Dr. Schund, decommissioned nuclear reactors are $100 billion white elephants. Can capitalism snare stone cold profit from the hot messes?
Civilization originates with social complexity tidying über-ape bands to efficiently harvest plant resources for food. It strengthens as tool makers learn to grab with authority (spears) and supplant luck with agriculture and animal husbandry. Surplus brings leisure and stratification into laborers, thinkers, managers, and crooks (honest, priestly, and eventually Liberal and Enviro-whiner). Synthesis displaces scant inferior natural supply. Things really get rolling when civilization supersedes chemical structure worries with sensibilities about isotopic composition. So it is with the First World, the Third Millennium, and carbon-13.
Carbon-13 is 1.1 atom-% of natural carbon, the rest being C-12 and ultratrace radioactive C-14 (14 disintegrations/minute-gram carbon; 5 dpm/gram prior to H-bomb testing). C-13 makes a lovely tracer through mass spectrometry. C-13 diamond is 4% harder and stronger than natural gems, that seemingly small increment being the strength of the strongest spring steel. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry only sees C-13, not C-12. Carbon-13 is mighty useful but mighty expensive: 13 grams of C-13 at 99 atom-% enrichment as carbon dioxide costs $3200.
The expense arises from isotope separation, which sieves a very dilute source. The world would be a more provocative and productive place were there carbon quarries with greater C-13 natural abundance. There are carbon quarries bursting with C-13, not that it makes any difference - the government is in charge.
A profusion of military and civilian fission reactors employ graphite as moderator to thermalize multiple-MeV fission neutrons to 0.025 eV ambient equilibrium. Chernobyl-class reactors cook along at 15 megawatts thermal and core neutron flux densities around 5x1014 neutrons/sec-cm2. The Chernobyl graphite core was a cylinder 7 meters high and 12 meters in diameter. Given about 30% of the internal volume being solid graphite net, that is 530 metric tons of graphite. C-12 neutron capture to C-13 has a cross section of 3.5 millibarns; C-13 to C-14 is 1.4 millibarns. The initial rate of production of C-13 is (neutron flux) times (cross section) times (number of target nuclei). Let's do it for one second on sphere of natural carbon (graphite) with total surface area of one cm2 (radius of 0.2821 cm, volume of 0.09403 cm3, massing 0.2116 grams).
(5x1014 n/sec-cm2)[3.5x10-27 cm^2)](1.06x1022) = 1.9x1010 atoms of C-13 created each second. Is this a good number? Let's try it for a cube with one cm2 of surface area (side of 0.4082 cm, volume of 0.06804 cm3) massing 1.531 grams. (5x1014 n/sec- cm2)[3.5x10-27) cm2)](7.67x1022) = 1.34x1011 atoms of C-13 created each second. Either way we create 8.77x1010 atoms of carbon-13/second for each gram of reactor graphite.
If the reactor has a duty cycle of 300 days/year and runs 30 years before decommissioning, we get (60 sec/min)(60 min/hr)(24 hr/day)(300 days)(30 years)(8.77x1010 atoms/sec) = 6.82x1019 atoms of C-13/gram reactor graphite created over the operating life of the reactor. Given 530 metric tons (megagrams) of graphite there accumulate 3.6x1028 atoms of synthesized C-13, or 60,000 moles, or 781 kilograms, or $192 billion worth of C-13. It's only triple what Bill Gates has in his bank accounts, but it is still a lot. The remaining reactors in Russia's Chernobyl complex or America's Hanford Reservation are huge, mammoth, incredibly rich gold mines.
Does it stop here? Not at all! Common hydrogen (as in boiling water reactor) has a thermal neutron absorption cross-section of 332 millibarns to produce valuable and stable deuterium which otherwise has a natural abundance of only 0.015%. Common oxygen has a thermal neutron absorption cross-section of 19 millibarns to produce valuable and stable O-17, which otherwise has a natural abundance of only 0.04%. We are swimming in rare isotopic wealth! Typical of any government oversight, we are flushing it all down the sewer.
Dr. Schund Volunteers to create, administer, and audit a United Nations "Developing Nations' Isotopic Resource Directorate." D-NIRD will collect teracuries of superannuated nuclear reactor cores and neutron-rich isotope effluvia to create expansive cottage industries in the economically meanest and geographically most isolated Third World societies. A gas ultracentrifuge here, a Claus fractionation column there, and soon villages so remote they still have dial telephones will be harvesting the big money to invest in giant Cadillac SUVs, a diverse assortment of recreational pharmaceuticals, and payola to their benefactors.
The world can be a better place, someday, but only if you slather lavish emoluments upon Dr. Schund's upturned palms up front and personal right now. Do it.