Gerald S. Frankel, materials scientist, Ohio State University. Credit: US Department of Energy. These underground tanks in Hanford, Washington, were built in the s to store liquid radioactive waste from plutonium production.
Today, the contents have been transferred to newer tanks in preparation for vitrification. Widespread storage Tens of thousands of metric tons of radioactive spent nuclear fuel sit in steel-and-concrete storage casks cutaway at nuclear power plants across the US map as they await permanent disposal.
Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Meline pours a sample of molten glass to study corrosion in vitrified nuclear waste. Related: Tank Troubles. Vitrification of nuclear waste seems to be well established by now, but actually it still faces complex problems. You might also like Nuclear Power. Proposed nuclear waste storage materials may have a corrosion problem.
Radioactive Waste Safety. Tank Troubles. Share X. To send an e-mail to multiple recipients, separate e-mail addresses with a comma, semicolon, or both. Title: As nuclear waste piles up, scientists seek the best long-term storage solutions.
Submit Sending Purniah March 30, AM. Its well known that the spent fuel taken out of a reactor contains a lot of useful material. Unused fuel, Plutonium and radioactive fission fragments which can be used for medical treatment etc. If these are removed then the remaining waste is very less. So it makes sense to reprocess the spent fuel. Mike Keller March 30, PM. Reprocessing is an ideal that more or less guarantees no solution will emerge.
Get rid of the stuff, as in deep underground. Anja May 18, PM. But it does not disappear when you bury it underground. You just don't see it. But we don't know what it will do underground overtime. Stan October 26, AM. If you reprocess the spent fuel then there is no waste to dispose of. Right now we use less than 0. Put spent waste in a fast actinide burner and you can recover essentially ALL of the energy.
We have enough uranium already mined to power the planet for the next years. And there is NO long term waste. After a few centuries a period of time that it's easy to store something for you are left with silver, palladium, and rhenium, along with other valuable industrial elements.
I wish I had the 'problem' of having a few million metric tons of palladium Phil March 30, AM. Partially spent nuclear fuel will be used as a fuel source for Generation 4 reactors being developed now by Bill Gates' TerraPower and others. It will supply electricity for decades without mining any more uranium. Dry Cask storage is safe and adequate for the near future. In my opinion and that of many others permanent disposal is costly and not necessary.
Tony April 19, PM. Yes, TerraPower is by far the best way to use spent nuclear materials, e. Or we could have engineers manage the effort and actually get something accomplished. The solution does not have to be perfect, it only has to be good enough for a couple of hundred years.
At that point the radiation levels are reasonably low. Worrying about the disposition of plutonium in the distant future is a classroom exercise.
TptDac April 1, AM. I have given thought to the issue of what kind of people could run a successful nuclear waste disposal project. I spent a fair part of my career as a scientist working on such projects. When the scientists were in charge, the funding tended to be a feeding trough for people who did what they wanted to do anyway.
When the engineers were in charge, things were more focused on the end result. There was always some component of basic science that was actually needed to attain the end result. I am not impressed with this article. It presents a happy picture Wow, now we know what to do! Look up the history of project failures, going back about four decades or so e. The article should have included something about the long history of failures, especially those related to vitrification. Bart Ziegler May 19, AM.
Excellent comment. Tom March 30, PM. This industry has never known what to do with the waste. They are idiots for ever making any of it. Nature out of place.
Don't blame the industry. The federal government promised to figure out the waste disposal issue. These researchers complain about kicking the waste "problem" down the road.
The truth is that their own remarks, and articles like this, make it more likely that it will continue to be kicked down the road. The nuclear waste "problem" is purely political. It has been technically solved for a long time. The fact is that any risks long-term as well as shorter term associated with nuclear waste are tiny compared to those associated with other industries' and energy sources' pollution and waste streams.
Even with all the supposedly significant issues these researches go on about, the long-term risks of other waste streams are orders of magnitude larger. It is the only industry that is containing all its wastes and is ensuring that they remain contained for as long as they remain hazardous.
NRC has concluded that Yucca Mountain would meet that impeccable, unprecedented requirement that no other waste streams come close to meeting. Other industries just release their wastes and toxins directly into the air, simply heap them into piles like coal ash or carelessly shallow-bury them. Depleting earth's reserves of valuable hydrocarbons, destabilizing the planet's climate, and lacing soil and water all over the world with toxins like mercury and arsenic; now THAT's a gift to future generations!
If one is concerned about overall public health and safety, as well as the climate, the way to help is not to nitpick about tiny nuclear-power-related risks or try to make tiny nuclear-related risks even smaller. Even solar and wind power pose larger risks than the ones these researchers seem to be so concerned about.
The only real issue nuclear power has is cost, and almost all research efforts should be directed at bringing nuclear power costs down.
