What kind of super-men do you expect to design, build, run, secure, and maintain these plants? All it takes is one accident, and you've got a disaster on your hands.
Er, no, someone hasn't been reading. New nukes have passive safety features built into the physics of the plants. Imagine a candle burning away underneath a giant water balloon. What happens when the candle burns too brightly? POP! And the candle goes out. It's a bit like that. The physicists tell me they're like that now. It doesn't matter if Homer Simpson falls asleep. Many fast neutron reactors have some sort of reactor medium fluid in them that slows the neutrons down so they can sustain the nuclear reaction in the other rods. If the fluid overheats, a metal plug melts and the fluid drains away, shutting down the reaction. Another version is actually built into the fuel rods themselves! It's called 'Neutron Leak'. You know how metal expands when it gets hot? Well if these rods get so hot they leave normal operational temperatures, they expand. Hold your hands up in front of your face with your fingers pointing up and held tightly together. That's normal temperatures with the 'closed fingers' catching all the neutrons and enabling the nuclear reaction. Now spread your fingers apart, splayed all over the place. That's the fuel rods expanding, leaking neutrons. The nuclear reaction shuts down. It seems that the 'deadly, scary' fuel rods themselves are now the final safety cut-off switch! How long have we had this? Is this some scary, hot off the press technology that hasn't been thoroughly tested? Nope. We've known how to build 'neutron leak' into fuel rods since the late 1980's —about 30 years. OK? And again, it's passive. No super-human required, not even Homer Simpson is needed to stay awake.
The fuel itself is dangerous, and remains dangerous for billions of years. Who do you trust to be able to tame something like that? And even if you trust the current engineers and businessmen and politicians to keep it safe, you have to trust those that follow, for the rest of your life (and the lives of those to follow).
No my friend, that is where you are totally wrong! You need to google Generation IV reactors. The Integral Fast Reactor burns nuclear waste! Do you understand that? The experts tell us that once-through fuel is only 'depleted uranium' that has lost about 0.06% of its energy. In other words, you're talking about storing or burying a fuel source that is MILLIONS of times more energy dense than oil or coal. Rather than being a problem to store for 100 thousand years, nuclear waste is now an energy source! Indeed, with Integral Fast reactors about to come out just the waste we have mined today could RUN THE ENTIRE PLANET FOR 500 YEARS! Did you catch that?
Nuclear waste; it's not the problem, it's the solution. How's that for a slogan?
Indeed, it seems the problem is that we don't have enough nuclear 'waste'. (Once through fuel). It takes a few fuel cycles to breed up the uranium into plutonium (of a 'flavour' that cannot make bombs, indeed, these IFR's burn bombs as well!). If we roll IFR's off the production line as fast as I'd like to see them to come off the line, we'll run out of waste. Sure the waste we have today could hypothetically run the world for 500 years, but it has to go through the breeding process, and I forget whether it's 7 or 10 years per doubling period of the fuel cycle but eventually the 'waste' that goes into one plant will run two plants. And then it happens again, and again, until all the uranium is bred up into plutonium and running hot through the IFR's at it's maximum potential. Or some technobabble like that; I don't know the equations and physics, just the English executive summary. (If a scientists can explain it to me in English then I know we BOTH have a chance of understanding it. ;-)
So the bottom line is that while we wait for the final kinks to be ironed out of GE's S-PRISM GenIV reactor, we should really be building out Gen3 reactors like the CANDU or the AP1000. If we do that, then we'll have more than enough 'waste' to run through the IFR's when they finally hit the marketplace. And by then we'll be able to close uranium mining for about a thousand years, as that's how much fuel we'll have sitting around for 'free'.
Lastly, there is a little waste left over after all this. It's super-hot stuff, so we have to guard it carefully, but only for 300 years. It's so hot it burns itself back to safe levels in that time. And the volume is drastically reduced. So basically if we are building earthquake proof reactors, then we can store this waste in the basement for all I care; it only has to stay there 300 years. And the reactor should be a heavily guarded, earthquake proof building capable of withstanding hurricanes and 9/11 styled jet attacks.
So once again, with IFR's nuclear waste is not the problem but THE SOLUTION!
