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Radioactivity Neutralization Methods


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Deep Underground Burial of Radioactive Waste
Gary Vesperman has seen a Department of Energy estimate that the life-cycle cost of the abandoned Yucca Mountain, Nevada radioactive waste repository would have been $150,000,000,000.
From: Tommy.Smith@rw.doe.gov

To: vman@skylink.net

Date: Wednesday, January 28, 1998 11:29 AM

Subject: Re: Low-Energy Nuclear Transmutation

 

Dear Mr. Vesperman:



 

Thank you for your inquiry to the OCRWM National Information Center. Funding for OCRWM activities is subject to the Congressional appropriation process. Funds have not been provided for the research you cited. The scope of scientific work conducted by OCRWM is prescribed by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (1982) and its amendments.

 

Many possibilities for permanent disposal have been studied in depth.


Based on a final Environmental Impact Statement prepared in 1980, and recommendations from groups such as the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Geological Survey, and several scientific organizations, deep underground disposal was chosen as the best option.

 

I would like to recommend the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Research as an additional



resource for research and development information and comments. The Internet address is

http://www.er.doe.gov/.

 

Sincerely,



 

Tommy Smith

OCRWM National Information Center
http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/260797 displays the February 16, 2014 copy of the Las Vegas weekly “The Sunday”. It includes an article which profiles the key people for and against restarting the abandoned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

DOE Opposes Radioactivity Neutralization to Preserve Source of Bomb-Grade U and Pu

From the compilation of “Energy Invention Suppression Cases” pp 85-87 at www.padrak.com/vesperman:

 

From: David  G. Yurth



Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2006 5:27 PM

To:


Subject: Remediating Nuclear Waste Materials - UNLV

 

Dear Mr. Tetreault: After reading your article in the Las Vegas Review Journal entitled “Nuclear Project Draws Interest,” I thought it may be of interest to you to know that the DOE has played this game with university and privately funded laboratories for many years. Perhaps the most comprehensive review of this subject ever undertaken was prepared by Mr. Richard Shamp, President of Nuclear Remediation Technologies, headquartered in Hyattsville, Maryland (301) 559-5057.



 

Beginning in 1997, NRT and its chief scientist S-X Jin [once the highest ranked particle physicist in the People’s Republic of China, until he escaped to the US in 1994 while addressing the Institute of New Energy symposium in Salt Lake City, Utah] have been submitting critical laboratory documents to DOE, demonstrating the effectiveness of known technologies used to remediate radioactive emissions generated by nuclear fuel waste materials in both solid and liquid form.

 

After being finessed into providing all the definitive laboratory data to Dr. Frank Goldner of DOE’s nuclear remediation division, then Secretary of DOE Spencer Abraham attempted to confiscate, classify and impound NRT’s technology while at the same time pretending to be considering providing grant money to support its continued development. 



 

The fact that the technology in question had already been awarded six patents [K. Shoulders et al] was the only thing that prevented him from succeeding. Instead of providing grant funding, Dr. Goldner was instructed to put an end to NRT’s pursuit of DOE funding for the development and deployment of its technologies.  And that is precisely what he did.

 

During a conference call held on November 15, 2003, I was informed by Goldner that not only did DOE not intend to ever provide any funding to anyone for the purpose of remediating radioactive emissions in spent nuclear fuels, he insisted that it is and will continue to be DOE’s policy for the next 40 years to encapsulate and bury every ounce of high-grade nuclear waste material stored in the US underground at Yucca Mountain.



 

Further, he told us that any attempt to obtain any high-level nuclear waste materials for testing by anyone, including government funded laboratories, would be arrested and jailed without access to legal counsel under the Export Administration Act. I still don’t know what the EAA has to do with remediating radioactive emissions, but that is what he said.

 

In 1999, while Elliott Richardson was Secretary of DOE, NRT was awarded a discretionary grant of $2,000,000 for the purpose of advancing its test schedule. The work was to have been undertaken in concert with Dr. George Miley, physicist in residence at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Dr. Miley’s laboratory at the Champaign-Urbana campus was level 2 accredited by DOE, and was therefore acceptable as a test and development site. However, within less than 90 days after the announcement of the grant had been published, pressure from within the Department rose to such extraordinary levels that Secretary Richardson was forced to withdraw the grant, albeit grudgingly.



