I have been waiting for about 20 years for this paper to appear.

[NNadir]

Listen folks, most of what one hears here and elsewhere about addressing what is possibly the most serious issue before humanity since humanity passed out of Africa to the larger world, climate change, is pure bullshit.

I cannot be dissuaded from taking this position, not by people who insipidly mutter "Fukushima" or "Chernobyl" of (even more stupidly) "Three Mile Island," not by people who think that the existence of plutonium inevitably will lead to nuclear war. The entire history of nuclear war, has not killed a tiny fraction of the people killed by fossil fuel wars; the entire history of the accumulation of so called "nuclear waste" has not killed as many people as will die this afternoon from fossil fuel waste, and has killed each and every afternoon of this century.

The last hope of humanity is to convince ourselves to consider things as the are and to prioritize them over the things we imagine through a prism of fear and ignorance.

Because so many of us are in our own ways as ignorant as right wing anti-nuke and antivaxxer Bob Kennedy the 2nd, here's where we are as of this morning with respect to the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO₂:

Week beginning on April 07, 2024: 425.90 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 422.68 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 401.36 ppm
Last updated: April 13, 2024

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa (Accessed 4/13/24)

Back in the late 1950's and early 1960s, the American scientists ran an nuclear reactor known as the LAMPRE, (Los Alamos Molten Plutonium Reactor Experiment).

It was in the era of dynamic creativity in the development of nuclear energy which has been described beautifully in a monograph by the former director of ORNL, Alvin Weinberg, who died at the age of 91 in 2006: The First Nuclear Era.

That dynamism was quashed by appeals to fear and ignorance; it was an intellectual infrastructure that was destroyed along with the manufacturing and operational infrastructure in nuclear energy with the result that the planet is in flames.

Now we are in the "build back better" phase of the nuclear intellectual infrastructure; at least I hope we are. To build back, we must reach back to what was lost.

For many years I have in my Google Scholar alerts, a "liquid plutonium" search term; because I despaired of anyone anywhere ever looking as deeply into molten metal fuels. I badger my son, a nuclear engineering Ph.D student, about it from time to time, although his research interests are in nuclear materials as opposed to fuels. (In molten fuels, materials science is indeed critical, liquid plutonium is an excellent solvent. It dissolves steel and many other metals.)

Anyway, this morning the paper I was hoping would show up did.

Here's the link: Molten Fuel Fast Reactor: Concept of Core, Fuel Efficiency, and Safety (V.S. Okunev, 2024 6th International Youth Conference on Radio Electronics, Electrical and Power Engineering (REEPE))

The abstract:

This paper examines two options for a fast reactor core with the molten metal fuel. It is proposed to use fuel elements in the form of the sealed tungsten capsules filled with a mixture of waste metal uranium powders (80%) and concentration of the 235 U isotope of about 0.2% and metallic plutonium (20%) extracted from the spent nuclear fuel from a VVER (water-water energy reactor), which was previously purified from the 238 Pu isotope. Molten fuel natural convection in the fuel rods would make it possible to separate fission products during the reactor operation. They would be concentrated in the upper layer of the liquid fuel rods, i.e. above the core. During reactor operation, the fuel burns out, and the core height would gradually decrease. This helps in reducing the reactivity void effect. Criticality is compensated by the secondary fuel production, i.e. the breeding factor in the core is about 1.06. The reactor is able to operate on the lowenriched fuel: the fissile material concentration does not exceed 6…7%. Calculations show that such a reactor is safe. It is able to operate in the high-temperature and ultra-high-temperature reactor modes.

I have downloaded the full paper and will badger my son by sending it to him so it may remain in his mind through his career, a career I hope will be dedicated to saving what is left to save and restoring what can be restored.

As my life winds down in the awful times through which I have lived, observing in a peculiar way the realities, my hope for the future has been challenged. I often think that anything we do will be too little, too late. I have enough hope left to hope I'm wrong.

Dr. Okunev is a Russian scientist, and thus lives in what is now a pariah state. Even in a dark world, there can be places in which light can emerge, and to my mind Dr. Okunev is just that, a light in darkness. I hope this paper gets some attention.

Have a pleasant weekend.

[GreenWave]

1. Let me see and let me think. Antartica is miles high in ice.

Its natural melting has added over 250 feet to the ocean level over the past ten thousand years.

Let's watch this process unfold and figure out where did all those people only 275' above sea level.

