Dr. Conca reports that we might actually make a move that brings us closer to the disposal of nuclear waste than ever before. Give each of the two main types of nuclear waste, from weapons and from electrical power generation, has their own deep geologic repository. Last week, President Obama authorized the Energy Department to move forward with a plan for a separate repository for high-level radioactive waste that was created from making atomic and nuclear weapons. Immediately, Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz announced what we have been wanting for decades a separate deep geologic nuclear waste repository for our defense-generated high-level nuclear waste (HLW), to be separated for our spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from commercial power reactors. HLW is bomb waste. Weapons waste.
Very different from commercial SNF which is not really waste at all. This last point is really the important one. A separate repository for useless defense waste would go faster and cheaper than a larger repository for both waste types. Right now the law is that SNF and HLW have to be disposed of together at the same time, referred to as co-mingling, even if that makes no sense, and that the repository has to have a 50-year retrievability period for the spent fuel, in case we want to use it again. The Secretary announcement signals an end to this nonsense, and is an attempt to bring science and common sense back into what became a horribly political process in the 1970s and 80s. The amount of nuclear waste in America is quite small, totaling less than a soccer field. The U.S. has about 80,000 metric tons each of SNF and HLW, measured as metric tons of heavy metals, or MTHM.
SNF does not need any reprocessing or alteration to be disposed of, or shipped or just stored. This may be progress. On the other hand, HLW is in different liquid, sludge and solid forms in various containers such as the 90 million gallons stored in large tanks at Hanford, Savannah River and other DOE facilities.
The original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-flow-batteries-the-energy-storage-breakthrough-weve-needed/#395ad0a5bde8
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