 

The only similar technology ever contemporaneously developed in the US for the remediation of radioactive emissions in high-grade nuclear waste materials was developed in the late 1990’s by Dr. Paul Brown and his colleagues at World Atomics in Colorado Springs, Colorado. After being granted several patents for the ‘Nuclear Spallation Device’ he designed, Brown contracted with several Japanese contractors to build three successively powerful prototype versions of his device.

 

He had them built in Japan because DOE actively intervened more than a dozen times to prevent US companies from building it. The problem with Brown’s device was that it was little more than a small, semi-controlled nuclear fission-powered device designed to continuously bombard nuclear waste material targets with a highly charged gamma ray field. Because it was so dangerous to operate, Brown was never able to obtain the necessary State Department or UN transport clearances to have it shipped across international waters into the US for further testing and development.



 

As you may recall, Dr. Brown was killed shortly thereafter under the most questionable of circumstances, just as the utility of his nuclear spallation technique was about to be publicly demonstrated in Japan .

 

(Only a month before he died, Paul Brown met with me, Gary Vesperman, and a few of my business and science associates in Henderson, Nevada to present his method of neutralizing radioactive waste. His method is detailed in “Radioactivity Neutralization with Paul Brown’s Gamma Ray Method”.



A few weeks after Brown’s suspicious fatal car accident, Art Rosenblum also died in a car accident. Rosenblum had been enthusiastically promoting Randall Mills' Blacklight Power Inc.’s energy source.)

 

We have known how to safely remediate radioactive emissions from spent nuclear fuels, both liquid and solid, for nearly a decade. We have the test data and prototype apparatus to prove it. That data, including all the protocols, policies, procedures and experimental design criteria associated with our work have been submitted to DOE many times over – Dick Shamp can tell you all about it if you want to go to the trouble to ask him – with the net result that DOE will not allow the US Postal Service to deliver our proposals any longer. If you want to see what is really going on with nuclear remediation, this is a very good place to begin.



 

Thanks for writing your article – you’re about to find out how big Pandora’s box really is.

 

David G. Yurth, Ph.D.



Director Science and Technology

Nuclear Remediation Technologies, Inc.

 

(Yurth’s letter to Tetreault has not been published in any Las Vegas publication. Why? Maybe to protect the profitable contracts to be generated by the DOE-estimated $150 billion lifecycle cost of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository? Gary Vesperman)



From: Ace Hoffman

To: Recipient list suppressed:

Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2013

Subject: High Burn-Up Fuel: The problems multiply...

 

9/26/2013



Dear Readers,

Spent fuel is hot stuff.  It's thermally hot – about 400 degrees Fahrenheit. That's not residual heat from when the fuel was in the reactor; it’s decay heat from fission products with relatively short half-lives – from days or weeks to about 30 years for most of them (most isotopes of iodine, cesium, strontium, etc.).  The fuel will stay well above the boiling point of water for centuries or even millennia, although the temperature will keep dropping over time.

(Note: The term "short" for the half-lives of most fission products compares to uranium, which is a billion years or more, or even plutonium, which is 10s of thousands of times more radioactive (SHORTER half-life) than uranium.  Fission products are thousands of times more deadly than that, not counting Pu and U's heavy metal horrors.)

And speaking of the boiling point of water, above that you get steam.  Steam is particularly hazardous to the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods.  The zirconium separates the hydrogen from the oxygen in the water molecules of the steam, and the hydrogen atoms combine with each other as H2, which is explosive.  Because it's so hot and radioactive inside the dry cask, they can't monitor this process near where it's happening, inside the "dry" cask.  They need to monitor the water content, as well as the hydrogen, oxygen, helium, and "fission gasses" that are emitted.