With lots of seldom discussed items too. If only I had a daughter like this,

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-if-all-ice-earth-melted-overnight-2019-10

[greblach]

2. FFTF

Sounds a bit like the FFTF that was closed at Hanford...test facility, liquid sodium cooled, testing breeder reactor tech...unfortunately was deactivated... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Flux_Test_Facility#:~:text=The construction of the FFTF,especially relating to breeder reactors.

[marble falls]

3. Still wonder how waste that needs thousands of years to degrade are going to be protected ...

... it's a tempting thing for any country that might want a nuclear weapons program.

But it is a topic we all need to discuss. Hopefully cold fusion is starting to make sense for energy production - what do you think in the next twenty years?

[NNadir]

4. And yet, people focusing on so called "nuclear waste" with insipid reference to time are spectacularly disinterested...

...in the fossil fuel waste that will kill about 20,000 people today.

These deaths won't take "thousands of years;" they're constantly taking place:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).

The full paper cited in the OP is predicated on the idea, that despite much Bob Kennedy type ignorance to the contrary, there is no such thing as "nuclear waste." Specifically it is a paper about producing energy from the valuable contents of used nuclear fuel, which uneducated people continue to call, out of lazy sloganeering ignorance, "nuclear waste."

Of course, it's a scientific paper and has nothing to do with sloganeering.

Under these conditions, reprocessing valuable used nuclear fuel and putting its contents to use. naturally occurring uranium, which has a half-life equal to about the age of the Earth, 4.5 billion years, has its half life reduced to about a few years, and in the process removes the formation of all of the radioactive components of the uranium decay series.



Source: USA EPA Radioactive Decay

I really don't know where people come up with these "thousands of years" or "tens of thousands of years" or "millions of years" numbers - it varies from antinuke to antinuke, but probably it comes from the circle jerk of antinuke websites dedicated to the promotion of ignorance - but the scientific literature readily compares the radiotoxicity of used nuclear fuels - if they were to escape, which they are unlikely to do, especially if put to use to save the planet - the effect would be, in a few hundred years, to reduce the radioactivity of the planet, which may or may not be a good thing:

The following figure shows the very different case obtained if one separates the uranium, plutonium and minor actinides (neptunium, americium and curium) and fissions them, whereupon the reduction of radioactivity to a level that is actually below that of the original uranium in a little over 300 years:



The caption:

Fig. 4. – Radiotoxicity (log-scale, unit: Sv/tSM) of 1 t of heavy metal (SM) from a pressurized water reactor (initial enrichment 4.2% U-235, burn-up 50 GWd/t) with regard to ingestion as a function of time (log-scale, unit: years) after discharge. Left-hand frame: contribution of fission products (FP), plutonium (Pu) and minor actinides (MA) to radiotoxicity. Right-hand frame: Modification of radiotoxicity due to separation of U, Pu or U, Pu, MA. The reference value is the radiotoxicity of the amount of natural uranium that was used to produce 1 t of nuclear fuel. Source: [17].

(Hartwig Freiesleben, The European Physical Journal Conferences · June 2013)

I excerpted this figure (of which there are many examples in the literature) from a post here I put together in response to just one of the poorly educated antinuke radiation paranoids around here who was whining stupidly about a collapsed tunnel at Hanford:

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

I always invite any and all antinukes - who as I suggest in the OP are responsible for this vast death toll from air pollution - to show that the storage of used nuclear fuel, that as many people have been killed, in the nearly 70 year history of the accumulation of used nuclear fuels, that they have killed as many people as will die today between noon today and 6 PM today in any time zone anywhere on this planet by air pollution, never mind climate change.

Only reference in the peer reviewed scientific literature can be accepted as evidence of the same.

The antinukes never answer the question. They change the subject or they slither away without even attempting an answer into the hellhole of their ignorance, ignorance that clearly, with a planet in flames, is appalling.

Nuclear energy saves human lives. It doesn't need to be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else, just as vaccines need not be without risk to save lives.

In Bob Kennedy Junior we have the coalescence of two forms of pernicious ignorance, antivax rhetoric and antinuke rhetoric.

I personally hold the people handing out this shit - from Bob Jr. on down - beneath contempt, but in Bob Jr.'s case, he readily exemplifies the equivalence, to which I often point, of the two very dangerous bits of mindless anti-science propaganda which, regrettably, too many people take seriously, resulting in a vast death toll.

Have a pleasant weekend.

