A Promising Process For Nuclear Fuel Re-use and Disposal? (autonocion.com) 61
A Canadian lab has run a chemical process on real spent nuclear fuel "and pulled out 90% of the long-lived danger in 24 hours, the part that forces a burial site to last 100,000 years," notes the blog Autonocio, "with the leftovers meant to fuel a reactor."
The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, sit them in a pool of water for seven to ten years while the heat and radiation come down, seal them in concrete casks, and look for somewhere deep and geologically dull to leave them for the next hundred thousand years. Canada has been hunting for that burial site since the 1980s and still doesn't have one in the ground.
A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all. Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls WATSS can strip 90% of the long-lived material out of used Canada Deuterium Uranium [CANDU] fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn't a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90% figure.
None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem.
"The chemistry has a lab result behind it. The reactor does not exist..." the article points out. "Moltex is aiming to have its first WATSS and SSR-W units running at Point Lepreau by the early-to-mid 2030s... Not everyone buys the pitch. Critics have argued the reprocessing creates its own stream of byproducts, that the economics are unproven, and that a single site's stockpile is finite."
But Moltex "isn't alone in trying to burn nuclear waste instead of bury it," the article notes, with Switzerland and Denmark "chasing the same goal a different way." Switzerland's Transmutex drives a subcritical reactor with a particle accelerator, feeding it spent fuel alongside thorium... Denmark's Copenhagen Atomics is building a thorium molten-salt reactor that fits inside a shipping container and runs on the leftovers from conventional plants.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader kwelch007 for sharing the article.
A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all. Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls WATSS can strip 90% of the long-lived material out of used Canada Deuterium Uranium [CANDU] fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn't a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90% figure.
None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem.
"The chemistry has a lab result behind it. The reactor does not exist..." the article points out. "Moltex is aiming to have its first WATSS and SSR-W units running at Point Lepreau by the early-to-mid 2030s... Not everyone buys the pitch. Critics have argued the reprocessing creates its own stream of byproducts, that the economics are unproven, and that a single site's stockpile is finite."
But Moltex "isn't alone in trying to burn nuclear waste instead of bury it," the article notes, with Switzerland and Denmark "chasing the same goal a different way." Switzerland's Transmutex drives a subcritical reactor with a particle accelerator, feeding it spent fuel alongside thorium... Denmark's Copenhagen Atomics is building a thorium molten-salt reactor that fits inside a shipping container and runs on the leftovers from conventional plants.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader kwelch007 for sharing the article.
Long life (Score:1)
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Nuclear disasters are huge. Fukushima was evacuated for a decade. Everyone involved lose their homes. The psychopath CEOs r
Who modded up this incoherent conspiracy nonsense? Fukushima Prefecture has 1.7m people. Fukushima city was never evacuated.
Several towns were, but that was a big mistake causing unnecessary harm to people.
Perhaps AC is confusing it with Chernobyl ?
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If it is only that material (due to stochastic decay you always have all decay products), that would be about 0.08 mrem when holding it for 5 minutes. The annual limit you should be exposed to is 100 mrem. So one might say you can hold it for some time, but don't make it a habit.
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100 mrem/yr is highly conservative. But yes, don't sleep on that stuff if you can help it.
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Not very conservative. But you get an average of 0.3 rem per year or so from natural sources anyways. So the reasoning is that the 0.1 rem in addition should only increase your cancer risk by 33% or so. Of course that is for full-body exposure and some radiation is far, far worse than the natural background radiation.
Now your base cancer risk is about 25% per lifetime. Do you really want it to get significantly higher?
Re: Long life (Score:4, Interesting)
Heck, even in the hardest hit areas in Japan from the Fukushima disaster, the WHO estimates only a 4% increase in the lifetime risk of hard tumor occurrence for female children (the highest risk group) with significant internal exposure to radioisotopes. And to clarify, that's a 4% increase to the rate, not an additional 4% likelihood of getting cancer.
The same study estimates the highest change would be in the rate of thyroid cancer, an increase of 70%, but even there, the change in the absolute chances lifetime occurrence is only estimated to go from like
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Very roughly, it does work like this. You are just trying to confuse the issue. How repulsive.
