this morning, my questions is, what about those spent fuel rods in japan that need to be covered with water? i understand that they need to be cooled, but my question is, do they need to be cooled forever, or do they eventually finally cool down, and how long does it take, and how do they dispose of them? i was reading about each individual reactor, but it didn’t mention that, so i looked it up and when i just typed in “spent, the words “spent fuel rods” immediately came up, which means, of course, that many many people all around the world want the answer to this question.
i started reading about the nuclear fuel cycle on wikipedia but quickly got bogged down with words like”actinide transmutation” and pphrases like “Depending on the matrix the process can generate more transuranics from the matrix.”
i did finally scroll way, way down and came to “spent fuel rods.” here’s a small part of that, which does tell us something:
Spent fuel that has been removed from a reactor is ordinarily stored in a water-filled spent fuel pool for a year or more in order to cool it and provide shielding from its radioactivity. Practical spent fuel pool designs generally do not rely on passive cooling but rather require that the water be actively pumped through heat exchangers.
OK, but then heres’ the part of this entry which is found a little bit alarming:
Nuclear Reprosesssing can separate spent fuel into various combinations of reprocessed uranium, plutonium, minor actinides, fission products, remnants of zirconium or steel cladding, activation products, and the reagents or solidifiers introduced in the reprocessing itself. In this case the volume that needs to be disposed of is greatly reduced.
Alternatively, the intact Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) can be disposed of as radioactive waste.
The United States has planned disposal in deep geological formations, such as the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, where it has to be shielded and packaged to prevent its migration to mankind’s immediate environment for thousands of years.[1] However, on March 5, 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate hearing that “the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste.”[9]
so WE DON’T KNOW EVEN HAVE A PLACE TO PUT THE RADIOACTIVE WASTE, is what i got from this. surely that can’t be right??? if you happen to be a nuclear scientist, just lolling around reading this posting, please edify. i can’t imagine that there’s just a bunch of reactor waste lying around somewhere, but you never know.
last night i wanted to hear more about japan but it was only on “nightline” which i don’t believe i’ve actually every watched, only parodies of it on Saturday Night Live, and there was a story about an american guy who is the head of a basketball team there, and how he and his family were trying to get to Kyoto, and he had shot some video of their trip, showing huge lines of people desperate to get gas, and standing in line for food that wasn’t there. at the end of the story the guy and his family made it to Kyoto, and the news announcer announced “what a happy story,” and i said ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND, LADY? what about all the poor japanese people who are without food and power and all the death and destruction?
then they had a guy on who sounded very alarmist and just a little bit crazy. the announcer kept pressing him to say what the “worst possible outcome” would be, and he rolled his eyes and said something like “we’re all fucked.”
no, he didn’t really say that, but that’s what he was implying.
how come they never ask about the BEST possible outcome?
also it’s interesting to hear how the japanese just feel it’s “part of their job” for the workers at the nuclear plant to keep working, because “that’s what they have to do,” even though now they’re saying it’s a suicide mission because of the huge amounts of radiation exposure. the whole japanese mentality is so different from ours.
i wanted to watch CNN last night, but instead they were covering Bahrain, and i’m feeling like there are so many cataclysmic events occurring worldwide that it’s almost impossible to keep up, or process all the information.
i did spend some time yesterday trying to rid the world of zombies, but i also decided that i need to challenge my brain, since i’m not studying nuclear fusion or fission and i’m not trying to figure out how to stop insane and evil Kadafi from killing all his people.
i decided to try Sudoku. I always thought it involved math, but Bev is a Sudoku fanatic (and, i’m sure, a sudouk master), so i thought i’d give it a try to maybe stop some of the alarming fleeing of all my brain cells.
it’s not math, it’s logic. i found it online and was just gonna plunge in but realized that i didn’t even know the basic concepts, so i read up on it.
i played one game and it took me about 49 minutes. it said the fastest anybody did it was ONE MINUTE AND FOURTEEN SECONDS. i mean, how is this even possible?
clearly, i’ve saved my poor brain from plunging straight down into complete moronitude. it’s teetering there on the brink, so i must try the Sudoku each and every day.
last night i called bev at 11:20, after spending about two hours trying to finish a harder sudoku puzzle. she’d told me before that she’s always up late, but when she answered the phone she said “what’s wrong?” so clearly she was asleep and thinking i was calling her about a crisis.
no, just a sudoku crisis.
we were going to have some corned beef in celebration of st. patrick’s day, and maybe i’ll wear my cute green wig to the grocery store.
ok then, hang in there, world,
mrs. thursday hughes.