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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: The Spanish Grid Drop-out - recently released information.
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 16:52:30 +1000
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On 15/05/2025 3:19 am, 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.

That doesn't do anything about the fission products which are a bunch of 
isotopes of about half the atomic weight of uranium. Some of them have 
short half-lives, and are very radioactive and some of them have longer 
half-lives and have to be managed for longer periods, out to about a few 
hundred thousand years

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

Over a hundred thousands years or so deep holes can't be relied on to 
stay buried. Subduction zones are - by definition - geologically 
unstable, and there's no guarantee that  your chosen target will keep on 
subducting.

https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2023/february/radioactive-waste

talks about a way of treating nuclear waste that concentrates it and 
makes it insoluble. One of the guys who worked on it - Lou Vance - was 
an acquaintance of mine when we both undergraduates. He died recently, 
and the process has been around for decades now, but nobody uses it. 
Somebody in the UK is apparently running tests on it, but 
not-in-my-back-yard is international.
> 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.

Nuclear power is neither cheap nor safe. Nuclear policy is pretty much 
driven by people who want nuclear weapons and nuclear powered 
submarines. The US has nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, but they 
wouldn't last long in a modern war. U-235-fuelled nuclear reactors are a 
source of plutonium, and any electric power they generate is bonus.

The absence of thorium reactors is a bit of a give-away.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney