Is U.S. Reprocessing Worth the Risk? (original) (raw)
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Assessing the benefits, costs, and risks of near-term reprocessing and alternatives
Testimony for the Subcommittee on Energy and Water …, 2006
Policies for management of spent nuclear fuel should focus on those options that offer the best combination of low cost, low proliferation risks, low environmental impact, high safety and security, and high sustainability. Traditional PUREX reprocessing technologies are inferior to once-through approaches in most of these respects. Proposed new separations and transmutations approaches such as UREX+ and pyroprocessing are at an early stage of development, and moving quickly toward selecting particular technologies, carrying out engineering-scale demonstrations, and building commercial-scale facilities risks locking in to poor choices, repeating past mistakes. The higher cost of reprocessing and recycling, while small per kilowatt-hour, will amount to an additional tens of billions of dollars in the cost of managing U.S. spent nuclear fuel, which would have to come either from government subsidies lasting many decades (which might not be sustained), a major increase in the nuclear waste fee, or regulations that would effectively force private industry to build and operate uneconomic facilities; all of these options would cast additional doubt on private investments in new nuclear plants in the United States. Dry cask storage provides a safe, proven, low-cost approach to spent fuel management for decades, leaving all options open and making it possible to make better-informed decisions when technology has advanced and economic and political circumstances have evolved. The laudable goals of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership can be achieved without reprocessing and recycling. Indeed, the future of nuclear energy will be best promoted by making nuclear energy as safe, cheap, proliferation-resistant, and uncontroversial as possible, and recycling using the technologies available today or likely to be available in the near term points in the wrong direction on each of those counts.
2014
One of the best ways of preventing accidents is to avoid hazards by inherently safer design. As many processes, particularly those in the chemicals, nuclear and oil industries, involve the production, handling and use of hazardous substances, process intensification (PI) apparently offers to the plant managers many benefits such as safer, cleaner, smaller, and cheaper equipments. Process Intensification could lead to a higher process flexibility, increased inherent safety and energy efficiency, distributed manufacturing capability, and ability to use reactants at higher concentrations. These goals are achieved by multifunctional reactors, e.g. reactive distillation or membrane reactors, and miniaturization that can be done by employing micro reactors and/or improving heat and mass transfer. Within the benefits of process intensification with reference to process safety the following can be considered: The use of process intensification can reduce the number of process operations, which leads to fewer transfer operations and less pipework, preventing source of leakages; It can be easier to design a smaller vessel to contain the maximum pressure of any probable explosion; For exothermic reactions, the enhanced specific surface area of intensified plants makes heat transfer, and thus heat removal, easier, minimising the triggering potential of a runaway reaction. Process intensification has thus the potential to be a significant factor in the implementation of inherent safety practices Although safety can benefit from process intensification, it should be ensured that new hazards are not created. This can be obtained applying at a early design stage the reliability and safety analysis that are traditionally used in process risk assessment. In this paper in particular the above techniques are applied to a VOC (Volatile organic compound) treatment plant, comparing the traditional plant (a fixed bed reactor) to the intensified reverse flow reactor. From the results of the application of a recursive operability analysis and the successive fault trees fully quantified, some conclusions are drawn from the point of view of the reliability of intensified processes and from the adequateness of risk assessment methodologies.
Reshoring Manufacturing Back to the United States
OALib
The purpose of this study is to discuss the possibilities of reshoring manufacturing back to the United States and how this would either benefit or hinder the supply chain in the United States. Reshoring is the concept "of returning the production and manufacturing of goods back to the company's original country" (Kenton, 2021) [1]. To explore this concept, I created a five-question survey targeted toward business-professionals that are involved in the supply chain. With the help of my thesis chair, Dr. Sime Curkovic, I received 113 responses. The point of the survey was to analyze business-professionals' opinions on if they believe reshoring manufacturing is a good option, what benefits and risks they see with it, what makes them consider reshoring (if applicable), and what other options they're exploring if they're not considering reshoring. The results of this survey proved that a portion of manufacturing should be reshored back to the United States. The biggest risk associated with reshoring found in my survey is cost, and the biggest benefits are decreased lead times and decreased risk with factors such as quality and communication.
