Fukushima To Become Nuclear Dump?

mdsolar writes "Japan's atomic energy specialists are discussing a plan to make the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant a storage site for radioactive waste from the crippled station run by Tokyo Electric Power Co."

Words

[Anonymous Coward]

Words are fun.

"Dump" vs "Storage Site" or "Spent Fuel Storage" or "Waste Storage".

You can tell when someone is trying to sensationalize a story by the words they choose.

Nuts!

[Peter H.S.]

Yes, make a nuclear waste dump on a site known to be hit by magnitude 9.0 earthquakes and Tsunamis. Great idea that shows how safety conscious the nuclear industry is.

Re:Sea level rise

[mdsolar]

I think you are considering sea level rise this century which will likely be less than six meters. But nuclear waste is a problem for much longer than 90 years. The number should be 80 meters for complete melting plus tsunami wash so 150 meters or higher above current see level would be needed for a nuclear dump.

100.000 years

[captainpanic]

The comments here once again show that people only look for the duration of their own lifespans (or perhaps a little more) regarding the storage of nuclear waste.

Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe. Which is safe without human intervention in the next decades/centuries/millenia.
You can't dump it somewhere and make a plan to "build a dike if need be". Who will guarantee that a dike will be built if need be in 250 years from now? Or 2500 years from now?

Re:Words

[captainpanic]

So, is TFA using strong words, or is the nuclear industry generally using euphemisms for their problems? You can't deny either of them. And the truth lies in the middle.

Re:Sea level rise

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny that you dismiss a scientific argument as a hoax, but claim a 2000 year old bedtime story as the truth.

Or...

whoooooooooooosh. I very much hope whoooooooooooosh.

Re:Waste

[circletimessquare]

then you want breeder reactors, which leave 1/10th the amount of waste, generate 10x more power, and have less harmful radioactive waste byproducts with halflives of a century rather than 10,000 years

problem is, breeder reactors make plutonium. nobody wants anyone making plutonium

nuclear power is over, it's a historical, ostracized energy source as of march 11, 2011. all serious nations are moving away from nuclear. nuclear is a wonderful power source in all regards except for the waste nightmare and the fact that althought hings rarely go wrong, when they do, they REALLY go wrong

if you deny nuclear power is an endangered species, you indeed are living in denial, and you just remind me of baghdad bob:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf [wikipedia.org]

Re:Words

[SomeKDEUser]

Except spent fuel can be recycled in a breeder reactor. It is only "waste" if you give up on using it!

Re:100.000 years

[kevinNCSU]

Not that I think this is a good site location, but in your hypothetical, if there's no people or organized government around to do so who cares? In such a post-apocalyptical world no ones going to care about a little nuclear waste winding up in the ocean when there's a zombie ripping their face off to get to their delicious brains.

Re:Words

[Jawnn]

Calling it a dump is hardly sensational. The word "dump" has always had, in common parlance, a definition that equates to "a place where things no longer wanted or useful are discarded". Ergo, any place where we put the mess made by nuclear energy processes is a dump. It may rub your pro-nuke sensibilities the wrong, but you really need to get over that, because calling it "storage" is just plain stupid. Storage? Seriously? Stored there until... what? You find a way to render it useful for something? Please.

To add a bit more about fast breeders

[dbIII]

Plutonium fast breeders were shown to be an expensive waste of time way back in the 1970s - the exception is if you are just starting out on atomic bomb production. That's probably before you and the weird cargo cult nuclear fanboys here were born. Everything in nuclear has moved on apart from the fanboys and the lobbyists that just want fleece the taxpayer by getting governments to buy old nuclear technology.

Re:Words

[dunkelfalke]

That is the theory. In the practice there are currently only three breeding reactors online, one in India, one in Russia and one in Japan (that one had a previous sodium leak and fire). What makes things even worse, two of these three are research reactors, only the russian one is the real deal.

Breeding reactors are very expensive and complicated to operate, it is far cheaper to dump spent fuel somewhere. So yes, it is waste.

Re:Waste

[Will.Woodhull]

I agree with the above, but want to point out that the ultimate failure of the nuclear power industry has nothing to do with a lack of foresight by engineering or science.

The underlying problem is one of an inadequate accounting system. The nuclear power industry is the first time anyone has tried to do cost benefit analysis on processes where the overwhelmingly greatest costs are in managing the waste stream: post-production costs. Early accounting systems were developed to manage costs of feedstocks, production, and moving product to market. Waste was not accounted for, which led to the incredible pollution problems of the last century. Handling the accounting of waste management or post-production costs continues to be a kind of correction tacked on to the basic bookkeeping systems in current use, rather than an integral part of any accounting system.

If it had been otherwise, it is doubtful that any business would have ventured into nuclear power generation. It would have been obvious that the total cost, including handling the waste stream, is too great to justify any reasonable investment.

Re:Words

[peragrin]

That's only because the USA and japan and Europe has banned all new reactors of safe designs and decided to extend the life of the old reactors by 2-3 times their original design lifetimes.

That's like taking your pickup truck to 500,000 miles because you like the color. It makes no sense.

I am not saying to not build safely, but to actually build the new safe designs before we need them to be built in a hurry, and thus under specced.