The Nuplex Solution

by Marcel F. Williams

In 1982, the United States Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Energy to find a suitable site to construct a disposal facility for the radioactive spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors. In 2005, 52,000 tonnes of spent fuel was being held at nuclear power and military facilities in the US. And it is estimated that by 2015, the nation's nuclear power facilities will be storing over 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel on site. There are laws preventing the expansion of nuclear power within several States in the US until a final storage solution is found for the radioactive spent fuel accumulating at current commercial nuclear reactor sites. And to fund such a permanent storage facility, nuclear utilities have paid nearly $30 billion in fees and interest to a Federal “nuclear waste fund”.

Nuclear Energy Institute map of stored radioactive waste from the commercial and military nuclear industry

Eventually, Yucca Mountain became the Department of Energy's solution to the nations nuclear waste problem. Over 2 billion dollars has been spent studying the Yucca Mountain area in Nevada with an additional 5 to 6 billion dollars to finish the facility by 2010. But there has been strong political and environmental opposition to storing spent fuel at the Yucca Mountain facility. Harry Reid, Senator from Nevada and the current leader of the US Senate, strongly opposes Yucca Mountain as a repository for the nation's nuclear waste material. And President Barack Obama ran in opposition to utilizing the Yucca Mountain facility for radwaste deposition during his campaign for president.

So it now seems unlikely that the Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada will be utilized for the deposition of the nation's spent fuel. And the Nuclear Energy Institute has reportedly recently advanced the idea that President Barack Obama convene a blue ribbon nuclear waste commission to find an alternative to burying radioactive power plant fuel at Yucca Mountain.

Despite that fact that there are tens of thousands of tonnes of spent fuel now residing at US commercial nuclear power plants, it should be noted that only 3 or 4% of that spent fuel is actually radioactive waste. After enriched uranium is utilized in a nuclear reactor for fuel, 96% of the remaining mass is in the form of the original fertile uranium 238 with a residual component of fissile uranium 235 composing about 0.83% of the total uranium content. This percentage of uranium 235 is down from its original 3% as fuel, but still higher than the 0.71% natural concentration of uranium. An additional 1% of the spent fuel is in the form of fissile plutonium 239. And the rest is in the form of fission products and minor actinides. Since the uranium and plutonium can be recycled and utilized for fuel, only 3% or 4% of spent fuel can actually be considered as radioactive waste material.

Spent fuel cask stored on site

Spent Fuel Composition

95.6% uranium (0.83% of which is U-235)
2.9% stable fission products
0.9% plutonium (about two thirds fissile plutonium)
0.3% cesium & strontium (fission products)
0.1% iodine and technetium (fission products)
0.1% other long-lived fission products
0.1% minor actinides (americium, curium, neptunium)

So instead of the Federal government using the 30 billion dollars given to them by the utilities to simply throw away the spent fuel, I propose that the Federal government use that money along with additional Federal investment funds to dispose of 96% of the spent fuel by recycling the fissile material and converting it into clean energy.

I propose that a Federal Nuplex Corporation should be established in order to fund the construction of Federal Nuplexes in every State that is currently storing spent fuel at their nuclear power facilities and for every State willing to take in spent fuel from other states.

I envision Federal Nuplex facilities as consisting of:

1. Temporary storage areas for spent fuel cask recently imported from nuclear power facilities within the state

2. On site spent fuel reprocessing facilities to extract uranium and plutonium fuel on site utilization

3. On site uranium enrichment facilities to fabricate uranium fuel for on site reactors

4. 8 to 40 on site nuclear reactors capable of using the recycled uranium and plutonium fuel for base-load electricity production

5. Long term storage cask for housing the reprocessed radioactive spent fuel fission products and minor actinides from nuclear reactors

6. Adjacent site synfuel production facilities for the production of carbon neutral gasoline, methanol, diesel fuel, jet fuel, dimethyl ether, hydrogen, oxygen, and ammonia for the transportation and industrial chemical industry

7. Off site (up to 80 kilometers) methanol-oxygen cogeneration and trigeneration power facilities for the production of peak-load electricity

8. On site storage facilities for radioactive waste from hospitals and radioactive research facilities

A State's spent fuel could be transported by rail to the Federal Nuplex facility located within the state. The residual nuclear waste produced after reprocessing would be stored on site for a few hundred years until either transmutation or final out of state deposition. On site reactors could also be decommissioned on site after energy production from a Nuplex has finally ceased. The safest and most economical way to decommission a reactor facility would be to allow the irradiated components of the facility to decay over the coarse of 100 to 200 years. So if you assume that several reactors would be gradually added to a nuplex over the course of the next 30 or 40 years and that these reactors will continue to operate for at least 60 to 80 years then Nuplex facilities would probably not be completely decommissioned and removed from its site until at least 300 years from now, or not until the 24th century. So any residual radioactive waste could remain on site at secured Nuplex facilities for a few hundred years until the material is eventually transmuted into shorter lived elements or permanently deposited in deep sea beds or in some extraterrestrial environment in the 24th century.