[LiberaBlueDem]

5. Plutonium is some weird stuff

Quote: (In molten fuels, materials science is indeed critical, liquid plutonium is an excellent solvent. It dissolves steel and many other metals.)

It dissovles steel ?!!? .... What can ever keep it from reacting and dissolving any contanier?

Best we just stop making any more plutonium.

[NNadir]

6. We desperately need as much plutonium as we can get.

There are almost 60 metals in the periodic table available in macroscopic quantities, and iron is only one of them.

The current paper proposes to use tungsten, which would have the interesting property under these conditions to be transmuted over a period of time into the very valuable and very rare metals rhenium, osmium, iridium, and even platinum.

Beyond specific metals, there is also a huge and very advanced science called "Materials Science" that is way more sophisticated than when the LAMPRE reactor operated in the 1950's and early 1960's. (It did not leak.) There are many concepts that can be utilized to manage hot liquid plutonium, for example, metalloceramics, certain classes of metallocarbides, very corrosion and temperature resistant nitrides, as well careful design to exploit peritectic systems to make plutonium migration into metals be effectively self healing.

My son is a materials scientist and he is, in fact, working on nuclear materials in a nuclear engineering program.

The point of a liquid plutonium fueled reactor is that to allow continuous reprocessing without removing or isolating the fuel. Under these conditions we could recover valuable fission products by rather mundane chemical processes on line, such as distillation and extraction.

Note, the LAMPRE did not operate on pure liquid plutonium but actually the fuel was an iron/plutonium eutectic. The reactor exploited the solubility of iron in plutonium.

The point of having more plutonium is to save what is left to save from climate change and fossil fuel related chemical pollution, and perhaps to restore what can be restored. It can be shown that converted to plutonium, the world inventory of uranium already mined, which is mainly ²³⁸U. Plutonium is, I have convinced myself, the last best hope of the human race. The question is to make it fast enough to accomplish this vital task. Liquid plutonium can exhibit very high breeding ratios, perhaps only exceeded by some americium isotopes, although this data should be subject to update.

Without plutonium, to my mind, there isn't all that much hope for the future.

[LiberaBlueDem]

7. Transmutation

I have read where reactors were being used to make gold >>> transmutated

I guess plutonium in very controlled situations can be transmutated into who knows what but any researchers would be susceptible to its pollution. How many years does it take plutonium to kill? We know it can be deadly for a long, long time.

[NNadir]

8. The rumor, the disingenuous claim, that plutonium is "deadly" should be supported by data.

Plutonium was discovered in 1941, and the element now exists on a more than 1000 ton scale. Since it was discovered it has been used once in a nuclear weapon that killed a significant number of people, at Nagasaki, where it was used to end a what started as an oil war, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor to eliminate the US fleet on its flank as it drove for the oil fields in what was then Dutch East India, now Indonesia.

That was the last and only nuclear war. It is notable that in the last and only nuclear war, the number of people killed by petroleum weapons of mass destruction dwarfed the number of people killed at Nagasaki, even if one were to add the people killed by the other nuclear weapon, the one that utilized naturally occurring uranium, the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima.

Since 1945, oil wars, some on a very large scale with a vast death toll, have persisted; nuclear wars have not.

Multi-ton scale plutonium only became available by the late 1950s or mid-1960's at best, probably later, and in isolated form, only by the 1980s. The largest isolated quantity is currently in the UK.

Today, yesterday, and tomorrow, every day of this year, every day of next year, 19,000 people roughly will die from air pollution, largely from the combustion of oil, gas, and coal.

The standard language I use to make this point is here:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

If we take an unusually high estimate of the death toll at Nagasaki, around 100,000 people, this means that air pollution is generating a "Nagasaki" roughly every six days.

Since 1946, there have been a few instances in which plutonium led to a few deaths, generally in criticality accidents, probably fewer people than died on the oil platform when the oil rig in the Deep Horizon accident killed 8 people instantly; to this we can add other oil related explosions, but these are trivial in comparison to the vast death toll associated with the use of petroleum.

I think this history, in which the total number of deaths related to the use of plutonium represents less than a few hours worth of the number of deaths routinely caused by petroleum suggests that plutonium isn't all that "deadly."

By comparison, petroleum and its products are extremely "deadly."

When plutonium is used in nuclear reactors in peaceful productive settings, it saves human lives, myths and mysticism and marketing aside:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895).

If we are to ban any form of energy, fossil fuels should be the target, and the banning of fossil fuels is 100% dependent on the use of plutonium, whatever its minor risks.