On 18 Jul 2004 08:16:29 -0700, jim rozen wrote:
In article , Roger Shoaf says...
Any endeavor of man has benefits and costs. The United States has been
collecting a tax on all of the power generated at all of this countries
nuclear power plants for years promising to build a repository for the
waste.

Hmm. So now it's the government's responisibility? If this
were a discussion about education, or welfare, or product
liability, the term "nanny state" would be thrust into play
at this point.

Why shouldn't Entergy Co. be required to run its buisiness
*without* government assurances that they will be bailed out
in the end? And by 'bailed out' I mean, 'the nanny state will
step in and buy all the fuel rods and the decrepit plant, for
one dollar, at the end if it's lifetime.' Because that's the
kind of subsidy that apparently is needed to make the nuclear
power business a paying proposition.

See IRS section 468A. Each utility is taxed one tenth of one cent
per kWh generated to fund the federal nuclear decommissioning
trust fund. In 1999, the trust fund contained $22,5 billion dollars,
designated by law to pay for plant decommissioning and permanent
high level waste disposal. So industry has already paid, and continues
to pay, for a service it is not receiving.

As I remember it, if you were to stack all of the spent fuel rods in one
place it would fit inside an average high school gymnasium. This is not a
whole lot of stuff to store in such a way as to protect the public.

All the spent fuel used in all commercial nuclear plants since the
beginning of the nuclear age would fit on a football field, making
a pile with a depth of 3 feet (in other words, about 5,000 cubic yards).

As Jim notes below, actually doing that wouldn't be a very good idea,
due to criticality issues. In reality you'd need to increase the volume
about 36 times (in air) in order to avoid overheating. But you're right
in essence, it isn't a huge amount of material. In fact it is miniscule
compared to the wastes produced by any other power generating
method.

More importantly, most of it isn't "spent". Only about 3% of the fissile
material in a "spent" rod has fissioned. By using reprocessing, almost
all of the remaining fissile material could be recovered and reused
(and if breeder technology were used, more fissile material would be
recovered than was originally present in the rods). That means the
amount of *real* high level waste, stuff with no commercial value, is
much smaller than the already tiny amounts we're talking about.

Yep, and if you removed all the space from inside the atoms in the
fuel rod assemblies, you could fit them all inside a teacup. My
point being, you *can't* stack them in a swimming pool, and you know
that. Saying so is deceptive. If they *could* do that, they would.
Trust me. They're having enought trouble stacking *one* plant's
spent fuel in one swimming pool right now, in Buchannan, NY. The
pool is full and for them to keep running the plan they've got to
start taking the older stuff out so the hot stuff can go in.

Correct, and they've already paid the federal government $22.5 billion
dollars to do just that. The problem is, the federal government won't
live up to their end of the bargain. The feds took the money, but they
won't deliver the service.

To add insult to injury, the NRC won't allow the utilities to dispose of
the spent fuel in any other way. If the federal government didn't prohibit
it, the utilities could simply build other cooling pools following the Safstor
protocols, or sell the fuel rods to reprocessors in France, Japan, or Korea,
or start up a reprocessing facility of their own in the US. But all that is
forbidden.

Federal law requires them to turn the spent fuel rods over to the US
government for disposal, the government has already been paid to
accept them, but the government won't obey its own laws, and is
refusing to take the rods.

This tempest in a teapot is all purely political, of course. There is no
valid scientific, engineering, or financial reason why nuclear waste disposal
should be a major issue. Since 1954, there have been 100 commercial
reactors decommissioned, 250 reseach reactors, and about a dozen fuel
processing facilities. We have a very good handle on the methodologies
required, and on their actual costs.

The trust fund was designed to cover costs higher than actual practice
has shown us to be realistic. In other words, it has a lot more money in it
than is strictly necessary to safely accomplish decommissioning and
high level waste disposal for all existing US plants.

Gary