Sea Water Could Cause Uranium Pollution From Nuclear Fuel Rods 97
New submitter Required Snark writes "UC Davis researchers have found a mechanism where the sodium in sea water can cause uranium nano-particles to be released from nuclear reactor fuel rods. Normally the uranium oxide compounds composing the rods are very resistant to leaching into water. This could have serious consequences for the Fukushima disaster, since sea water was used for emergency cooling."
Re:Haha "This could have serious consequences" wow (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember when the Fukushima event was still making headlines people were freaking out because radiation was making it's way to the U.S. I was a little worried myself, but since I work for an air purification company one of the data-crunchers there was able to explain now negligible the impact actually was.
If it's the same for this seawater issue, then no big deal, I guess. Still, I can't help but be a little disturbed at the idea of radioactive particles from a power plant being spread into the ocean. I wonder how nuclear subs handle this sort of thing.
Why pretend it's magic - try reality (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, just as I could marry rich supermodel twins on the day I turn 90 while legally keeping another three wives. Possible, but incredibly difficult to do and entirely pointless. In other words your "can" doesn't match what is in the dictionary but instead has a definition of "somebody somewhere thought one step might be possible so I'm building an enormous fucking house of cards on it and pretending it's a solid pyramid".
Going from that to pretending that anybody has even roughly worked out costs, and then suggesting it's "economically viable" is an incredible audacious lie. If you are an adult you should be ashamed of what you have written to try to trick people into thinking your pet cause is magic instead of reality. As for the ash thing, if you've actually fallen for that one instead of just trying another even more incredibly stupid lie try googling for Alex Gabbard to find that was yet another one of his works of fiction. If terrorists could easily build nuclear bombs out of coal then one would have been used by now.
Here's a clue people - if we don't have a process devised that is in any way similar to what is going to be attempted there is no way to work out costs within an order of magnitude let alone work out if something is "economically viable". That's why private funding for leading edge technologies of any kind usually sucks because nobody knows how much things will cost and how much can be gained. "How much will it cost" is a question that can only really be answered reliably after a prototype or pilot plant.
I should add why I think it's stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
The "Uranium is running out" problem was a 1960s thing, partly real due to some reactor designs of the time being very fussy about the isotopes in the fuel, and partly political/military to provide an excuse to build expensive Plutonium fast breeders. Also many other Uranium deposits have been found and exploited since then.
If nothing else we'll get a hell of a lot of Uranium as a side product from mining Copper in a few places so it makes no sense at all to go after the tiny concentrations in seawater.
Re:Why pretend it's magic - try reality (Score:3, Interesting)
So, you mean extrapolation of prices is a difficult and error prone process and they could easily be off by a factor of 10? You're right! But does it matter? No!
1kg of Thorium/Uranium/Plutonium (it really doesn't matter much in breeding reactors) is sufficient to produce 1MW of electricity for one year. That's almost 9 million kWh. Even if the cost estimate was off by a factor of 1000 and a kg of Uranium extracted from sea water cost $300,000 - the cost of extraction would add no more than $0.03 per kWh to the cost of electricity.