Re: Defence procurement bungles and wins
Reply #88 –
There is some argy bargy today about "high level nuclear waste" from Subs, how are we going to deal with this "huge problem", what can we do to manage it safely, the claim is there are "no answers" to those questions and "the risk" in a country like Australia is "too high", so the Subs should be banned!
The reality is this.
Even from an old fashioned nuclear reactor, the high level waste is a very very small percentage of the total waste. Typically less than 5% older plants, for more modern plants less than 3% and for the next generation systems it is expected to be less than 1%. But what does that mean for the amount of high level waste?
Well I don't know about Subs as this they are need to know, but a gigawatt nuclear plant produces about 2L coke bottle of long term radioactive waste every year, of that less than 5% is "high level waste", so a bit more than a cap full or two from a 2L bottle. But a gigawatt nuclear plant is about 200x larger than the nuclear reactor on a Sub, so by ratio we are probably talking about some annual high level waste the size and volume of a postage stamp! That is ignoring the fact that the Sub reactors are far more advanced than power plants, and I suspect are probably more efficient simply because of the size and space constraints.
Much of what the public and media label as waste are unused materials surrounding the waste, much of that waste gets reprocessed/recycled and reused, the actual waste left over by volume after the reprocessing is very very small. You always get those images of pools full of pallets of nuclear waste, deathly glowing blue, but that isn't all waste in the pools, the pools keep the waste and unused material in a safe state (i.e, not irradiating the workers and building) as it cools enough to be reprocessed. For a Sub there might be something similar to those pools, but perhaps the size of a 200L drum.
btw.; Water is such an effective barrier at stopping most radiation, that there are long term plans / proposals to collect and clad space craft with ice as a solution to protect astronauts from solar or interstellar radiation.