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Regardless of exactly how rough or not the estimate is, The math does make it clear that you don't want to put it under your pillow. If it's 0.08 mrem for five minutes, then it would be .96 mrem for an hour and 7.86 mrem for a nights sleep. Then about thirteen nights to hit the yearly max of 100 mrem. Basically, in a year, if it's where you sleep, you'll get double your yearly dose. Wear it as a necklace, even to bed and you're looking at quadrupling your yearly dose. However you want to nitpick about how m
Re: Long life (Score:2)
If that's using the linear no threshold model of radiation exposure, that's been debunked.
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As an approximation, it is good enough. And since we are talking rem, not sievert, we are not trying to be precise anyways. But I guess that is already far beyond you.
Re: Long life (Score:2)
Just curious what the point of that personal insult at the end was.
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Too many smart-asses here today. I make a point of insulting all of them these days. You may have been caught by accident. Or not.
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But yes, don't sleep on that stuff if you can help it.
You will be thinking of the Kramatorsk radiological accident. That was Cs137, a 30 year half-life and a gamma emitter. Scary stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Also remember that those 0.1 Rem are for full body exposure. Concentrated exposure comes with much lower limits and much higher cancer risks. Cancer in your hand is probably not fun.
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"Cancer in your hand is probably not fun"
in my teens a neighbor had severe cancer of the jaw.
i'll take hand cancer any any even if it's my dominant hand
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The summary doesn't say that the half-life is 100,000 years, but that the material is dangerous for 100,000 years.
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It's considered no longer dangerous after 99.9997% of the radioactivity is gone, about 100,000 years.
Re:Long life (Score:5, Informative)
Don't conflate "forces a burial site to last 100,000 years" with the half-life.
I'd assume the majority of the elements' half-lives are much shorter than 100,000 years, so that they will have dropped in population enough after 100,000 years for the waste to be considered 'safe'.
Wikipedia: Radioactive waste [wikipedia.org] gives a run down of the isotopes of concern and their half-lives.
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Oh, you probably can. Just do not breath even a microgram of it or you are toast. For comparison, holding Asbestos in your hand is absolutely no problem whatsoever. Not everything that is an absolute killer is also a contact-poison.
Hence I vote this "most insightless comment of the whole discussion".
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Re: "Clean Energy" (Score:2)
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Given how much power you take from uranium, this is something you actually have to check the math.
And have to redo it against deuterium.
Also give 100 years and people might be doing the dumbass thing of trying to reclaim the trash that is no longer trash due process refinements possibly by force.
For those unfamiliar.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Moltex has been pitching this concept for some time now. They moved from the UK to NB because the province was trying to figure out what to do with their CANDU replacement and put up some money for alternatives willing to move to the province. Moltex, and two others, obliged.
Moltex claims that a WATSS + SSR reactor can produce electricity for about 14.5 cents/Wh. That is twice the current going rate, let alone the rate from the paid-off CANDU6. However, they also claim that by burning the waste from other plants that the cost would come down into the 8.5 range, which is competitive with CANDU's like Pickering.
However, all of this depends on the capital cost of the WATSS being around 850 million. There is absolutely no way that will happen. Everything takes place in hot cells, the plant structure itself has to be safed, the resulting fuel has to be moved to the SSR for round-trip processing, and you HAVE to include general cost overruns one has to bake into any nuclear plant, let alone first-of-type.
20 years ago everyone was pitching their energy ideas by claiming the result would be cheaper than coal, but these days most things are cheaper than coal so when you see someone making that claim you know they're full of BS. So when I see Moltex claiming "cheaper than PUREX" I don't see "economically viable" I read it as "less unviable" and that's not inspiring. It's simply not a useful comparison in an era where 20-year PPA's on solar are 2 cents and 4 cents with 4-hour firming.