Spent fuel cask being transported by rail

A typical Nuplex could contain perhaps four AP 1000 light water reactors plus four ACR 1000 heavy water reactors. The recycled plutonium and uranium could be used inside of a thorium blanket inside of an ACR reactor to reduce plutonium production while producing more uranium 233. A Heavy Water Reactor utilizing thorium could in theory have an 80% conversion ratio or above almost to the point of being self-sustaining. The AP 1000 Light Water Reactor could use the recycled and enriched uranium to produce power or the plutonium as MOX, or the plutonium in a mixture of a thorium-uranium blanket






Federal Nuplexes would contain between 8 to 40 reactors. Concentrating so many reactors at one site could substantially reduce the capital cost of the power facility due to economies of mass production and large concentrated facilities could also reduced labor and security cost. Each Nuplex would also produce thousands of permanent jobs. But because of the heat island effect, it may be necessary to limit the number of nuclear reactors at a site to ten or less. However, if waste it is dissipated by locating several cooling ponds and dry cooling towers in all directions, several kilometers off site, then this effect could be mitigated. Alternatively, the heat island effect could be mitigated by utilizing the waste heat for seawater desalinization, greenhouse and hydroponic agriculture, or aquaculture.

Because the Federal government would be reprocessing domestic spent fuel on Federally protected facilities, there should be no danger of nuclear proliferation. Additionally, the export of Nuplex produced synfuels to other countries for electric power production, transportation, and industrial chemicals would enable foreign nations to benefit from the production of nuclear energy without the need for nuclear facilities or nuclear material.

Federal Nuplexes would eliminate the need for long term storage of spent fuel at commercial nuclear reactors sites. They would also substantially reduce the volume of spent fuel produced by the commercial nuclear industry while also substantially increasing the amount of nuclear energy produce for base-load electricity and synfuel production. As the Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has already noted, nuclear power plants already produce 100 times less radioactive material than coal power facilities. Nuplexes could furter reduce radwaste production by more than 1000 times relative coal power production. Finally, Federal Nuplexes would allow regional utilities to increase the number of reactors on existing sites without the long term trouble of managing and storing spent fuel.

References and Links

1. Waste Management in the Nuclear Fuel Cycle

2. Short & Long Term Solutions for Nuclear Waste

3. Experts Weigh In On How The U.S. Should Handle Its Commercial Nuclear "Waste"

4. Public Power & the Future of Nuclear Energy

5. G. Olah, A. Goeppert, and G. Prakash, (2006) Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, Wiley-VCH Verlang, Weinheim, Germany

6. Green Freedom: A concept for producing carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and chemicals, Los Alamos Labs, November 2007 F.J. Martin and WL Kubic,

7. Gasoline from Air and Water

8. A Guidebook to Nuclear Reactors: Reactors, Fuel Cycles, The Issues of Nuclear Power
Anthony V. Nero Jr.

9. Nuclear Decommissioning

10. Technology and Policy Instruments for Mitigating the Heat-island Effect

11. Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste

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Gasoline from Air and Water

by Marcel F. Williams

Fossil fuels are predominantly responsible for putting excess carbon dioxide and methane into the Earth's atmosphere, greenhouse gases that are melting our polar ice caps, raising global sea levels, and causing more extreme climate conditions around the world. The coal and natural gas power industry has looked looked towards future technologies for the on site capture of flu gas in order to recover and sequester carbon dioxide. However, there is no cost effective technology for capturing the CO2 from the mobile producers of carbon dioxide: automobiles, trucks, aircraft, and sea craft.

But there are new technologies that are rapidly being developed that may eventually divorce carbon dioxide polluting sources of energy from the need for on site capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide. These devices are sometimes referred to as mechanical trees. But what they do is to simply extract and recover carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And these future technologies appear to be far more efficient at extracting CO2 from the air than the plant life on our planet.

Some argue that these carbon dioxide from air extracting technologies could be the saviors of the fossil fuel industry. Ironically, such future technologies could also eventually lead to the complete extinction of fossil use on this planet if the CO2 taken from the atmosphere is used in combination with hydrogen from water to produce hydrocarbon fuels such as: gasoline, methanol, diesel fuel, jet fuel, and dimethyl ether.

