Spent Nuclear Fuel Howard “Cork” Hayden October, 2018 issue of The Energy Advocate
The photo above, from Chemical and Engineering News, 17 September 2018, shows spent-fuel casks at the Zion Illinois Nuclear Power Station. The C&E News article was, of course, about how to dispose of the “waste,” now that ex-Senator Harry Reed has managed to obstruct the use of the Yucca Mountain site. The article’s emphasis is about the need for a place to store spent fuel, but the photo tells a great story all by itself. In the first place, the casks shown contain all—100%— of the spent fuel from about 25 years of operation of Zion’s two 1,020-MWe reactors. By way of comparison, a single 1,000-MWe coal-fired plant requires 120 railroad cars, each containing 100 tons of coal every day. (A similar amount of natural gas flowing through normally unseen pipes is used in gas-fired plants.) Two other things are revealed by that picture. The spent fuel, at this stage, does not require water cooling. Most of the fission by-products from the reactor have very short half-lives; that is, they are very radioactive, but for a short time. For a while, the spent fuel must be kept in circulating water, but after a year or so, the heat produced is low enough that the spent-fuel rods can be transferred to these air-cooled casks for outdoor storage. Finally, the radiation at the surface of the casks is so low that it presents no hazard to humans. Workmen can go there unimpeded (though there’s probably no work to do there). Anybody with a wire cutter could get through the chain-link perimeter fence and walk right up to the storage casks.
As a long-time observer of the energy scene, I remind everybody that the war on nuclear is only part of the war on energy being waged by both the malicious and the ignorant. All energy saves lives, even from unreliable piddle-power sources like firewood (500 W/acre 1200 W/ha year-round average), wind (5 kW/acre, 12 kW/ha year-round average), and solar (>>>$1 million/kWh at midnight).
Please don’t get sucked in by his implication that fossil fuels are bad. You’d be joining the battle against energy. Cheers, Cork _____________________ Howard "Cork" Hayden corkhayden@comcast.net NEW! Energy: A Textbook, $25 at www.energyadvocate.com and www.valeslake.com P.O. Box 7609 Pueblo West, CO 81007 Consensus is the enemy of science