One can twist the claims a little to be more about the timelines of the waste than the electricity cost itself, but no matter the protestations one reads around these parts of the 'net, people don't *really* care about waste. It's been sitting around in casks and pools for decades and no one's doing anything, and no one's really asking them to. So while we might all think this is a great idea, finding the money for it, and the political capital, seems like the difficult part. Ultimately the pitch comes down to that, we burn your waste, and I'm not convinced this is a big enough issue for the ratepayers of NB to consider doubling the cost of their wholesale power.
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Everything about nuclear energy is expensive. This is the first time that an actual solution to disposing of nuclear waste, has been achieved. The cost may be high, but the importance is also high. So in the cost/benefit equation, it still makes sense.
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> Everything about nuclear energy is expensive.
Only if the cost of oil wars are presumed to be zero and light water reactors are the only data point.
Solar probably still has the advantage for electrical usage in suitable climates.
Also, the Globalists seem to be destroying the hydrocarbon system across the planet right now. Some day the CoVID depopulation plan failed. A billion might die in Africa from lack of fuel and fertilizer in the coming years.
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Only if the cost of oil wars are presumed to be zero
As opposed to the cost of wars about nuclear technology?
Some day the CoVID depopulation plan failed
Now you are *really* off the deep end. You probably think the earth is flat too, the space race was just a conspiracy, right? And powerful people drink the blood of children? Conspiracies are real, but vague conspiracy theories that don't name names and identify conspiratorial acts, are just that, fairy-tale conspiracy theories.
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Re:For those unfamiliar.... (Score:5, Interesting)
> Everything about nuclear energy is expensive
Precisely.
> This is the first time that an actual solution to disposing of nuclear waste, has been achieved
Reprocessing and fast breeders have been around as long as light water reactors. The reason we don't use them is that they are fantastically expensive.
There is n reason to believe this cycle will be as cheap as the company claims, so it is highly unlikely this will change anything.
> The cost may be high, but the importance is also high
We have been talking about this problem for almost a century and done nothing about it, so I don't think anyone agrees that the importance is high.
> So in the cost/benefit equation, it still makes sense
Perhaps to people who think "the importance is also high", but they appear to have little sway.
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Your response makes sense *unless* the company is able to deliver their solution at a price that significantly undercuts previous technologies.
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> Your response makes sense *unless* the company is able to deliver their solution
> at a price that significantly undercuts previous technologies.
As I noted in my initial post, wrong. Even if they significantly undercut previous technologies, they will still be out of the money. A 20-year PPA for PV with 4-hour firming is 4 cents right now, today, and falling. They are predicting best-case 8.4 cents in some future date. So even if they hit their numbers, no one is going to buy this for power.
And that
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Every few years someone comes along with some fantastic new nuclear technology that is going to revive the industry and change everything. And every single time they just came up with a possible solution to one problem, if they can scale it which is far from a given, and hand waved away the rest.
There are a couple of countries (Score:4, Informative)
What I would be looking for is a businessman proof reactor. Basically a reactor that no matter how many corners a businessman cuts you don't get another Fukushima. This seems to be one step in that direction if it works which would be fine for The limited use cases nuclear still works in.
The problem with nuclear is that wind and solar make it obsolete. They are cheaper and they are safer and they have been able to provide base load power regardless of location or weather for about 10 years now, debatably longer.
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Japan will put its wind farms in front of the coast. Ans strictly speaking: they have the land, but it would be idiotic to place wind farms there.
Wind and solar do not provide base load. A base load plant is a plant that runs around ~95% capacity all day and night for years.
Base load in this context (Score:2)
Doesn't matter. Wind and solar can provide base load. They do need a little bit of battery here and there but not all that much. Because when the sun is down the turbines are still spinning.
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There's no such thing as "base load". That's just a concept to make nuclear power look more ideal when it has the exact same problems wind and solar have. That is, all three are in industry vernacular, non-dispatchable. That is, their output cannot shift on demand.
Now, the problem is that nuclear has the opposite problem as wind and solar. That is, we know wind and solar output ar
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Japan has massive off-shore wind resources that it has failed to exploit. The problem is that they want to do it all domestically, and Japanese industrial manufacturers have been slow to develop and deploy off-shore turbines.
There is no such thing as a businessman proof reactor.
