WHO WANTS TO GLOW IN THE DARK?
Indigenous voices important in developing new low, intermediate nuclear waste strategy
Indigenous engagement for the development of a strategy for the storage of low and intermediate radioactive waste has been hampered by more pressing concerns, including the coronavirus pandemic and forest fires blazing in many regions of the country.
“I think it's been a difficult time for the Indigenous communities,” said Karine Glenn, strategic project director for the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO). “It’s just taking a little bit longer simply because of the other priorities they have in their communities.”
However, Glenn stresses those voices are important as the NWMO holds virtual engagement sessions that will inform their recommendations to the Natural Resources minister on a long-term strategy for the handling and storage of low and intermediate radioactive waste.
These consultations do not focus on used nuclear fuel, but instead on low-level waste, like mops, gloves, paper towels and other day-to-day tools of operations, and intermediate waste, such as the resins that filter the pool water.
“The Nuclear Waste Management Organization believes that Indigenous people have a really integral and important role to play. These kinds of projects cannot proceed without having Indigenous support,” said Glenn.
The NWMO has a reconciliation policy in which it recognizes the historical wrongs that have been perpetrated against Indigenous peoples in Canada and are “really committed to building a better future together with Indigenous communities,” said Glenn.
NWMO respects Indigenous treaty rights and incorporates Indigenous traditional knowledge into their projects, she adds.
Glenn points to a three-day NWMO-hosted Canadian radioactive waste summit in March, in which one-quarter of the 65 speakers, facilitators and panel members were Indigenous. Of the 500 registrants, 15 per cent self-identified as Indigenous.
On Aug. 26, NWMO will host a virtual engagement session in Alberta on the development of a federal integrated strategy for radioactive waste. However, it won’t be the only opportunity for Indigenous communities or organizations to take part, says Glenn.
NWMO is offering to work with any Indigenous community across the country who is interested in “having a dialogue” to set up forums or formats.
The discussions in Alberta are particularly timely as this past April the province joined New Brunswick, Ontario and Saskatchewan in signing a Memorandum of Understanding that commits them to collaborate in advancing Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as a source of clean energy. SMRs are nuclear reactors that produce 300 MW of electricity or less and are seen as an alternative to diesel-generated power in isolated and northern communities.
At this point, says Glenn, Alberta has no nuclear waste or nuclear generation.
“Moving forward with nuclear energy, if that was the path that Alberta would wish to move forward with, doesn't necessarily mean that they would host a disposal facility, so that's not necessary. But I think it's important that if you agree to in the future to having nuclear energy as part of your energy policy in the province, you also get an opportunity to participate in a dialogue about the long-term management of its waste,” she said.
There are numerous options for storing this level of radioactive waste:
This kind of radioactive waste, says Glenn, does not require a deep geological repository as does used nuclear fuel. Instead, it can be stored “just below (the surface) tens of metres deep,” according to the international best practice.
Regardless of the type of radioactive waste that is being stored, Glenn stresses that all facilities are designed to ensure public safety.
There are economic benefits to a community that hosts the waste site, she adds, including jobs during the construction phase and for operating and monitoring the facilities.
However, Glenn is quick to point out, this phase of the consultation does not involve the site of the repositories, and NWMO has not been tasked with recommending sites.
“We’re at the step before that. We are looking to say what kind of facility we should build and how many of them should be build,” she said.
Glenn does not anticipate the recently called federal election to delay the consultation process as NWMO’s work is funded by the waste owners and not the government. However, it will delay the final recommendations she had hoped to deliver to the minister by the end of 2021.
The government needs to revise its radioactive waste policy framework and that was supposed to be completed in early fall. However, Canadians will be going to the polls Sept. 20.
While the delivery of the recommendations will be delayed, Glenn is confident that the consultations will be valuable.
“There could be some policy direction that might limit the number of options that are available to us, if the government legislated specific technical options for instance. But it wouldn’t necessarily change a lot of what we're asking people… Those concerns and those considerations will be the same regardless of the policy direction,” she said.
To date, 10 community engagement sessions have taken place in New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba. Saskatchewan will follow the Alberta consultation.
The NWMO has met with the First Nations Power Authority, the Assembly of First Nations, the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan, and the Wolastoqey Nation of New Brunswick. A meeting is planned with the Pabineau First Nation, N.B., and workshops are being arranged with the Grand Treaty Council #3, the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians, Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, and Sagkeeng First Nation.
Workshops in all nine regions of the Métis Nation of Ontario are underway, and meetings are planned with the Historical Saugeen Métis and the Métis Nation—Saskatchewan.
Glenn says other Indigenous organizations have been contacted, as well as Treaty 6 chiefs, the Treaty 8 First Nations and the Métis Nation of Alberta.
Glenn expects engagements to conclude by October or November.
“When we’re talking about long-term management of waste we're talking into the hundreds and thousands of years. We want to make sure we get it right and we need to hear from as many people as possible,” said Glenn.
The Indian Resource Council (IRC) has not been approached about the virtual consultations, says Larry Kaida, assistant to the president.
IRC, headquartered in Tsuut’ina Nation, represents about 140 First Nations who have produced oil and gas in the past, are producing now or have the potential to produce.
“The IRC is now looking at all forms of energy so long as there are benefits/opportunities for First Nations. We would, of course, be very cognizant of environmental issues and impacts. We are well placed to coordinate meetings, provide the right information, but leave it to First Nations to decide if interested,” said Kaida in an email to Windspeaker.com.
Any Indigenous communities that wish to organize a workshop or forum, can reach out to info@radwasteplanning.ca.
Windspeaker.com
By Shari Narine, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Windspeaker.com, Windspeaker.com
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced today that it has produced a fusion reaction in the laboratory that yielded more energy than was absorbed by the fuel to initiate it.