Hydrogen

Because the combustion of hydrogen produces only energy and water, hydrogen via the electrolysis of water through hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, and solar has often been proposed as a replacement for hydrocarbon transportation fuels. Liquid hydrogen fuel has been used in US space craft since the days of the Apollo Moon program. And liquid hydrogen has also been frequently proposed for future generation subsonic and hypersonic airliners and aircraft. Hydrogen fueled buses now transport commuters in many urban areas in the US. And hydrogen automobiles have been demonstrated by many automobile companies around the world .

However, hydrogen automobiles have a substantially shorter range than hydrocarbon fueled vehicles and are a lot less efficient than electric vehicles. Refueling hydrogen vehicles also takes much longer than refueling with gasoline, ethanol, or methanol. Because of the hydrogen embrittlement of metals like steel, hydrogen pipelines are more expensive to maintain than natural gas and oil pipelines. Aircraft, seacraft and ground vehicles, and the infrastructure associated with these vehicles, would also have to be completely replaced if we completely replaced our fuel economy with hydrogen.

Hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 and hydrogen

Alternatively, there are several demonstrated methods for synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels by utilizing carbon dioxide in combination with hydrogen which could allow a country to avoid any major overhaul in its transportation energy infrastructure.

Chemist have known how to produce methanol from hydrogen and carbon dioxide for more than 80 years:

CO2 + 3H2 → CH3OH (methanol) + H2O

Methanol is mostly used as a feedstock for making other chemicals. But methanol can be converted into dimethyl ether (DME), a fuel that can be effectively used in diesel engines equipped with new fuel injection systems. The fact that dimethyl ether produces no black smoke, soot, or sulfur dioxide is an clean advantage it has over diesel fuel.

Methanol can also be converted into high octane gasoline via the Mobil Oil methanol to gasoline (MTG) process. Back in the 1980's, the New Zealand government produced 600,000 tonnes of gasoline a year from methanol derived from natural gas using the MTG process.

Methane gas can also be synthesized from hydrogen and carbon dioxide:

CO2 + 4H2 → CH4 (methane) + 2H2O

And methane can also be converted into diesel and jet fuels via Fischer-Tropsch and hydrocracking processes.

Mechanical extraction of atmospheric CO2

Plants capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while utilizing sunlight to convert the CO2 into starch. During photosynthesis, trees, for instance, convert carbon dioxide and water into starche molecules and oxygen through a series of oxidation and reduction reactions:

6 CO2 + 6 H2O + sunlight ---> C6H12O6 + 6 O2

Some farm crops and trees can produce up to 20 metric tons per acre (4047 square meters) of biomass a year. One tonne of dried tree consist of 0.45 tonnes of carbon which would translate into the extraction of 1.65 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually extracted from the atmosphere. That's 33 tonnes of CO2 per acre extracted on an annual basis.

Even though the concentration of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is a meager 0.04 per cent, companies like GRT (Global Research Technologies) in Arizona and Canadian researchers at the University of Calgary have already built machines that can extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere far more efficiently than any tree or any other source of biomass. GRT claims that its carbon dioxide air extraction system is a thousand times more efficient than a tree of equal size.

GRT CO2 absorbent material

The University of Calgary team has shown that they could capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere with less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per tonne of carbon dioxide. Their carbon dioxide from air extraction tower was able to capture the equivalent of about 20 tonnes per year of CO2 on just one single square meter of air scrubbing material. Astonishingly, this suggest that even the most conservative estimates would allow these CO2 extracting machines to produce more than 80 thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide per acre annually.

University of Calgary carbon dioxide extraction machine

Because of the need for cheap electricity for hydrogen production, only nuclear and hydroelectric facilities would be currently viable for hydrocarbon fuel production utilizing carbon dioxide from air extraction technologies. Hydroelectric facilities currently produce electricity at 0 .85 cents per kwh while electricity from nuclear facilities currently cost 1.68 cents per kwh. Wind and solar thermal electricity, however, is much more expensive and ranges from over 4 cents per kwh to over 6 cents per kwh.

At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, F. Jeffrey Martin and Williams L. Kubic, Jr. have developed the Green Freedom concept for using the cooling towers of nuclear reactors to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for the production of gasoline and methanol. They argue that a 1 GWe power plant using their Green Freedom method could produce 18,000-bbl/day of gasoline or 5000 tonnes a day of methanol.

Carbon neutral hydrocarbon synfuel production at nuclear and hydroelectric facilities would not only allow such power facilities to produce transportation fuels and industrial chemicals, they would also allow them to pump methanol and oxygen up to 80 kilometers away to high efficiency power plants for the production of peak-load and back-up-load electricity and commercial waste heat. Nuclear power plants could therefore not only produce base-load electricity but could also supply methanol fuel to replace greenhouse polluting natural gas power plants which are used for daytime peak-load energy and back-up energy for wind and solar power plants.

