Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Nuclear Waste? What do we do with it?

1600 Pennsylvania ave.

Usually we elect them to office and store them on Capital hill for at least their half life.

Jim

All these have been considered. We've:
1. dropped barrels of radioactive waster into oceans,
2. been building underground storage facilities in Nevada.
3. provided "temporary" storage in pools of water at reactor sites (this has been "temporary" for 60 years with no end in sight)
4. considered sending it the the sun on rockets, and
5. using reactors to convert the radioactive material into another element.

None has proven to be a perfect answer. The barrels dropped into the ocean leak and decay; the underground storage facilities (probably the best answer) are expensive and require land transport (air transport is considered too risky); the "temporary" storage pools are filling up and must be removed; rockets are faulty and an explosion on lift-off would be catastrophic and; converting the fuel into another element would be VERY expensive.

There seems to be no good answer.

Yucca Mountain (Nevada) has been a disaster waiting to happen as it is sitting in an earthquake prone area. The only way to transport this waste is over land (air transportation is considered too risky) and many states and localities oppose it traveling through their territory.

Molten lava moves in a circular pattern, often up to the surface and then down toward the center of the earth (unless there is a volcanic eruption and exposition of lava which would eject the radioactive material into the atmosphere).

The circular movement of the molten core of the earth would move it around but no one would know for sure where it would end up.

Yucca Mountain (NV) was conceived in 1982 (Reagan Administration) as a place to store radioactive waste. In the past 33 or so years, billions have been spent and problems (geology, construction and financial) keep arising - they never seem to end.

I think the real reason spent nuclear fuel isn't going anywhere is that it's really only a couple of % used. Well over 90% of if is not yet fissioned.

Breeder reactors can use it as fuel, and even though breeder reactors are currently out of favor, it doesn't make a lot of sense to encase it in glass if you have an eye on using it later.

Rock Chuck,

A significant portion of the high level waste (reactor fuel rods) at the INL has been moved to dry above ground storage versus the wet (pool) storage from the past. As such, it poses a much smaller risk to the aquifer. Liquid high level wast has, except for a few tanks, has been converted into a dry powder and stored in tanks; again a safer approach.

A poster mentioned the WIPP facility in NM, it was never designed or planned to contain high level (reactor fuel rods) waste.

I wouldn't say 90% but it is a significant percentage. Jimmy Carter scuttled a nearly completed fuel reprocessing plant in South Carolina to prevent proliferation of enriched nuclear materials. The bottom line, nuclear power plants across the country are building additional fuel pools as there isn't any place to send it for reprocessing or to Yucca Mtn. for disposal.

Most if not all commercial power reactors, while not called breeder reactors, do convert uranium to plutonium which is then fissionable.

Your government at work...

Why not mix it with steel and ship the glow in the dark rebar cheeeeep to Mexico? They did the same to us a while back.

It's largely a political problem. Monitored retrievable storage in a geologic repository would alleviate some of the public concern and make it easy to retrieve for reprocessing. The current practice of long term storage of spent fuel at power plants is asinine. Reprocessing is a mature technology that has been used in France and elsewhere for many years.

There is so much stupid in this thread its not even funny, craigD is the only person who seems to have any actual knowledge. Dry cask storage is how they do it now. when do bring the fuel out of the reactor down the transfer canal, they put it into a space in the spent fuel pool, after its "cooled off" they load it into a lead lined, stainless steel cask. This cask in then incased in a [bleep] load of concrete, and moved with a special machine, they are able to take a 747 flying into them without being compromised.

if anyone is wondering, i work in nuke plants. no you dont have to worry about them, were so damn regulated that crossing an imaginary boundry 30 seconds after you just walked through there, will get you run off and kickd out permanently. so much oversight its not even funny.

Dump it in the Middle East,

Yep.
Stick 'em up obama's butt and kick him out the door.

if dropped in a subduction zone its gonna be diluted to such an extent its not an issue....besides it will be likely hundreds of thousands of years before it even comes in contact with lava to start the melting process, meanwhile it wil contaminate a very small piece of property and be continually buried deeper and deeper by mother nature....

Now that that Harry Reid is retiring maybe Yucca Mtn. will be reopened. I'm in So. Nevada and there are plenty of people who were fine with it. We could set off atmospheric A-bombs in the 1950's at the test site, but now we can't bury it safely?
There are scores of radioactive holes in the desert where underground tests were performed but we can't safely bury more?
The folks in Nye County where it is located wanted it to happen for the $ and jobs it would create.

Don't take this as a bash on the nuclear industry, but based on my experience in the oil industry which is also heavily regulated (though only a fraction of what nuclear has to deal with) I'd say that heavy regulation does not guarantee safety. True safety is achieved through constant vigilance.

Overly restrictive regulations and a mind set that nothing can go wrong leads a work force into complacency which can bite you in the ass.

Yep. Fiftyish years (depending on how you count) of commercial nuclear energy in the US and the number of people killed or even seriously injured by the nuclear part is still zero. That's zero point zero zero. Safer than riding a bicycle or taking a bath.

Nuclear energy gets held to an absolutely insane standard of safety, it actually meets that standard, and gets not enough credit for that accomplishment.

Built and refueled a few Nuke's in the 70's & 80's and if I remember correctly at that time we shipped spent fuel rod's in containers to South Carolina.

Just business as usual on the campfire.