Zapping a BB-size capsule of fusion fuel with UV light from 192 lasers at the lab’s $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF), scientists say they sparked fusion reactions that released 1.3 megajoules of energy, about five times the 250 kilojoules that were absorbed by the capsule. That energy emission from the tiny blob of plasma—roughly a cube with sides measuring the width of a human hair—occurred within about 100 trillionths of a second to yield more than 1016 watts of power.
The shot, which occurred on 8 August, demolished the facility’s previous record yield of 170 kJ, observed in February, and was 25 times as high as the best results obtained just a year ago. “Everyone has a spring in their step,” says NIF director Mark Herrmann. The results have not yet been peer reviewed.
Although the achievement represents a milestone in fusion research, the laboratory stopped short of declaring ignition, the goal for which NIF was named and which it had planned to achieve by 2012. The fusion yield fell short of the 1.9 MJ that the NIF laser brought to bear on the hollow target, called a hohlraum, in which the fuel capsule was suspended. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences review of NIF’s design defined ignition as fusion yield equal to or more than the laser energy input. In NIF’s approach, known as indirect drive, 85% of the laser’s energy is lost in the conversion of UV to x rays that occurs inside the hohlraum.
Stephen Bodner, a former director of the laser fusion program at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and a persistent critic of NIF and the indirect drive approach, congratulated the lab on the achievement, saying it was close enough to ignition for him. “They made spectacular progress,” he says. “I’m surprised they found a way to minimize the laser–plasma problems,” he says. He added that “it demonstrates to the world that there’s no fundamental reason why laser fusion can’t work.”
But Bodner cautions that the NIF results won’t extrapolate to higher energy gains due to the inefficiency of the indirect drive process. “If you want to get to high gains, you have to directly illuminate the target,” he says, referring to an approach pursued at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) and NRL, where laser beams are symmetrically directed onto the fuel capsule.
Michael Campbell, director of the LLE at the University of Rochester in New York, says that ignition was attained by most scientific measures, including the extent to which alpha particles from fusion reactions heat the plasma and create more fusion. “It gives the US a lab capability to study burning plasmas and high-energy physics relevant for [nuclear weapons] stewardship,” he says. “It’s an enormous scientific achievement.” Like NIF, LLE and its Omega laser are funded by the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Jill Hruby is the undersecretary for nuclear security at DOE and the NNSA administrator. “These extraordinary results from NIF advance the science that NNSA depends on to modernize our nuclear weapons and production. It also offers potential new avenues of research into alternative energy sources that could aid economic development and help fight climate change,” she said in a press release.
By most measures, the NIF results exceed the best results achieved in tokamaks, which bottle fusion plasmas in magnetic fields. In 1997 the Joint European Torus generated about 16 MW, roughly two-thirds of the power that it took to start the reaction.
Research on laser fusion, also known as inertial confinement fusion, was initiated at LLNL by John Nuckolls, who went on to become the lab’s director, soon after the invention of the laser in 1960. The goal has always been to create at laboratory scale what happens in the secondary stage of a thermonuclear weapon.
When NIF opened for experiments in 2009, five years behind schedule, LLNL scientists were confident they could reach ignition within two years. That concerted effort, known as the National Ignition Campaign, formally expired in 2012 (see Physics Today, October 2012, page 28), and the frequency of fusion shots was scaled back in favor of other research in support of the nuclear weapons program.
But experimenters continued to test a wide variety of compositions and different shapes of capsules and hohlraums, while also fine-tuning the timing and sequence of the laser pulses. Until now, they’d been unable to implode the fuel capsule with the precise degree of symmetry needed to prevent the plasma from squeezing out.
Over the years, the lab developed a suite of unique diagnostic tools that have provided a clearer picture of the reaction dynamics. Among the tools are 3D neutron and 2D x-ray imaging instruments and neutron time-of-flight detectors (see Physics Today, February 2017, page 33). Herrmann noted that in previous experiments, neutrons exiting the capsule on one side of the implosion arrived a few picoseconds earlier than did those flying off the opposite way. Those exquisitely sensitive measurements indicated that the plasmas were jetting off in one direction. The problem was traced to capsules that were a fraction of a micron out of round.
The lab hasn’t yet reproduced this month’s results, and Herrmann cautioned that doing so might not be straightforward. “We don’t know what variability will be in successive shots. It’s a nonlinear process where alpha heating heats up the fusion fuel and creates more fusion, which creates more heat.” Herrmann says the 3.5 MeV alpha particles, which remain in the plasma, produced 20% of the fusion yield, with 14 MeV neutrons accounting for most of the energy.
Further experiments will require the manufacture of additional fuel capsules and hohlraums. These may not be ready until at least October, Herrmann says. The nanocrystalline diamond-coated capsule that was imploded in this month’s event took six months to grow at General Atomics, which has long worked with LLNL on fabricating capsules. The spheres have to be polished and the core’s interior etched with tools inserted through a 2-micron-diameter hole drilled into it. The tritium–deuterium mixture is injected through a tiny fill tube just prior to the shot.
The lab is still analyzing the results from the shot. It’s not yet known which or what combination of advances to the targets, laser pulse lengths, or other variables led to the leap in performance. Some of the instruments were saturated by the unexpected yield of the reaction. A few that are used in the target chamber for other, non-ignition experiments will need repair.
Herrmann acknowledged that the announcement deviates from the standard practice of peer-reviewed publication. But the results, he says, were leaking, “so we wanted to put it out so people could discuss the facts.”
Editor’s note, 17 August: The first sentence was updated to clarify that the fusion reaction did not meet the National Academy’s definition of ignition.