Memo to Fox News: Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Energy Are Not The Same

[PamW]

20. Answers to questions

RobertEarl,

Spent nuclear power plant fuel is solid and looks just like new fuel. Spent reactor fuel is an "assembly" that looks like a square array of rods. The array for a PWR ( pressurized water reactor ) is 17 x 17. The array for a BWR ( boiling water reactor from GE ) is 9 x 9. The actual fuel is a ceramic that is inside the tubes. What happens when the fuel is "burned" in a reactor all happens at the sub-microscopic level. The assembly looks the same when it comes out as when it went in. So spent fuel consists of all these "assemblies" of fuel rods. Congress outlawed reprocessing / recycling of spent nuclear fuel back in 1978. Assemblies have to cool for years before they can be reprocessed. Because the 1978 ban came before any fuel was ready to reprocess; no commercial reactor fuel has been reprocessed. It all sits in the form of these assemblies in the pools at the plants, or they have been moved to "dry casks" that sit at the plants.

What is stored at Hanford is liquid waste from an old form of reprocessing used in the Manhattan Project. The fuel elements for the "production reactors" at Hanford, those are the reactors that made the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb and subsequent bombs; was reprocessed using the old form of reprocessing technology. The first step in that process was dissolving the the production reactor fuel elements in nitric acid.

You can read about this in Richard Rhodes Pulitzer-Prize winning book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". The reprocessing plants at Hanford are long buildings called "Queen Marys" because they are about that long. Inside is a big "canyon" ( the sister facilities at Savannah River are called canyons; like F Canyon and H Canyon ). The chemical processing that is reprocessing took place in this concrete canyon.

On page 604, of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", author Rhodes quotes someone who was there when the reprocessing operation first started on Dec 26, 1944. The first step was dissolving the spent fuel elements in nitric acid, and the witness tells how the concrete canyon was filled with brown smoke. The exhaust fans exhausted that smoke up the stack of the canyon, and the smoke floated away on the breeze. Of course, that smoke was radioactive, which is why Hanford was built in a remote location.

The chemical processes extracted the plutonium from the dissolved fuel / nitric acid mixture. The extracted plutonium was sent to be made into bomb components. The liquid residue was what was stored in those tanks.

After years of sitting in the tanks, the "sludge" is no longer liquid, but has a consistencies ranging between thick peanut butter up to hardened cement with some liquid interspersed.

So there's no nuclear power plant fuel at Hanford because none was reprocessed, and none was reprocessed using the old "wet" method used back in the 1940s.

I don't recall what the cost to deal permanently with the Hanford waste; but I think it is was in excess of $100 billion. So $2 billion a year doesn't cover it. We've only been spending money on cleanup since 1990 when the weapons production mission was stopped. ( See second link below ) Dealing with the tanks is only part of the problem. There was also the "cocooning" of the reactors.

Because the consistency of the sludge is so thick, it can no longer be pumped out; it's going to have to be physically scooped out.

http://www.hanfordchallenge.org/hanfords-history/

http://www.hanfordchallenge.org/the-big-issues/cleanup-progress/

http://www.hanfordchallenge.org/the-big-issues/tank-waste/

http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/TPlant

http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/100Area

http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/BReactor

http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/NReactor

The last link tells about the "N Reactor" which was the most powerful production reactor at Hanford that operated from 1963 to 1987. Shortly after its construction, Hanford N Reactor was dedicated by then President John F. Kennedy and the last link shows a picture of Kennedy speaking at the occasion.

PamW