Plans for "Green" Hydrogen Transition in China: An Amusing Paper Involving Doubly Wasteful Energy Storage.

[NNadir]

2. I am probably the wrong person with whom to discuss this, because I don't think of used nuclear fuel as "waste" but...

...I have long argued that all of the components of used nuclear fuel are extremely valuable, in particular the once through uranium which in general makes up the bulk of the mass. This is because once through uranium contains the isotope ²³⁶U which does not occur naturally and is the precursor to ²³⁷Np, itself the precursor to ²³⁸Pu, the plutonium isotope that powers spacecraft but also has the property of making plutonium unusable for nuclear weapons.

The chief transuranium actinides found in used nuclear fuel are plutonium, neptunium, americium, and curium. All of these have critical masses and therefore all are useful as nuclear fuel, particularly if they are allowed to accumulate in large amounts, which they must do if we are to save the world since nuclear energy is the last best hope of the human race.

It would take a very long time to list all of the potential uses for fission products; if one is inclined, one can leaf through my journal here, where I have discussed many of them.

The fear of used nuclear fuel is not commensurate with the actual risk, which is extremely low, almost to the point of vanishing. It's a media creation.

However, let's cut to the chase about energy "waste." The difference between used nuclear fuel, often characterized out of ignorance as to what is involved, as "nuclear waste," and fossil fuel waste is that the latter kills people - and is killing the planet with extreme global heating - and used nuclear fuel has accumulated a 70 year record of being stored, largely on site, without killing anyone.

The death toll from fossil fuel waste in the form of air pollution, fossil fuel waste, is about 7 million people a year, and to show this, I keep handy a reference and excerpt with my commentary from one of the most important medical journals in the world, Lancet.

It is here:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

If one runs the numbers, this works out to about 19,000 people killed per day, roughly by air pollution, or 800 people per hour.

I invite, often, people concerned about so called "nuclear waste" to show that in the 70 year history of the storage of used nuclear fuel, that it has killed as many people as will die today from air pollution, indeed as many people as will die from air pollution in the next 10 hours, 8,000 people. For evidence of this case, I will only accept references from the primary scientific literature as opposed to junk websites.

Note that if someone were to die from used nuclear fuel storage, the "but her emails" and "Joe Biden's old" media would go into a major festival of ignorance pushing, whereas they don't remark at all on the deaths of fossil fuel, or if they do, it's in obscure settings.

They miss the point, a truism: Nuclear energy need not be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to better than everything else, which it is.

I have very little tolerance for this "thousands of years" nonsense, often stated as "millions of years" or even "billions of years." The world has always been radioactive and always will be, but it can be shown that in a continuous fuel recycling program, after about 1000 years of the utilization of clean nuclear energy that the overall radioactivity of the planet will be reduced because of the relative short half life of most fission products and the elimination of some of the uranium driving the uranium decay chain.

I made reference to this in an earlier post, with references, here: 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels It's a long post, with many scientific references, but if you look, it's there.

The relevant excerpt:

The following figure shows the very different case obtained if one separates the uranium, plutonium and minor actinides (neptunium, americium and curium) and fissions them, whereupon the reduction of radioactivity to a level that is actually below that of the original uranium in a little over 300 years:



The caption:

Fig. 4. – Radiotoxicity (log-scale, unit: Sv/tSM) of 1 t of heavy metal (SM) from a pressurized water reactor (initial enrichment 4.2% U-235, burn-up 50 GWd/t) with regard to ingestion as a function of time (log-scale, unit: years) after discharge. Left-hand frame: contribution of fission products (FP), plutonium (Pu) and minor actinides (MA) to radiotoxicity. Right-hand frame: Modification of radiotoxicity due to separation of U, Pu or U, Pu, MA. The reference value is the radiotoxicity of the amount of natural uranium that was used to produce 1 t of nuclear fuel. Source: [17].

(Hartwig Freiesleben, The European Physical Journal Conferences · June 2013)

Source 17, in German, is this one: Reduzierung der Radiotoxizität abgebrannter Kernbrennstoffe durch Abtrennung und Transmutation von Actiniden: Partitioning. Reducing spent nuclear fuel radiotoxicity by actinide separation and transmutation: partitioning.

All of the components of used nuclear fuel are valuable and are essential to the survival of the planet and the ecosystems not already destroyed by fossil fuel waste. Some of those components, like the interesting metal technetium, and of course, neptunium, plutonium, americium and curium, can be obtained no where else.

I hope this helps you to keep an open mind.