely reason. Biden's Team's mission believes that all technical problems will patiently wait while the United States achieves some ill-defined uber-liberal utopia.
That means that Biden's Team does not consider nuclear waste to be much of a problem, at least not compared to the inequalities experienced by LGBTLMNOP types.
They will find, as millions have in the past, that reality is hard and reality waits for no man...no matter how much they "imagine" or "want" something.
ERJ, you may be knowledgeable about this than I: how much of an issue is nuclear waste in terms of placement? Are we running out of space?
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is that very large amounts of radioactive waste is stored on-site at the nuclear power plants in "swimming pools".
DeleteThe swimming pools were originally intended to be a short term solution. The spent rods contain a duke's mixture of radioactive isotopes. The ones with the shortest half-lives produce the most radiation initially but quickly dissipate.
To use a crappy analogy, the swimming pool was intended to function like cracking the screw-top of that warm bottle of Dr Pepper, letting the fizz escape.
After the waste de-fizzed, it was to be trucked to a suitable, underground facility to smolder for 50,000 years or so.
That is where the process stalled. No jurisdiction was willing to receive the hot material. Thus much of it sits in aging containment barrels inside nuclear facilities.
As far as I know, the issue is long term storage - high level waste has been stored "temporarily" at power plants and processing facilities for 60 years now. Some of them are running out of space and in most cases the storage is vulnerable to long term threats, for example earthquakes, floods, terrorists, etc. In addition, some of the waste is highly corrosive so there are issues with leaks and spills.
ReplyDeleteHanford in particular has had problems with it getting into groundwater.
The big issue is that everybody sees radioactive waste as a huge Boogeyman so every plan to store it has been fought by somebody, no matter the other problems already existing in that area.
Ex Navy nuc here. I disagree with the highly corrosive part of the waste. Reprocessing of spent fuel does generate nasty chemical waste that is higly radioactive, yes. Spent fuel from reactors, no.
DeleteNot saying something shouldn't be done with spent fuel but I think you're conflating two different problems.
I didn't work in the civilian power industry but a number of my shipmates do and I've talked w them about this and other things. The spent fuel is not only VERY radioactive but it also is still generating significant heat from radioactive decay of the fission products that build up in the fuel during operation.
The fuel that's most recently out of the reactor goes into the swimming pool looking storage, usually inside the containment building. The water provides the cooling needed as well as acts as radiation shielding. There is obviously a limited amount of space inside the containment so this is just temporary (months or maybe years).
After some time though (months or a couple of years) the spent fuel has cooled (thermally speaking) such that air cooling is enough to remove that decay heat. Once it's at this point, the fuel can be put into huge concrete shielded containers and parked outside the containment building, for our purposes indefinitely. That outside, air-cooled storage space isn't going to run out.
Back 25+ years ago, the feds had promised they'd find a long term repository to store this spent fuel in, but they have to pay down the debt and make social security solvent again before they get to the easy problems like getting some place to accept a long term storage site near them.
I used a term "reprocessing" that I should explain or define. "Reprocessing" nuclear waste (spent fuel that's been used in a reactor) still has a substantial amount of the original Uranium 235 or Plutonium in it.
DeleteIt would and does make sense to "reprocess" that spent fuel to remove the expensive Uranium & Plutonium so that you can make more new fuel out of that.
The French do this with their civilian nuclear waste as well as spent fuel from their nuclear powered naval vessels. Alas, the US does not reprocess spent civilian fuel due to Jimmy Carter era concerns about encouraging proliferation of nuc weapons. So, a lot of useful material still gets thrown away when you dispose of that unprocessed waste.
Said all that to say, "reprocessing" spent nuclear fuel usually means dissolving the fuel assemblies (highly radioactive) in different acids and then using yet more chemicals to extract the U/Pu. That would be the toxic, corrosive and pretty radioactive stuff I think was mentioned above.
"The TECHNICAL problem in handling nuclear waste involves finding stable geographical formations where water does infiltrate."
ReplyDeleteis this sentence missing the word "not"?
Yes. Great catch. Thanks for pointing it out.
DeleteThanks to all who responded. This discussion now makes more sense - and one would in fact assume that long term nuclear waste storage should rise to the top of someone's list - but a fairly unresolvable one.
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit late to this thread, but Finland is finishing their radioactive waste tomb for permanent storage. At one point, if I recall correctly, and before the enviroweenies started jumping up and down, the U.S. was building a similar type of storage facility under some mountain out west.
ReplyDeleteHere's a link to a Science.org story about Finland's facility, which is called Onkalo. Rather interesting.
https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-store-nuclear-waste-can-it-survive-100000-years
He may be qualified for the role but maybe it’s a bit more sinister.....
ReplyDeleteSafety and concern for health and environment be damned. You are a LGBTLMNOP-phobic hater if you oppose any ideas that come from this department, especially ones that will involve your backyard/state.
If you (citizen, elected official, governor) are this phobic/hater, you will be sanctioned or fined, have federal benefits withdrawn from your state, or property repossessed. Prosecution may ensue for hate crimes against a government official.
It is quite a stretch, but it would not surprise me if we start hearing Mr. Brinton start making claims of hate if any of his ideas start meeting resistance
I'm not against Diversity. Jobs should not be held away from people because they aren't something you would see on Leave it to Beaver. But holding jobs away from qualified people people and giving them to someone less qualified because they would be The First three armed Cyclops to hold the position is a level of stupid that I can not understand.
ReplyDelete