After draining the fuel rods by slowly lifting the entire dry cask assembly out of the spent fuel pool (about 15 years after it was used in the reactor) about 25 gallons of water will remain in the fuel assembly.  This water must be removed through repeated drying processes which are only partially successful each time.  After that, water seepage into the dry cask is also an ever-constant threat.

There are now about 50 and will be approximately 150 dry casks at San Onofre.  Each one will need a constantly-operating monitoring system to know the levels of hydrogen and other gases in each cask.  Such systems have not been designed for horizontally-stored casks such as are used at San Onofre.  Instead, walk-by monitoring will be done for escaping radiation.  That's not sufficient.

The threat of water intrusion comes from many sources.  The dry casks will supposedly be submersible to 50 feet of water, according to regulations.  But on the other hand, they will barely be above sea level, and the California State coast and waterways brochures state that everywhere along California 's coast, 50-foot tsunamis are possible.  Should we risk these "dry" casks on a coast with 9 million people within 50 miles and with so little margin of error?

In some ways, it's too bad the fuel isn't hotter, because if the temperature is above the "brittle/ductile boundary temperature" (which varies for every alloy of cladding and everything else in a fuel rod assembly) then it's much easier to move.  But instead, the fuel has been cooling to well below that temperature, and now it's very brittle and difficult to deal with.  As it gets older it also gets more and more embrittled, and so, even more difficult to deal with.  That is where we are heading here at San Onofre.

Additionally, in high burn-up fuel, the ceramic pellets of uranium dioxide, which forms the bulk of the mass of the fuel rods (uranium is 1.7 times more dense than lead) fuses to the zirconium cladding.  This is a very serious problem during later transport of the fuel, especially during postulated (let alone, greater-than-postulated) accidents, because the weight of the fuel on the ring of zirconium cladding is all concentrated on the very thin areas between the fuel pellets.  So a force that was supposed to be spread out along the length of a pellet (about an inch) is instead borne nearly entirely by mere fractions of a millimeter.  A crack means deadly fission products escape, a full rupture of a fuel rod means pellets drop out and could cause a criticality event when they gather at the bottom of the cask.

There are no shipping containers which the NRC has licensed for transporting high burn-up fuel, and worries about criticality events is one reason why.  There aren't even any dry cask storage containers which have been licensed beyond the 20-year period for storage of high burn-up spent fuel.  As recently as last March, the NRC's own experts can be heard at a meeting stating that tests for the quality of such containers should take at least 10 years to conduct – and that's after the regulators have already conducted preliminary experiments to determine the type of testing that needs to be done!  But it's the nuclear industry's job to actually do the tests (according to the NRC).  The tests need to be done for each type of cladding.  All zirconium alloys behave uniquely, and the industry hasn't even started to develop a plan for a test, let alone started a test of their systems for long-term storage or for transport afterwards.

However, despite these "known unknowns," high burn-up fuel IS being used around the country, and IS being loaded into dry casks, which are currently licensed for up to 20 years sitting on site wherever they happen to be produced.  Never mind the pressures from vibrations of ocean waves and rails and truck routes a few feet away and all those unknowns.  Never mind that there is no national plan to move the fuel ever.  Never mind all that, so that operating reactor sites can keep making more waste.

High burn-up fuel allows reactor companies to keep operating even when they would otherwise be unprofitable.  It also wears out the steam generators and/or other components of the reactor faster.  It's no bargain for society to let the utilities get away with using high burn-up fuel!


Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman


Carlsbad , CA

Ace Hoffman, Owner & Chief Programmer, The Animated Software Co.


POB 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018
U.S. & Canada (800) 551-2726; elsewhere: (760) 720-7261
home page: www.animatedsoftware.com
From: Helen Caldicott
To: 'Gary Vesperman'
Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2013 8:34 PM
Subject: RE: High burn-Up spent nuclear fuel: The problems multiply...
Gary this is high burn-up spent fuel, 4.5% enriched U-238 instead of 3%

 

From: Gary Vesperman [mailto:garyvesperman@yahoo.com]


Sent: Saturday, September 28, 2013 2:35 PM
To: Gary Vesperman
Subject: High burn-Up spent nuclear fuel: The problems multiply...

