Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Inside a Nuclear
Reactor
Steam outlet
Fuel Rods
Control Rods
Chernobyl 1986
Much more secure repository than leaving high level waste at 60 reactor
sites around the country.
On old atomic bomb testing base, inside a mountain.
The storage is above the water table.
The Yucca Mountain site would be 60% filled by present waste.
US has legal commitment to the reactor industry.
Site has been studied extensively by scientists for over 20 years.
Will store waste during its 10,000 year decay time.
Questions of how to deflect dripping water around and under the
storage vessels.
Questions of radioactive decay weakening storage containers.
A solution would be to build containers that can be opened and
reincased, or to which surrounded casings could be added.
Fusion Reactors
Fusion easiest for Deuteron (D) + Tritium(T):
D(p,n) + T(p,nn) 4He(pp,nn) + n
in a high temperature plasma.
Replacement T created from Li blanket around reactor
n + 6Li 4He + T
Fusion reactors
International ITER in 2012 for research for a decade, costing $5
billion
Current stalemate over siting in France or Japan
Followed by DEMO for a functioning plant, taking another 10
years.
Design and completion of a commercial plant not until 2050.
US Lithium supply would last a few hundred years.
Still would be a radioactive waste disposal problem.
International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor (ITER)