Probably not (Score:1)
This has been tried many, many, many times. It has never worked out. It is not the fundamental process that is the problem, it is the details that make the process dangerous, expensive and unreliable. The primary reason the industry settled for direct long-term storage eventually is that long history of failure.
But I guess the nuclear fanatics will be as ignorant about the history and technological realities of their fetish as ever.
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You are the fanatic who is not aware of technological realities. You are correct that recycling nuclear waste is not new and has been tried many times in the labratory. Everything else you wrote is wrong.
The main reason it never was used is that this technique can be used to create nuclear bombs.
Basically, what they are doing is concentrating radioactive materials. Which happens to be the hardest part of making a nuclear bomb.
For this reason, the USA vetoed using this method. A few other countries tried
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Take a look at the above posting for a nice extreme example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Somebody with no clue at all confidentially stating complete lies.
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the Dunning-Kruger effect. Somebody with no clue at all confidentially stating complete lies.
Ain't it funny how many people confidently cite Dunning-Kruger, clearly having never read the paper, and with no clue what they were actually saying?
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And funny how some people are not in that class, yet some nil wits claim they are in an attempt to fling crap in the hopes some will stick.
In the situation at hand, if you _really_ missed that, my claim was not that this cannot work. My claim was that all attempts at similar things failed to be industrialized successfully due to entirely practical problems and there is no reason to believe this lab-demo will fare any better when they try to industrialize it. Nuclear chemistry is exceptionally tough and deat
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How to tell when you should ignore someone rather than pay attention to them:
When they think you are wrong and instead of pointing out where you made your mistakes and providing supporting facts, they merely insult you. Such people should be ignored.
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What to look at to realize that nuclear recycling started in the 1950 and lasted for more than 1/2 a century:
Magnox nuclear reactors - used from 1950s to 2016.
Yes it was expensive power but it still made electricity as well as nuclear bombs.
Yes, they recy
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Obviously cultists like you want to stay in their reality-exclusion bubble. Without the desire for bomb-making, none of that would have ever been done, far too expensive. And it was never a really large operation anyways. Some niche application is not a proof for general viability.
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> The main reason it never was used is that this technique can be used to create nuclear bombs.
Fascinating seeing you say that after complaining...
> You are the fanatic who is not aware of technological realities
The reason we don't use reprocessing is that it is fantastically expensive. That is the only reason.
Here's a report from Los Alamos on the topic:
https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00315989.pdf
If you care to turn to page 19, you will see that the effective cost of power from
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Indeed. It makes absolutely no economic sense. But the nuclear cultists do not even understand basic numbers. In their minds it is all easy and cheap and just perfect and reality does not intrude.
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Talking about my insult that was a direct quote of the original poster is not reasonable. When a shmuck insults others, it is OK to use his own insult back at him.
You are educated about economics but lacking knowledge of politics and history. The money is the RESULT of politics, not the cause of the situation. It is true that modern nuclear plants are cheaper than the old recycling ones. I implied it in my post.
This is because the government decided to spend billions of dollars researching non-prolifera
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Funny then how they always point to France, which is 70% nuclear. That is when their nukes are up ...
Lab results (Score:2)
Critics have argued the reprocessing creates its own stream of byproducts
"We finished the demonstration sucessfully. Now just a sec while we rinse these test tubes out."
Just great. Now scale that up 10^5 times.
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Indeed. That has scaling up and industrializing has failed spectacularly and very expensively a few times now. Those failures are the only reason why direct storage of the waste (which is _very_ expensive) is the cheapest option.
But I guess wait long enough and you can make some money off an idea that has ben proven to not work time and again. Especially the nuclear morons never learn and always try the same old failed ideas again in an utterly cult-like derangement. And, obviously they think this is all "e
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You may be right, you may be wrong, but jesus christ do you come across as a bitter old cunt when you insist on ending all of your posts with playground-tier insults that serve absolutely no purpose other than demonstrating what a bitter old cunt you are. Makes people like me, who are actually interested in learning a little deeper about topics from domain experts, want to block you at router level.
You should prolly step away from the terminal for a while man.