Where did the data for this table come from? Checking Pb-208 (a memorable double-magic nucleus), it should really not be shown as undergoing alpha decay when none of the major ENDF tables show that. There is an unsourced remark on Wikipedia that this might happen, but given the half-life, I do not think scientists have ever measured a single such decay... so probably not best to include it. And if one spot check shows a mistake, how many more are there? It's a big table and ENDF data files are not pretty things....
The photo of the lifetime waste burden is good. But of course obfuscates the waste trail before the fuel arrived at the reactor. I don't want to come off as nit-picky: its an amazing lesson how how LOW the post-energy waste burden is, done right and I wish we could learn to agree about this as a huge upside of Nuclear, compared to the mountains of fly ash, and related waste from coal, and the CO/CO2 burden.
But, we do need to pay heed to the waste cycle going in. Its not zero by a long chalk. It includes heinously bad stuff at all stages from yellowcake up. If the cycle still has Uranium Hexaflouride in it, this is why we have PTFE.
> There are advanced reactor designs that don’t rely on the fission of U-235, but rather use the far more abundant isotope U-238. Some of these reactors can burn “spent” fuel, or “depleted” uranium left over from the enrichment process—extracting something like 60 times as much energy from uranium as traditional nuclear reactors.
Some "we" and/or some "they". Russia seems to be intent and making advances toward closing the fuel cycle, in efforts IMHO severely underreported on HN. (It might be better that way. I have seen reticence to stir up jealousy or something in the Anglosphere. Let them [ignorantly] go about their business.)
The most famous of these is the Chernobyl reactor design, the RBMK. It could be run on natural uranium rather than enriched uranium and would self enrich the uranium via neutron bombardment inside the reactor.
Of course there are some flaws in a reactor that breeds it's own enriched uranium. There's states that the neutron flux is too low so the enriched elements aren't burnt off quickly as intended. This leads to a state where the whole reactor is a highly enriched weapons grade bomb.
A reactor that runs on natural uranium is still fissioning 235U (and some of the 239Pu that has been bred, but that's true of reactors that run on low enriched U as well.)
Yeah, but that graphite has to have zero boron in it, which is not easy to accomplish. You have to go to fairly crazy extremes, like regulating what kind of laundry detergent your factory workers are allowed to use.
This is a bit nit-picky, but a CANDU reactor does not fission U-238. Neutrons in a CANDU reactor are still thermal neutrons, and if you put pure U-238 in a CANDU reactor it won't run. A CANDU reactor does run on uranium with a lower amount of U-235 than a standard PWR design, and it does transmute some of that U-238 into Pu-239 which it then does fission, but it doesn't directly fission U-238 and it does require some baseline ratio of U-235 to operate.
What would the consequences be of detonating an improvised truck bomb, comparable in size to the Oklahoma City Bombing [0], in the middle of the spent fuel casks at the Connecticut Yankee plant?
A truck bomb would do barely anything to those except perhaps crack the ones immediately next to the epicenter. Local cleanup would be required, but nuclear waste containers have been generally over-engineered with things like that in mind.
The famous video of a train versus one of the transportation casks:
It depends on what you mean by middle. If you mean just placed in the middle of the configuration, probably not much. A few feet of concrete reinforced steel can resist a lot. Certainly some leaks but probably not too bad outside of the immediate vicinity.
If you put the bomb in the middle of one of the casks, it would probably impact 100,000s of people. It'd probably be pretty hard to get it there though and if you could do that, you could probably extract the radioactive material and transport it somewhere else.