In 2006, the US consumed nearly 21 million bbl/day of petroleum for transportation fuel and industrial chemical use. If we assumed that nuclear power plants replaced all of the petroleum used in the US in 2006, that would roughly require more than a thousand new 1Gwe nuclear reactors, over 1000 GWe of electrical capacity. Existing nuclear sites that already have nuclear reactors could probably add an additional 200 to 300 Gwe of capacity. However, if one large centralized nuplex (nuclear park) with about 30GWe of average electrical capacity were set up in every state in the union, then that could add an additional 1500 GWe of electrical capacity, more than enough to replace all of our petroleum needs today and probably our needs 30 years from now.

If the new Obama administration is going to invest substantial R&D money into new energy technologies, I would strongly suggest investing in the fast tracking of these carbon dioxide extraction from air technologies that could revolution synfuel production by helping to achieve US independence from the petroleum fuel economy while protecting the global environment from the dangers of global warming and climate change.

Links and References

1. Green Freedom: A concept for producing carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and chemicals, Los Alamos Labs, November 2007 F.J. Martin and WL Kubic,

2. GRT (Global Research Technologies, LLC)

3. Giant Carbon dioxide Vacuums

4. Snatching Carbon dioxide from the Atmosphere

5. CO2 capture from air

6. First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved:

7. First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved by Columbia University Scientist and Private Company, (2007) Earth Institute News Archive, 04/24/07

8. Carbon capture and storage:

9. Researchers Scramble to Create CO2-Busting Technologies:

10. CO2 capture from ambient air: a feasibility assessment:

11. Carbon Capture and Storage A False Solution

12. The Case for Carbon Dioxide Extraction from Air

13. Klaus S. Lackner, Patrick Grimes, Hans-J. Ziock, Capturing Carbon Dioxide From Air

14. K. Schultz, L. Bogart, G. Besenbruch, L. Brown, R. Buckingham, M. Campbell, B. Russ, and B. Wong HYDROGEN AND SYNTHETIC HYDROCARBON FUELS – A NATURAL SYNERGY General Atomics Poster

15. G. Olah, A. Goeppert, and G. Prakash, (2006) Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, Wiley-VCH Verlang, Weinheim, Germany

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Short & Long Term Solutions for Nuclear Waste

by Marcel F. Williams

A typical 1000 MWe nuclear power plant produces about 30 tonnes of highly radioactive spent fuel on an annual basis. However, a coal powered facility of equal capacity produces more than 400,000 tonnes of waste material (ash) annually that contains more than 100 times more radioactive waste (uranium, thorium, radon) than a nuclear power plant.

In fact, all of the spent fuel so far produced in the US could fit into a football field just 10 meters high. And if this fuel was reprocessed, then the volume could be reduced by at least a factor of ten. So you could easily store all nuclear waste material in fortified cask at just one nuclear facility.

Nuclear waste locations within the continental US

But Yucca Mountain is clearly not the long term solution for radioactive waste within the US.

My solution to this problem would be to:

1. To mandate that all radioactive waste material that exist within the geographic territory of a state be kept within that state at environmentally secured federal, state, or private facilities for up to 200 years.

2. I'd allow states that posses radioactive waste to petition the federal government to fund, construct, operate, and secure federal radioactive waste repositories within their states designed to securely house radioactive material for up to 200 years.

3. Alternatively, states could petition the federal government to build a-- nuclear energy park-- within their state to house and reprocess all of their nuclear waste for fuel which could then be utilized on site. A nuclear energy park would consist of 10 to 40 reactors and would be utilized to produce regional electric power, ammonia for agricultural fertilizer and hydrogen for the production of synthetic hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline, diesel fuel, and aviation fuel through biomass or through the extraction of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Adding hydrogen to biomass increases the efficiency of synthetic fuel production by 3 to 5 times.

4. After 200 years, the waste would be removed from the state repositories or nuclear parks for final deposition. Final deposition could be extraterrestrial disposal using 23rd century space technology, or deep sea disposal, or disposal on a tiny island.

Of course, much of this radioactive material may be deemed too valuable to throw away a few centuries from now. Who knows, the humans and industries of the 23rd century might even pay big bucks for what 21st century humans use to call nuclear waste:-)

References and Links

1. Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste

2. Radioactive Waste (Wikipedia)

3. Radioactive Waste (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission)

4. Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel (US NRC)

5. Dry Cask Storage (US NRC)

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