From: Gary Vesperman [mailto:garyvesperman@yahoo.com]


Sent: Friday, September 27, 2013 10:35 PM
To: Gary Vesperman
Subject: High burn-Up spent nuclear fuel: The problems multiply...

 

Ace writes here that the NRC has not licensed any shipping containers for transporting spent nuclear fuel. So how is spent fuel to be transported to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump? I am confused about the Yucca Mountain dump.  Gary Vesperman



 

From: David G. Yurth


To: 'Gary Vesperman'
Sent: Saturday, September 28, 2013 3:03 PM
Subject: RE: High burn-Up spent nuclear fuel: The problems multiply...
Gary –

 

I have beat my head against this wall since 1994, when S-X Jin, David Faust and I began testing high-density charge clusters as a way of remediating radioactive emissions produced by spent nuclear fuels. We developed a system that was totally viable. We developed the math that explained what it was and how it worked. We conducted the experimental protocols for 7 years and documented the procedures that were used to enable and sustain it. We submitted this info to US DOE in 2003 by invitation. In 2004 our system was independently validated by the guys at Sandia Labs.


In 2005 I was contacted by Dr. Frank Goldner, the senior nuclear scientist responsible for developing and testing remediation technologies at the agency. He screamed at me and threatened to have me and Dick Shamp arrested under FISA unless we stopped sending documentation to the Department and discontinued our work. I stopped. Dick did not.
In 2009, after Obama was elected, Dick contacted the #3 guy at DOE, a career bureaucrat who has served as personal private secretary to the Sec’y of DOE for more than 30 years named Dr. Eysan Khan. He apologized profusely for the way we had been treated and invited me to come to DC to present the HDCC methodology to all 26 of his senior department heads. Two weeks before I was scheduled to make the trip, he called to tell me that he had gotten so much push-back from ‘clients’ of DOE about my presentation that he couldn’t tolerate the pressure. The presentation was cancelled.

 

This has nothing to do with Yucca Mountain. It has everything to do with the government’s secret and unlawful use of public utilities who generate atomic power as the source for high-grade uranium and weapons-grade plutonium. They don’t want the problem solved because it would deprive them of their only viable source of supply. They don’t give a fart in a windstorm about the risks they impose on local populations like Fukushima – all they care about is using nuclear weapons to control the planet. And they are getting away with it. That’s why this subject makes no sense to anyone who talks about it – the real agenda has nothing to do with public safety or possible catastrophic contamination of the planet.



 

Dave Yurth

Dave Yurth and Richard Shamp generated the following form letter March 6, 2006 as a way to respond to the inquiries they received after the release of an announcement that Nova Institute of Technology, Inc., had awarded a contract for development of their radioactive waste remediation technology to Nuclear Remediation Technologies, Inc. It tells their story and explains where their intellectual property could be applied to resolve the kind of problems now being dealt with at Fukushima.

 

[Date]


[Name]

[Title/Company]

[Address]

[City/ State/ Zip Code]

[Telephone]

[Fax]


[Email]

[Web address]


Ref: NRT Proposal – Prototype Testing & Applications Development
Dear [name]:
Nuclear Remediation Technologies and its affiliates have been working for more than a decade to develop a technology to neutralize the radioactive emissions generated by high-level nuclear waste materials. Our primary objective is to develop a technologically feasible, commercially viable means for neutralizing nuclear waste materials created by power plants and other essential strategic sources in situ. We are convinced that it is simply suicidal to transport high-level nuclear waste materials across the country for burial under Yucca Mountain, the Goshute Indian Reservation in Western Utah and other similar waste depositories, as proposed by DOE. Even if the Yucca Mountain alternative were technologically feasible, the NRT solution will still save the nuclear industry and the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars each year.

