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posted by martyb on Thursday January 11 2018, @05:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the fast-enough-for-government-work dept.

The Buffalo News reports progress on the West Valley Demonstration Project. After years of converting liquid nuclear waste to glass, the buildings are now being taken down, very carefully.
http://buffalonews.com/2018/01/09/slow-and-steady-west-valleys-decommissioning-is-on-track/

West Valley was the nation’s only commercial nuclear reprocessing plant. The waste was created when the site was operated by Nuclear Fuel Services between 1966 and 1972.

[...] The building where the most highly radioactive materials at the West Valley Demonstration Project were once handled is being torn down.

The vitrification plant is where 600,000 gallons of liquid nuclear waste were turned into glass cylinders in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The cylinders were then packaged in fives and welded into steel canisters before being stored under 21-inch thick concrete casks and relocated to another spot on site.

In mid-September, contractors started peeling away the outside of the steel and sheet metal exterior of the building and the roof. That work wrapped up in early November, said West Valley officials.

“The (contractor) is making great progress with the safe completion of the first phase of this facility’s demolition,” said Bryan Bower, project director for the U.S. Department of Energy. “This accomplishment allows our team to continue its work in the completion of site demolition activities.”

The linked article includes several photos, inside and outside the plant.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by mrkaos on Friday January 12 2018, @12:03AM (2 children)

    by mrkaos (997) on Friday January 12 2018, @12:03AM (#621184)
    Reagan repealed the order against reprocessing fuel, the reason it isn't done is because it is not economically viable.

    It's also insane and destructive to waste 95% of our fuel. We really ought to reprocess that.

    Only if you have the right reactor technology, otherwise you end up with more plutonium that you started with because of the element you add to use the plutonium you've got. They are not called breeder reactors for nothing. No one wants a plutonium economy.

    --
    My ism, it's full of beliefs.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @12:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @12:28AM (#621199)

    Plutonium is a damn fine reactor fuel. It is usually part of a fuel called MOX, mixed oxides, which also contains uranium.

    We burned that for years, under a deal to use up old Russian warheads in our commercial reactors. The warheads got reprocessed in Russia, then shipped over to the USA for power generation. We ended that just a couple years ago, having used up the entire available supply.

    Lots of nuclear stuff is "not economically viable" on purpose. We regulate it to death. It takes balls to say "NO" to just one more regulation -- think of the children -- and that is how you kill an industry. Some people childishly think an economy can operate on rainbows and dreams, so just make that icky industrial stuff go away.

  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday January 12 2018, @10:26AM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Friday January 12 2018, @10:26AM (#621326) Journal

    As already pointed out - we do actually want a plutonium economy.

    But beyond that, first up MOX (extract the U and Pu from the spent fuel and blend it in with fresh fuel - this is the common reprocessing) is a very good way to recycle, not to mention the new russian REMIX (remove the gasses from the fuel and blend in enriched fuel (some 15-19% enrichment in the top-ups) which allows you to only have three full cores worth of fuel for the entire reactor lifetime, increases the amount of depleted uranium produces but drastically reduces the amount of spent fuel). But you could just run the fuel in a better reactor as the DUPIC-process shows (basically you cut the fuel from PWR to size to fit in a CANDU reactor fuel bundle and run the spent fuel as-is, four PWRs can fuel a CANDU completly).

    A bit here.. DUPIC has been demonstrated in S.Korea and in China, REMIX is something the russians are starting to use right now, and MOX is something many countries has been doing for quite some time (mainly produced in France which is the main user of it, Japan also uses it but all their MOX is produced in France due to lack of domestic facitilites (one is almost done)).

    Also - not all breeders produce plutonium, for instance a Th-232 bundle will breed more fissile fuel in the form of U-233 (after a few steps of decay). And if you're not impatient you also get U-235 out of "conventional" breeders (Pu-239 has a halflife of 24k years, and decays to U-235), but that is just wasting energy since Pu-239 is a nicer driver than U-235).
    Being a "breeder" just means you have a breed/conversion ratio above 1 (ie, you produce more fissile material than you use), but pretty much all reactors breed to some extent a normal LWR is at about 0.6 and a PHWR (CANDU et al) is at 0.8 and a few upcomming designs aims for between 0.9 and slightly below 1.0 (notably the VVER-1700 (VVER-SCWR)).
    Oh yeah, also, all common power reactors can be modified to run as breeders so it isn't as exotic as people think (in a CANDU it mainly is a matter of picking the right fuel mix and fuel-shuffling pattern).

    And the reason why reprocessing isn't economically viable is that uranium is dirt cheap, it is at something like 50usd/kg, reprocessing doesn't make economic sense until you start to hit about 150-200usd/kg (the uranium prices has been up to that level a few times - it increases the cost of nuclear by about 0.02c/kWh), for reference most uranium mines need at least about 70usd/kg to make economic sense.

    But yeah, in the mid-term (2 to 60k years (ten half-lifes of Pu-240)) you'd end up with more Pu but less Pu-239 and Pu-238. That is unless you start to use the Pu in a Th-232 or ADS (accelerator driven system) reactor in which case the Pu will drop drastically.
    (And before you scream that it needs special reactors - CANDU has been a commercial mainstay since the 60s and can do the Th-232 cycle and there are 42 CANDU and CANDU-derivate reactors running (for reference, there are 80 BWR running))