THAT is how you reduce public health risks. Dennis Huber March 31, PM. It is really straightforward to resolve the spent fuel issue. Reprocess the spent fuel into four product streams - transuranics that go to a burner or breeder reactor, fission products that are further separated into short lived less than 33 years that can be vitrified and stored for years or so at Yucca Mountain, and the seven bad actor fission products with long half lives that need to be sent to the burner reactor.
The fourth stream - the rest of the "waste" - is Uranium dioxide, and the deficit mass from the fission products and transuranics can be filled with weapons grade U or Pu from US or former Soviet Union weapons such that the resulting average enrichment is sufficient to use the entire lot to power another nuclear reactor without having to mine additional uranium for an extended time.
We should eliminate our wasteful once-through practice and deal with the problem we have created, not pass it onto the next generation.
Certainly I have simplified this: there are small issues with this approach few technical, mostly regulatory , but it is much better than the alternative - which is continue to do nothing. Noel Wauchope March 30, PM.
Look, this is a really informative and interesting article. Steven Curtis March 30, PM. Great article, however, recycling should be explored more in-depth. Purniah is right about recycling commercial used nuclear fuel, however, taking out medical radioisotopes must be done quickly for them to be useful. No process plans to do so yet, but it would be great if it could happen. Nevertheless, getting the remaining power from material currently considered waste should not be ignored.
Shane Broussard March 31, AM. We should be recycling the fuel as much as possible. Continuing to study the problems and doing nothing is what has been done for decades. This makes it more likely for an electron to get into the trapped atom's nucleus and induce decay. The researchers found that beryllium-7 encased in buckminsterfullerene has a half-life of about The half-life is the time it takes for half of the initial amount of material to decay. So could the effect be made much bigger? But squeezing a radioactive substance to very high pressures might enhance the effect that Ohtsuki and colleagues have seen.
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Published : 17 September Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. We have the capacity to store it there for many years," says Bryan Dolan, vice president of nuclear development at Duke Energy Corp.
The amount of space required to store it, after all, is "incredibly small. In fact, the U. The measure designated Yucca Mountain—a range of volcanic rock 90 miles kilometers northwest of Las Vegas in a patch of desert near former nuclear weapon testing sites—as the nation's permanent repository for all of its used fuel.
Critics, including environmentalists and Nevada residents and politicians, charge the site is unsuitable for a variety of reasons, most notably because of its proximity to fault lines earthquakes have already damaged some buildings at Yucca Mountain and because water that flows through its rock may ultimately circulate radioactive waste into the soil or drinking water.
That far-off goal seems increasingly unlikely. Barack Obama appears to agree. In Obama, then a junior senator from Illinois, wrote in a letter to Reid and Sen. Barbara Boxer D—Calif. And on January 5, Reid said in a statement that Obama "reiterated his promise to work with me to prevent the dump from ever being built.
Finding an alternative or figuring out how to make Yucca Mountain work—there is already so much nuclear waste in the U. Back in the DoE selected eight possible candidates for permanent storage other than Yucca, including the Vacherie salt dome in Louisiana; the Richton and Cypress Creek salt domes in Mississippi; salt beds in Deaf Smith and Swisher counties, both in Texas; as well as Davis and Lavender canyons in Utah; and the volcanic basalt beneath Hanford, Wash.
Other suggested alternatives have included burying the radioactive waste at sea or shooting it into space. But the federal government has spent more than two decades developing Yucca, leaving it the readiest candidate for a permanent repository. In its absence, the DoE continues to pay fines to the various nuclear power plants around the country for not providing storage for their waste—and the spent nuclear fuel piles up. Spent fuel At present, the nation's nuclear facilities store spent fuel on-site in pools or dry casks.
The glowing nuclear fuel rods rest beneath 40 feet 12 meters of pale blue water laced with boron to block stray neutrons, the uncharged atomic particles that initiate a nuclear reaction and slowly decay for a decade or more. New reactors will be built with at least 18 years worth of spent fuel storage capacity, according to Ed Cummins, vice president of regulatory affairs and standardization at nuclear reactor—maker Westinghouse Electric Co.
But nearly all of the nuclear power plants in the U. In the absence of a long-term solution such as burying the waste deep inside Yucca Mountain , the nuclear industry has turned to so-called dry cask storage.
The encased rods still manage to emit roughly one millirem of radiation per hour and heat the outside of the plus ton concrete casing to as much as 90 degrees Fahrenheit 32 degrees Celsius.
Some 9, metric tons of spent fuel rods are already stored encased in some such casks—the bulk of them stored vertically in concrete casks but some placed horizontally into concrete bunkers. But some environmentalists and other nuclear power critics contend that such dry casks present a tempting target for terrorists and a disaster for the environment if ever breached.
In fact, the San Luis Obispo, Calif. The solution may be one or many interim storage sites, centralized depots where such dry casks could be stored until a permanent repository is opened. Recycling In General Electric Co.
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