1998
was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency 01 the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any 01 their employees, &e any warranty, express or impIii or assumes any legal liability or ~~ponsibiiity for the acamqy, atmpleteness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or pnwmss Wed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Refemwe herein to any spedfic atmmerckd product, process, or service by trade name, b.ademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessariiy constitute or imply its endorsement, mmnmendation, or favoring by the United States Goverament or any agency thereof. Tlae view and opinions of authors expressed herein do aot necesfarily state or mflect thase of the United States Govenmeat or any agency thereof. I DISCLAIMER Portions of this document may be illegible electronic image products. Images are produced from the best available original document.
Cost-benefit analysis of pre-import screening 1
2000
International commerce in live organisms presents a policy challenge for trade globalization: sales of live organisms create wealth, but some nonindigenous species cause harm. In order to reduce damages, some countries have implemented species screening to limit introductions of damaging species. Adoption of new risk assessment technologies has been slowed, however, by concerns that risk assessment accuracy remains insufficient to
Remediation Journal, 2010
Economic globalization, or offshoring, has started to drive fundamental changes in environmental remediation, and this change will accelerate rapidly over the next decade. Moving work processes to a low-cost area (LCA) to reduce cost is no longer limited to call centers, software development, or simple manufacturing. Complex tasks for domestic projects are now completed by well-educated scientists and engineers in places like India, China, and Latin America. Globalized technical work includes innovative engineering design, complex financial and business functions, and supporting complex multifunctional teams like those used in remediation projects. Globalization is starting to drive a fundamental restructuring of the domestic remediation industry. Successful examples of globalization in remediation are still few, but that is changing. Fully loaded labor rates for junior-and mid-level engineering or scientific staff in low-cost areas can be up to three times cheaper than comparable labor in the United States and Europe. Remediation is one of the later technical industries to be affected by globalization, but the extensive LCA infrastructure built for other industries can quickly be adapted to remediation support. This synergy will cause globalization to transform remediation with more speed than those who have not experienced globalization would expect. While remediation projects are intrinsically linked to a remediation site, most of the labor costs for a remediation project are for labor conducted in an office away from the remediation site. Remediation is unique in many ways, but it still shares much in common with many other scientific and engineering endeavors that have undergone widespread globalization. My seventeen years in remediation, working for a major site owner and before that as a consultant, have taught me that remediation projects are complex, varied, challenging, and technically sophisticated endeavors requiring a wide range of capable professionals to support them. My experience over the last five years globalizing high-tech engineering and manufacturing has taught me that globalizing technical work is difficult and widely resisted at the start, but the large cost savings from successful globalization efforts drive additional globalization efforts. Industries are offshored when sufficient economies of scale, global labor cost differentials, industry process maturity, and global transition skills exist to drive globalization. Remediation currently meets this threshold. Much of the remediation work now performed in domestic engineering and consulting offices can and will be conducted by dispersed global teams composed of both domestic professionals and labor from low-cost areas.
What do we know about manufacturing reshoring?
Journal of Global Operations and Strategic Sourcing, 2018
Purpose The aim of this paper is to analyze and classify research that has been conducted on manufacturing reshoring, i.e. the decision to bring back to the home country production activities earlier offshored, independently of the governance mode (insourcing vs outsourcing). Consequently, the paper also aims at providing avenues for future research and to highlight the distinct value of studying manufacturing reshoring either per se or in combination with other constructs of the international business tradition. Design/methodology/approach A set of 57 carefully selected articles on manufacturing reshoring published in international journals or books indexed on Scopus in the past 10 years was systematically analyzed based on the “5Ws and 1H” (who-what-where-when-why and how) set of questions. Findings The authors’ work shows a certain convergence among authors regarding what reshoring is and what its key features and motivations are. In contrast, other related aspects, such as the d...
Pre-processing inspection – a worthwhile activity for remanufacturers
2015
Remanufacture, a process to return used product to an "as-new" condition with an equivalent quality, is typically carried out on complex mechanical assemblies as the remaining value in the used product is high. Remanufacturing is often a more efficient reuse strategy than recycling as, in addition to the reduction in landfill and the use of virgin material, it also reduces the amount of energy used in successive applications by removing raw material production and any subsequent manufacturing processes, thus increasing profitability for the remanufacturer. There remain barriers to remanufacturing particularly around the paucity of research into the field. Guide identified that remanufacturers perceive the scarcity of effective remanufacturing tools and techniques as a key threat to the industry. Ijomah quantified these key characteristics on a five-point scale ranging from "Not Significant through to "Critical". The only characteristic rated "critical&q...