Costs of nuclear energy include the continued risk of reactor accidents and the dangers of transporting nuclear fuel, but perhaps the biggest concern is how to deal with hazardous nuclear waste, which can survive for hundreds of thousands of years. For example, Pu has a half-life of 24, years, Tc has a half-life of , years, and I has a half-life of In order to come up with a long-term solution regarding the storage of radioactive nuclear waste, policymakers must consider the large volume of nuclear waste that is produced, the extremely long half-life of nuclear waste, and the sustainability of a long-term plan.
Since nuclear waste can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, the choices that we make today affect future generations. 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. There is no way to guarantee any storage solution for millenia.
Get off the pot and put this stuff in Yucca mountain. Or why not just drop these storage containers into the ocean above the Mariana' Trench? Cowan March 31, AM. The Vermont Yankee casks in the page-top photo could I suppose be considered a one-deep pile. Years ago, both gas and uranium prices were much higher, and government's loss was accordingly greater.
Otherwise said, it's down fold. Dallas March 31, PM. Or we could consume all that waste in a next gen reactor and provide years of safe, carbon free electricity and process heat. Jacob D. Paz March 31, PM. Both the scientific community and the state of the Nevada have challenged the proposed high nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada based on scientific and legal grounds. There is uncertainty as to whether the engineering barrier system will be corroded. There are two major corrosion concerns: electrochemical corrosion and microbial induced corrosion.
All the corrosion studies at Yucca Mountain were conducted in laboratories due to the chemical and geological complexity of YMP, which raises serious questions.
In order to evaluate properly how the repository will comply with regulatory requirements, the DOE should have conducted long-term studies in real-world conditions prior to the approval of YMP.
In addition, the DOE did not incorporate into their computer model deliquescence corrosion. Were some plutonium diverted in the recycling process, a non-nuclear entity could be one step close to building a bomb. However, under programs such as the now stalled GNEP [wikipedia] , where only countries who already have nuclear weapons recycle, proliferation-free waste recycling can exist.
Since the many of the largest energy users are already nuclear weapons states, a massive expansion of nuclear could be done there with no additional proliferation concerns whatsoever.
You will find more discussion of proliferation on our nonproliferation page. Please remember to contact us with your comments or questions. The longest living nuclides in nuclear waste are the ones that can be used as fuel: plutonium and the minor actinides. If these materials are burnt in fuel through recycling, nuclear waste would only remain radioactive for a few hundred years, as opposed to a few hundred thousand.
This significantly reduces concerns with long-term storage. See Also See our main recycling page for a more thorough discussion of recycling.
How does nuclear waste move from the reactor to the disposal site? We have developed containers that can handle the hazards of transportation without breaking. The US DOE and others have for example tested these containers by burning them in jet fuel, smashing into them with rocket-powered trains, crashing them into cement walls, and dropping them onto spikes. This can be a major concern in the oil field areas of Texas where many millions of dollars of oil are rail shipped out per day.
Launch it into the sun. The sun would indeed consume it, but launch reliability would have to be vastly better than it is today. A space elevator might make this a viable option.
Use it to sanitize municipal waste water. The radiation can sterilize without using chemicals like bleach. But the potential to steal it or for it to catch on fire or something is not worth the risk. Use it to power batteries. Many space probes do use material made in nuclear reactors. If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would generate per year would be A detailed description of this result can be found here.
If you want raw numbers: in , there were just over 80, metric tonnes of high-level waste in the USA. Between and , nuclear reactors in the USA generated GW-years of electricity to make this waste.
For comparison, in alone the US burned ,, metric tonnes of coal. This means that coal plants made 32 times more waste every single day than the US nuclear fleet has made in the past 45 years!
The astoundingly low amount of nuclear waste is thanks to the near magical energy density of the atom. Spent nuclear fuel composition varies depending on what was put into the reactor, how long the reactor operated, and how long the waste has been sitting out of the reactor. Notice that most of the Uranium is still in the fuel when it leaves the reactor, even though its enrichment has fallen significantly. This Uranium can be used in advanced fast reactors as fuel and is a valuable energy source.
The minor actinides , which include Neptunium, Americium, and Curium, are long-lived nuclides that cause serious concern when it comes to storing them for more than , years. Fortunately, these are fissionable in fast reactors and can thus be used as fuel! This still would leave us with the fission products. The decay of each nuclide vs. Toggle navigation. Concepts Learn about nuclear energy What is Nuclear Energy? What is Radioactivity?
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