Here's a link to Tom's website for the book:An end to greenhouse gas emissions, a global framework to control nuclear proliferation, a preemptive remedy to looming water wars, and unlimited energy worldwide are just a few of the concrete solutions offered up in Tom Blees's brilliant and timely Prescription for the Planet. Everyone is worried about global warming, energy wars, resource depletion, and air pollution. But nobody has yet come up with a real plan to resolve these problems that can actually work-until now. Prescription for the Planet proposes a workable blueprint to virtually eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of this century and solve a host of other seemingly intractable global problems.
Solving our planet's most pressing dilemmas requires more than simply setting goals. We need a roadmap to reach them. Technologies that work fine on a small scale cannot necessarily be ramped up to global size. Worldwide environmental and social problems require a bold vision for the future that includes feasible planet-wide solutions with all the details. Prescription for the Planet explains how a trio of little-known yet profoundly revolutionary technologies, coupled with their judicious use in an atmosphere of global cooperation, can be the springboard that carries humanity to an era beyond scarcity. And with competition for previously scarce resources no longer an issue, the main incentives for warfare will be eliminated.
Explaining not only the means to solve our most pressing problems but how those solutions can painlessly lead to improving the standard of living of everyone on the planet, Blees's lucid and provocatively written Prescription for the Planet has arrived not a moment too soon. There is something here for everyone, be they a policymaker, environmental activist, or any concerned citizen hoping for a better future.
The other issue is the purity of the waste stream, which however will be addressed by continuing technology improvement during future development, and can be improved by multistage reprocessing of the wastes: 1st pass to recover U+TRU fuels, 2nd pass to extract separate high purity fission products, 3rd pass to recover remaining TRU from the rest, for the IFR-like cycle.Pyroprocessing is a nuclear-fuel treatment and recycling technology developed at Argonne. It is a multi-step process that removes actinides — uranium, plutonium and other transuranic elements that take hundreds of thousands of years to decay — from used nuclear fuel and recycles them back into new fuel.
)Hi David,David wrote: Yes, the standard line about IFR pyroprocessing is that ALL actinides are recycled back into the reactor. However the truth is they haven't been able to do better than about 1% going to waste. Again I am not sure the details but if this loss ends up mixed with large masses of processing chemical or diffuses into cathodes etc it might be extremely expensive to try to simply do more processing to lower these losses. As I said, Argonne's initial goal was to have much less than 0.1% going to waste and they only were able to do 1% or so, I would be certain they tried quite hard to do better so it might just not really be possible given the system. If anyone from Argonne wants to chime in with specific details please do so.
Tom Blees wrote:From Yoon Chang of Argonne:
In the current PUREX type aqueous reprocessing, the uranium and plutonium products are very clean (no fission product contamination). The decontamination factor is known to be of the order of 0.000001. This refers to fission product removal and does not refer to the product recovery efficiency. My guess is that the plutonium recovery factor is of the order of 99% (meaning it is not 99.9% nor 90%). On the order of 1% plutonium and all other minor actinides (Np, Am,Cm, etc.) go to the waste stream.
In pyroprocessing, there are two types of cathodes. One cathode collects uranium, and the other a combination of plutonium and all minor actinides. The cathode deposit efficiency can be poor, namely not all uranium and actinides are deposited to cathodes when an elctrorefiner run is made. Maybe you get 90% deposited or even less. However, what is remaining in the electrorefiner becomes a part of the feed, along with additional spent fuel loaded in the anode, for the next run. The material is not lost. So, it is not the recovery efficiency, like in PUREX reprocessing, that matters. What is important is what goes out with the wastes. The uranium cathode products are distilled to remove the adhering salts. The resulting uranium ingot is then consolidated at very high temperature. In this process, some dross is formed as a result of uranium interacting with some oxide-coated graphite crucible. If the dross is thrown away, the uranium loss could be of the order of 5%. But this uranium has very low economic value and no radiological toxicity, and hence no harm done to discard it. The actinide cathode can be treated similarly, but care should be taken to minimize actinide loss to waste stream. This is simply an economic tradeoff. If the loss factor is unacceptable, then you add one more treatment step to recover more actinides. You can set up a target of 0.1% loss or any appropriate limit and the process can be designed to achieve it. Any experiments done to date may or may not meet this target in one run, but this does not represent the ultimate commercial operation. What I discussed here is just principles involved and I don't know of any particular experimental results to contradict them.
Lets hope so but I don't think it as rosy a picture as that. Argonne and INL spent a very long time on this process with the stated goal of getting losses below 0.1% . The fact that they have settled on a system that is only within a factor of 10 of this doesn't leave me to believe that getting below 0.1% will be at very little cost. I don't know enough about the process to say more than that though.Tom Blees wrote:In regard to the idea of processing the waste multiple times: It may seem like that would be a costly process, but think about it this way: If you were running PRISM reactors totaling about 2-2.5 GW, the amount of spent fuel you'd have to process daily to keep it running would be about a gallon (solid, of course). So it's a very small-scale operation. Since you'd have the recycling facility right on site, it would be a small matter—and very inexpensive since it would be all electric and remote controlled—to run the waste through as many times as you'd wish. I should think the system could be quite automated. So the cost of making the eventual waste virtually actinide-free looks thoroughly doable, at very little cost whatsoever.
