thebulletin.org/2024/04/spent-nuclear-fuel-mismanagement-poses-a-major-threat-to-the-united-states-heres-how/
Spent nuclear fuel mismanagement poses a major threat to the United States. Here's how.
EcologicalThe relatively high probability of a nationwide grid collapse, which would lead to multiple nuclear disasters, emphasizes the need to expedite the transfer of spent fuel to dry cask storage. According to Frank von Hippel, a professor of public and international affairs emeritus at Princeton University, the impact of a single accident at an overstocked spent fuel pool has the potential to be two orders of magnitude more devastating in terms of radiological releases than the three Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns combined. If the US grid collapses for a lengthy period of time, society would likely descend into chaos, as uncooled nuclear fuel burned at multiple sites and spewed radioactive plumes into the environment.
Throw it on the pile. Absolutely nothing will be done about this, either. America tends to be less proactive and more kick the can down the road until out of both can and road because profits.
The corner we have painted ourselves into on so many fronts is going to result in the most painful ass kicking imaginable. And the rest of the world is going to point, laugh, and kick the shit out of us when we are down. That might be a good thing. America needs to be knocked down a peg or eight.
Meanwhile, Congress sits there, occasionally when not on vacation, doing nothing and drawing a $200K paycheck.
Congress is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing during late stage capitalism. Congress is the Human Resources of the US Government. They are there to pretend to be looking out for your best interests while only protecting the top of the pyramid.
For most members of congress, the paycheck is absolutely meaningless compared to “the rest of the money”
My wife: "In the event of collapse, at least we don't have to worry about nuclear fallout. There aren't any nuclear power plants near us."
Me: "Honey. There's a plant right down the road from here." (less than 50 miles)
😐
And despite all the disasters to date, not a single fuck will be given by .gov. Nevermind that one EMP and a release of some nice designer flu would, probably at this point, end us.
TBH if the grid collapses it’s gonna be a hellish landscape anyways. It definitely wouldn’t be pretty but I wouldn’t put this as our first worry.
the reason its not "important" is because any grid failure which cannot be fixed in the time it takes for a fuel waste depot to start burning is going to kill perhaps 90% of americans and the survivors wont be living a lifestyle with the luxurary of getting to worry about dying of cancer in 20 years.
Mmm, lovely. Radiation poisoning, microplastics, food covered in pesticides, toxic air, cancerous artificial colorings, sugar & salt in everything, and chromium 6 filled water.
We really are the essence of self destruction, aren't we?
Don't forget prions.
Eh. This is moot. Meltdowns if no power, except if we got to that point with electric grid collapse we'd be fucked already.
IF we got to the point where we weren’t cooling nuclear fuel in the spent fuel pools by choice (minus a major environmental event that flat out prevents it), then the country/world is in a really shitty place. The radiation coming out of those areas would be the least of your worries with whatever civilization world is left. We’ve been poisoning the world with all kinds of stuff, add it to the pile.
And if we stop cooling nuclear fuel, fuck it. It’s over. Radiation scare is weird. Yes it’s bad. Yes it can cause cancer at super high doses. But the majority, if not all people that are near this, will ever see the effects anyway. The world will be so fucked that you won’t know when your next meal will be. Let alone worry about cancer in 30 years. Priorities are weird sometimes.
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1mo
At this point, perhaps.
If we had gone all-on on nuclear and didn't stop from a couple scares though, we might have been able to either avoid or at least push back the collapse by centuries (one of the most likely things to cause a rapid collapse is a global famine resulting from climate instability). I suppose we would then have a bunch more radioactive stuff we needed to deal with though, but who knows, maybe with that level of pressure on the issue we would have come up with more solutions, like figuring out how to make a proper and safe salt reactor design instead of mostly just giving up on that aside from occasional grad students.
why are you trying to survive in a radioactive wasteland? why are you bothering looking for the next meal? for what?
Exactly, this is a post collapse issue which currently only serves to scare people into thinking nuclear energy isn’t a net positive, which it always has been.
Nuclear scare has more to do with Hiroshima, the idea of Atomic winter and general cold war culture and the threats the world faced at that day and age. This amplified the cultural impact of Chernobyl, which in turn amplified the nuclear scare itself.
This is a lasting collapse scenario inherited from the cold war era, and while it is not totally unfounded, as you say, nothing in comparison to our other problems.
But it has a certain doomsday aesthetics around it, far cooler than plastic in the sea or depleted soil. Might be a reason for it's popularity.
