Uppity Wisconsin

A graduate student in nuclear engineering at UW-Madison, Brian Kiedrowski, has solved the nuclear waste disposal problem -- something the nuclear industry and the federal government have failed at for 50 years.  Can a Nobel Prize be far behind?

In a letter to the editor in the campus Badger Herald, Kiedrowski says:

Used fuel from all U.S. reactors over 40 years could fit in Camp Randall up to the goal posts. It is solid, compact and insoluble, not a green ooze that can leak.

Well, what are we waiting for? Well, I guess it would be hard to play football if the stadium was filled to the goalposts, so I'm thinking we look for an alternative site. Is the old Field House big enough?

Or maybe we could each take a small chunk of the solid, harmless stuff and store it in our homes or garages, if the volume's that small.

Kiedrowski doesn't mention that this stuff is highly radioactive, so deadly that the Environmental Protection Agency says it should be kept out of the environment and away from humans for hundreds of thousands if not a million years. (15,000 years ago, Wisconsin was covered by glaciers.)

You'll learn all sorts of other interesting "facts" at the Badger Herald website, which also ran a pro-nuclear column by another nuclear engineering student.

Such as: There is no man-made global warming. Or, "given the small amount of waste, it's conceivable that we could shoot it out into space on a collision course with a star." Or, "There is no such thing as nuclear waste." France has solved the problem. Etc etc.

Unfortunately, there is such a thing as nuclear waste and more is accumulating every day.

France? A few safety issues, like:part of France’s “recycling” strategy includes dumping radioactive waste in the ocean; independent medical studies have shown higher rates of leukemia in young people who live near the reprocessing center; and radioactive uranium solution accidentally leaked into the ground last summer, leading the French government to make two rivers off limits for human activity. So France is not exactly a model.

A new nuclear reactor costs $10-billion and takes 10 years to build, and the government expects half of them to default on their loans. That's why the nuclear industry is asking right now for a $50-billion taxpayer subsidy in the form of loan guarantees.

So maybe Kiedrowski needs to go back to the drawing board before collecting that Nobel. There remain a few small things to be worked out.

This is not just an academic question, by the way. There is a major push on in Wisconsin to relax the standards, in place since 1983, that have prevented new nuclear reactors from being built here.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, a Missouri utility, citing economic reasons, has scrapped plans for what was to be the first in the new generation of nuclear reactors in the US. The utility wanted to be allowed to charge its customers for financing costs before the plant was finished, the NY Times reports.