After conducting basic research for more than a decade to prove the technological viability of the underlying science used to reduce radioactive emissions in high level waste materials, NRT forwarded detailed development proposals to Secretary Spencer Abraham, Deputy Under-Secretary Frank Goldner and others at the Department of Energy (see background). Despite the fact that the technology has been categorically demonstrated to reduce alpha and gamma emissions from nuclear fuel wastes; and, further, in spite of the fact that all the data needed to rigorously document the efficacy of the proposed treatment modality has repeatedly been forwarded to DOE for review and consideration; and, further, notwithstanding the fact that DOE’s technical analysis of NRT’s proposals has confirmed the technological viability of the solution we have proposed; and, finally, regardless of the fact that the technologies integrated to provide the NRT solution have all been awarded Letters Patent by the USPTO, nevertheless all the requests for funding submitted to develop working prototypes under the review and control of DOE’s own accredited laboratories have all been rejected.


In November 2004, Dr. Frank Goldner, Director of the Division of Radioactive Remediation Technologies, was directed by DOE Secretary Abraham to demand that we cease and desist sending further documentation and proposals to DOE and, further, to advise us that the Department of Energy’s prime directive is to encapsulate and bury radioactive nuclear waste materials at Yucca Mountain. As a matter of policy, despite its public pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding, Mr. Goldner informed NRT that the U.S. Department of Energy will no longer support efforts to treat radioactive wastes by any means other than encapsulation and burial.
Recent estimates by the DOE suggest that after the Department has expended in excess of $40 billion to operationalize the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, more than $12 billion will be expended each year to encapsulate, transport, deposit, store, secure and manage the accumulated solid and liquid waste materials buried beneath the ground in Western Nevada. In contrast, NRT’s estimates suggest that five (5) working prototypes, ready for field testing in their beta configuration, can be prototyped, tested, and deployed over a period of no more than 36 months at a cost of less than $10 million. The background material attached to this correspondence identifies the timelines, milestones, budgetary requirements and control mechanisms developed by NRT and its affiliates for this project, as incorporated into the testing and development regimen previously submitted to DOE.
The principal advantages provided by NRT’s solution include the following:


  • On-site remediation and treatment capability at each nuclear fuel plant [e.g., the US Navy’s nuclear fleet, local and regional electrical power generation plants, etc.] The process is specifically responsive to DOE’s call for a technology solution which transmutes radioactive materials into other, more benign alternatives.

  • Elimination of the need to transport high-level nuclear waste materials by road and rail, through highly populated urban areas.

  • Provides for a transportable solution which can be moved on demand from site to site to treat radioactive emissions resulting from Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM), tar sands, current low-level radioactive storage sites [e.g., Energy Solutions, etc.], as well as high-level solid and liquid wastes already stored at more than 140 US sites.

  • Eliminates the need to handle liquid nuclear waste materials for the purpose of separating solid actinides [for example] via centrifuge and other particulate separation techniques [e.g., Westinghouse at Savannah River, etc.].

  • Elimination of the dangers arising from neutron embrittlement. This phenomenon has been shown by NIST, DOD and DOE independent scientific analysis to reduce containment vessel viability to less than 100 years, in all ‘best case’ scenarios developed by DOE using the most advanced ceramic encapsulation materials yet devised by modern science.

  • Extraction of at least as much usable energy from the nuclear waste materials as provided in their original enriched condition. This will (a) reduce the demand for additional fuel rods until existing fuel rod stocks have been rendered radioactively inert by remediation, and (b) substantially reduce the cost of operations associated with storing, managing and securing waste materials on-site.

  • Eliminates the opportunity for conversion of expended uranium and thorium to weapons-grade plutonium isotopes. The availability of this technology could significantly alter the level of imminent danger imposed by the lawless development of nuclear weapons by rogue nations [e.g., North Korea and Iran].

  • Provides follow-on technologies providing the enhanced capacity for atomic and materials engineering.

Please take a moment out of your busy schedule to review this document. We are convinced that it represents one of the most important greatest technological break-throughs of our time. Political considerations need not limit its development or deployment. Please feel free to contact us at your earliest convenience. We are eager to move forward with the development, testing and eventual deployment of this technology and will be most appreciative of any consideration or support you are able and willing to provide.


Respectfully yours,
Richard M. Shamp

Chairman and President


David Yurth

Director: Science and Technology


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