They absolutely won’t tell anyone when it happens
I work at a facility that does this and they have a dedicated public liaison branch that would be communicating with federal, state, and local officials, and the press. We absolutely would declare an event like this.
Annie Jacobsen’s new book “Nuclear War: A Scenario” talks about both the spent fuel concern and the grid-down concern, although in her book a California nuclear power plant with with stored spent fuel is hit by a North Korean submarine launched nuclear missile, and the grid down scenario derives from an EMP attack via nuclear weapon delivered by satellite. However different the scenario depicted is, there are similarities in that we really do not want to mess with either spent nuclear fuel/nuclear plants being disconnected from the grid, and an overall grid failure with our current, complexly managed systems.
The article is correct that the fuel cooling in spent fuel pools needs to cool for usually at least a couple of years. What that means is that it needs a steady supply of water on the fuel. It's usually already cooled some before leaving the reactor site. Any regional or national power outage for more than a few weeks will mean big trouble for some of those storage sites, but more so for nuclear reactors.
By design, reactor facility power is grid power, in case the reactor ever had a problem. Therefore, when grid power goes down, their protocol is to shutdown reactors. That's fine as long as generators have fuel to keep fuel there cool by circulating water. Otherwise, meltdown, like Fukashima in 2011. In that case, those reactors shutdown after the earthquake and were fine on generator power; until the tsunami took out most of the generators.
It would be a good idea to know if you live near any reactors or spent fuel storage sites.
Yet people attack me for saying nuclear is not the solution. 🫠 reduce and reuse. We dont need the amounts of energy we’re trying to create
Part of the problem is that most reactors in the U.S. are very old designs. Nuclear power doesn't have to be this potentially dangerous, we need newer designs that can't meltdown. But as we stand, it's a disaster waiting to compound another disaster like an EMP or CME.
I’ve been hearing about the ‘safer ones ‘ for years. They put them in the ground and now our aquifers are affected…. And also i’ve yet to see them put to use …
Not sure what you mean by put them in the ground. There are not a lot of new reactors due to U.S. government regulations making it so difficult, even though new models are safer. Which is a problem since the same government is outlawing a lot a natural gas appliances and pushing people to use more electricity.
Just put it in McDonald's burgers and we'll all eat it. Solved. Or you know, make toothpaste out of it. Or antidepressants. Oh wait, radiation sickness is a great way to lose weight, right? Diet pills! Perfect. /s
They don't already put it in Mountain Dew?
Mountain Dewm
NukaCola!
Not that it really matters now, I'm glad they're on it. I was not fully aware of the extent of the storage problems for spent fuels. This is the sort of information the public and government needs to act responsibility, assuming that's still a possibility.
I asked Claude3 to give me a final summary of the article:
While the author is highly critical of the NRC and the nuclear industry's management of spent fuel, the document does not outright state that nuclear power is untenable. The focus is on the specific issue of spent fuel storage and the need for regulatory action to address the identified vulnerabilities. The author seems to be arguing for improvements to spent fuel management practices, rather than advocating for the abandonment of nuclear power altogether.
The issue of spent fuel definitely exists, but the author is clearly biased and leaving out details about how the reactivity of nuclear fuel is managed in the US. Of all the industries out there, nuclear has some of the toughest regulatory oversight, along with the brightest engineers to solve these issues.
Huh, I wonder where all the nuclear fanboys are now? 🤔
Almost as if the storage of the spend rods are a actual threat, and a issue.
Shocked Pikachu face
We were supposed to be doing that from day one. Again another object lesson into why scientists should stop handing out chainsaws to monkeys.
No you see, they are completely safe as long as a human organization can be counted on to exist and be perfectly competent for 12,000 years. It's so simple.
Threaded spend rods as you put it aren’t nearly as big of a threat as how much damage fossil fuels have already done.
Threat... Nuclear, even if this happened, would still kill less people annually than fossil fuels, which kill millions, and climate change isn't going to lower those numbers.
Sure, there are some risks. But we need to cut fossil fuel usage down and we need something to back up renewables while they can't meet demand. The option is nuclear. Safer, cleaner, greener.
Even with high estimates for Chernobyl it still is only 4,000-16,000 with excessive cancer estimates. Millions die from pollution annually and increasing natural disasters is adding up.
It's all a moot point, this article basically says it's bad if the grid collapses. Already that's a huge problem, grid collapse basically would destroy this country fast.
