Issa and Levin Introduce a Bipartisan Bill for a Very Bad Idea.

[NNadir]

Congressman Mike Levin (D-Ca 49) and Congressman Darryl Issa (Trump Worship, No Principles Party-TWPNP-Ca 50) have introduced a bipartisan bill to prioritize the removal of the used nuclear fuel at the closed San Onofre nuclear facility: Levin and Issa reintroduce bill to remove spent fuel from San Onofre site: Levin and Issa reintroduce bill to remove spent fuel from San Onofre site

There are about 4000 tons of used nuclear fuel at San Onofre, a set of nuclear reactors that were saving Southern Californian lives by preventing additional air pollution for decades. A rule of thumb is that about 95% of the content of this fuel is unreacted uranium, 1% is mixed isotopes of plutonium, and 4% is fission products.

This suggests that there is 40 tons of plutonium in the used nuclear fuel.

Here, from the California Energy Commission is a table of the amount of energy produced in 2020 using all the wind turbines in the State of California, all of which will be expensive junk within the next 25 years: California Wind Energy Production 2020. In 2020, California produced 13,708,319 MWh of electricity. A MWh is 3.6 billion Joules. Thus all of the wind turbines in California combined produced 49.3 Petajoules, 0.0493 Exajoules, this on a planet where humanity consumes approximately 600 exajoules per year.

A kg of plutonium, completely fissioned, contains about 80 trillion joules; thus the energy content of the plutonium at San Onofre is 3.2 Exajoules, the equivalent of 65 years of the production of all the wind turbines in California.

Recently the DOE announced a partnership with Oklo, a California company, to reprocess used nuclear fuel electrolytically: Oklo, Argonne to commercialise advanced fuel recycling technology. This technology is only one of a world of possible electrochemical processes; I can and do personally think of many variants of these using advanced matrices. These kinds of systems can be very compact, and very useful at recovering the valuable components of used nuclear fuel, only some of which are actinides.

I also believe that the thermal efficiency of nuclear reactors can be made to approach 70% - albeit with some of the energy recovered as chemical fuels - with some of rejected heat potentially proving very useful for the purposes of desalination.

The San Onfre nuclear plant is located by the sea. It is near the Camp Pendleton Marine Base which is dedicated to making war on other countries. Some of that land might be repurposed to make a war on Climate Change while providing California with something it will increasingly need, water.

The new generation of nuclear reactors now under design are largely of the breed and burn variety, meaning that the uranium in San Onofre's nuclear fuel is a potential energy source. Following through, the uranium at San Onofre, approximately 3800 tons is equivalent, converted to plutonium, to about 300 exajoules. The United States consumes between 95 and 100 exajoules of energy per year, the overwhelming majority of it being waste heat.

There are excellent reasons, to my mind, for keeping the used nuclear fuel where it is, by a beautiful place on the coast of California.

However, appeals to fear and ignorance, some of them contained in the rhetoric of the "bipartisan" Levin/Issa bill, said appeals which actually kill people, are very popular today, where the imagination overwhelms, at the expense of everyone now living and everyone who comes after us, reality.

Have a happy President's Day.

[hunter]

1. It's all about real estate development.

The used fuel at San Onofre sits there and does nothing and will be a tremendous resource someday, but people who live in million dollar homes and drive expensive fossil fueled death machines don't want to live near nuclear power plants.

It's all about "property values," perversely for properties that will be eventually made uninhabitable by global warming, possibly within a few decades if we don't quit fossil fuels.

This kind of irrational fossil fueled consumerism is destroying the world.

[NNadir]

2. What WILL happen is very different than what SHOULD happen or COULD happen.

The used nuclear fuel at San Onofre could be a very valuable resource for Southern California, and might well ameliorate the water problem.

I agree that the most likely outcome is that California will exacerbate climate change by desalinating with dangerous natural gas derived energy. They will thus be doing what California's energy policies have been doing for years; making climate change worse by pretending that solar and wind energy can do meaningful work and that nuclear energy is "too dangerous."

It does seem to me that the danger of climate change, to which nuclear energy is a real alternative is becoming increasingly clear in California, but they will continue to do nothing except mouth tired old platitudes about wind and solar, none of which have had any effect.

Here's we are in February of 2022:

Week beginning on February 13, 2022: 419.76 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 416.59 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 394.02 ppm
Last updated: February 21, 2022

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa (Accessed 02/21/22)

The increase over the same figure 10 years ago, 25.74 ppm is the 7th highest ever recorded over 1,946 such data points going back to 1983. Three of the top 10 such increases occurred in 2022 and the year is still young. This is with the Covid lockdowns.

Still, this late, with this much loss, we still hear wind and solar will save the day. They haven't saved the day; they aren't saving the day; and they won't save the day but still it is nuclear energy that is "too dangerous" in the California legal system, not climate change.

Those bazillion dollar coastal homes aren't going to be worth doodle squat without access to water.