Re: The Spanish Grid Drop-out - recently released information.

On Fri, 16 May 2025 17:30:00 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:

On 5/16/25 16:05, john larkin wrote:

On Fri, 16 May 2025 09:50:52 +0200, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:
 

On 5/15/25 17:54, john larkin wrote:

On Thu, 15 May 2025 11:22:42 -0400, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net>
wrote:
>

On Wed, 14 May 2025 19:38:09 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
>

On 2025-05-14 17:37, john larkin wrote:

On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>

On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:

On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>

On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:

On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

>
>

Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.

>
Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
hundred thousand years.

>
And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.

>
The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
fuel.

>
Something that is expensive and not every country can do.

>
A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
forever.
>

>

When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.

>
That's simply wrong.
>

It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.

>
I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.

>
Why?  It's very safe when done carefully.
>
The little modular reactors sound cool.

>
Putting used nuclear fuel someplace deepish underground is important.
While a nuclear war would be very very bad, surface storage makes it
much, much worse.
>
The Chernobyl disaster released about 3.5% of the core inventory of one
reactor out of four.(*)
>
One Hiroshima-size bomb on top of a comparable large nuke plant could
release all the inventory in all four cores, which would be about
4/0.035 ~ 114 times worse than Chernobyl.
>
If the site included extensive spent-fuel pools, the total would be
correspondingly larger--maybe 500 Chernobyls, maybe more.  And that's
just one installation.
>
Not a bad score for one small bomb--there are lots bigger ones. :(
>
Cheers
>
Phil Hobbs
>
(*)
<https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28292/chernobyl-chapter-ii-the-release-dispersion-deposition-and-behaviour-of-radionuclides>

>
I'd be tempted to put hot waste in very heavy steel casks and drop
them into the Mariana Trench:
>
.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Trench>
>
It's 11 Km deep, and is where the Pacific Plate is subducting under
the Mariana plate, so those caskets are in for the long term.  Nor is
retrieval all that easy, or a nuclear weapon of much consequence.  If
it even works under such pressure.
>
Joe

>
Yes. Waste can be mixed into concrete or vitrified and dumped tens of
thousands of feet into a trench. Only irrational fear prevents that.
>

>
Maybe, but counting on geological subduction to cover it all
is ridiculous. You don't seem to realize how slow that is.
>
Jeroen Belleman

 
Do the math.
 

>
Subduction is usually in the cm/year ballpark. The waste will be
lying on the seabed for millennia, likely lots of millennia, if
it doesn't dissolve before that. Besides, it's a bit gross to
pollute an environment we have barely even seen yet.
>
Oh well, it's not your backyard.
>
Jeroen Belleman
>

A well sealed cask of vitrified nuclear waste, roughly a cubic meter,
will be insoluble, basically a rock, and will be secure for millenia,
as the hotter nucleotides decay. It will probably be sunk deep into
muck, under kilometers of water. It won't be back for millions of
years.

The earth's oceans are 1.3 billion cubic kilometers, and that water is
already mildly radiactive, mostly from potassium. Cosmic rays keep
generating radioactive isotopes in sea water. There's enough uranium
in sea water that we would extract it if we didn't have cheaper
sources.

Math.