Even then. They aren't going to fix storage, not that they can because they need power to cool it down, and we aren't going to make more nuclear because it costs too much (ironically because of safety regulations and oversight). Plus, nobody actually gives a shit about climate change. We're fucked, too greedy to bother trying.
I’m not sure I’m a fanboy, but the article does have a clear bias. The storage of nuclear fuel is very redundant and very regulated. Most fuel has a very short reactivity lifespan outside of the reactor such that it is inherently stable; the NRC model uses an earthquake because they need the worst case, most improbable scenarios to all happen at once to actually make a significant sustained unintended criticality.
Well, we have the unused facility that we could just… use. But as of now, dry cask storage is the normal way fuel is stored and they are pretty incredible storage configurations that would all be survive the end of humanity and then some.
I've never understood why people think any sort of nuclear energy would ever be better for us than other kinds of energy. Plus no matter how many failsafes or types of handling are in place there's still so much room for error that can kill us. We probably have the tech to try and replace it all and refuse to try and move on.
Its simple. It doesn't generate power in a process that emits CO2. Given the scary lines surrounding that, its no surprise that people would rather there be parts of the planet that are radioactive instead of clime changing to the point where its no longer predictable to grow crops.
A lesser evil and all that. Even this article is noting how its a big threat if the USA's power grid goes down completely. But whatever is making the entire grid go down and stay down in this hypothetical is probably a far bigger concern than the radiation would be by that point.
Wasn't James Hansen just promoting nuclear the other day? 🙃
I don’t care enough to read that ‘10C warming in the pipeline’ paper again as it was awful, but his source in the pre-print version for his claim that concerns about nuclear safety are overblown was a paper that blames “radiophobes” for the failure of the Glorious Atom.
Then there was his speculating about how tiny-shelled marine organisms will react to the entirely unprecedented changes we have set in motion… how do you even get to that point without realizing you have totally lost the plot?
Let alone the shilling for solar radiation “management,” the lauding of the World fucking Bank as one of humanity’s greatest achievements, his telling young people it’s a “great time to be alive,” and his desire for america to regain its status as “the shining city on the hill.” As though that wasn’t built on exploitation, environmental devastation, and stupendous quantities of oil.
He is just another energy blind old fool, not someone who should be taken seriously.
This is mostly nonsense. Post Fukushima all plants have implemented very costly flex strategies. The plant I work at has a fire truck on site for pumping water from the nearby lake up to the refuel floor and filling the pool with lake water. And to implement this strategy you would have to have about 30 other failures happen first.
There are also a couple places around the country with shared equipment that would get helicoptered to the various plants that need it within 24 hours.
And most plants have all the fuel they can in dry cask storage already. Plants have to maintain there pools empty enough to perform a full core off load for every outage as a contingency. Also fuel needs to stay in the pool for at a minimum of 5 years before it can be moved to dry cask storage.
Now if there was some long term collapse of society sure fuel pools could empty via boiling off. But mostly everyone would be dead already in this scenario anyway so who cares!
has a fire truck on site for pumping water from the nearby lake
Surely 'guy with a truck' is the solution lmfao
And this is why anyone who is collapse aware should be for ending nuclear energy.
I have only found 2 solutions as a security contractor:
A) Glass casket sequestration; call Savannah River Site for detailed info
B) Thorium high temperature (900C) MSR molten salt reactors that burn up most fission radionucliotides; call Oak Ridge Tenesse for info on the 5 year experiment failed in the 1960s. We do not have pipes insulated for 900C salt lava.
I'm thinking that I may be able to substitute in a synthetic high temperature oil that can moderate the reaction with boron pellets at say a more reasonable 450*C.......
Quick, everybody plug in our cars!!
Launch it into space. But use an India launch pad in case the rocket blows up
The following submission statement was provided by /u/HairyPossibility:
The relatively high probability of a nationwide grid collapse, which would lead to multiple nuclear disasters, emphasizes the need to expedite the transfer of spent fuel to dry cask storage. According to Frank von Hippel, a professor of public and international affairs emeritus at Princeton University, the impact of a single accident at an overstocked spent fuel pool has the potential to be two orders of magnitude more devastating in terms of radiological releases than the three Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns combined. If the US grid collapses for a lengthy period of time, society would likely descend into chaos, as uncooled nuclear fuel burned at multiple sites and spewed radioactive plumes into the environment.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1bw0wtu/spent_nuclear_fuel_mismanagement_poses_a_major/ky31sd6/