Sentences with phrase «of radioactive fuel»

Some supernovae have a reserve tank of radioactive fuel that cuts in and powers their explosions for three times longer than astronomers had previously thought.

«The result could be a runaway oxidation reaction» and the release of radioactive fission gases» and some of the radioactive fuel material.

Before that can happen, though, nuclear power will have to overcome the unresolved issue of how to dispose of radioactive fuel waste.

Not exact matches

The Federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act has mandated that deep - mine disposal of high - level radioactive effluent and spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors commence by 1998, but states with proposed geological sites are screaming foul.

At present 5,900 tons of high - level waste (HLW) in the form of spent fuel assemblies are sitting in pools next to operating reactors, together with 75 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste, plus 27 million cubic feet of trans - uranic waste (TRU).

Entergy will also move a set yearly number of spent fuel rods from their dangerous storage pools to dry cask storage on site — a much safer solution for this radioactive material.

The Indian Point nuclear power plant has a long history of accidental radioactive leaks and spills: spent fuel pools at the plant housing toxic nuclear waste have been leaking since the 1990s; corroded buried pipes have sprung radioactive leaks; tanks have spilled hundreds of gallons radioactively contaminated water; and malfunctioning valves and pumps have leaked radionuclide - laden water.

No containment structures exist over the spent fuel pools; the pools are vulnerable to a loss - of - coolant scenario; mock attack drills reveal accessibility to and vulnerability of spent fuel buildings; and two of the spent fuel pools at Indian Point have been leaking radioactive materials.

In the meantime, highly radioactive waste is being stored on - site in spent fuel pools at each nuclear plant, with 1500 tons of waste are currently stored at Indian Point.

Groundbreaking work by a team of chemists on a fringe element of the periodic table could change how the world stores radioactive waste and recycles fuel.

Three months after its meltdown, the stricken nuclear power plant continues to struggle to cool its nuclear fuel — and cope with growing amounts of radioactive cooling water

The safety of deep pools used to store used radioactive fuel at nuclear plants has been an issue since the accident at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant in March.

The breached reactor would then spew «16 percent of the core inventory» — «inventory» meaning cesium 137, along with 68 other radioactive isotopes in the hot nuclear fuel.

If Zawodny observes evidence of neutron production, then he plans to do a follow - up experiment to see if those neutrons are fueling radioactive decay.

«With a scaled up solution, not only will we no longer have to think about the dangers of storing radioactive waste long - term, but we will have a viable solution to close the nuclear fuel cycle and contribute to solving the world's energy needs.

This process could help scientists and governments comply with the European Council Directive 2011 / 70 / EURATOM on the «responsible and safe management of spent fuel and radioactive waste» which requires EU Member States to establish a dedicated policy, including the implementation of national programmes for the management of spent fuel and radioactive waste.

The research may eventually help lead to ways to safely dispose of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel that is stored now at commercial nuclear power plants.

If fuel rods remain uncovered, they may begin to melt, and hot, radioactive fuel can pool at the bottom of the vessel containing the reactor.

As the U.S. makes new plans for disposing of spent nuclear fuel and other high - level radioactive waste deep underground, geologists are key to identifying safe burial sites and techniques.

In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods — namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long - lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium.

Although some have argued that current methods of managing nuclear waste present problems, I would affirm that safe, effective management of used fuel and other radioactive material have been consistently demonstrated over several decades.

If the fuel rods are no longer being cooled — as has happened at all three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant operating at the time of the earthquake — then the zirconium cladding will swell and crack, releasing the uranium fuel pellets and fission byproducts, such as radioactive cesium and iodine, among others.

This component is only mildly radioactive and, if separated from the fission products and the rest of the material in the spent fuel, could readily be stored safely for future use in lightly protected facilities.

And just where all the fuel and other radioactive solid debris on the site will be stored or disposed of long - term has yet to be decided; last month the site's ninth solid waste storage building, with a capacity of about 61,000 cubic meters, went into operation.

At Yucca, spent fuel housed in steel canisters would be sealed within tunnels above the water table, in a manner meant to minimize corrosion and possible leakage of radioactive material, even over geologically long periods.

The NRC analysis found that a fire in a spent - fuel pool at an average nuclear reactor site would cause $ 125 billion in damages, while expedited transfer of spent fuel to dry casks could reduce radioactive releases from pool fires by 99 percent.

The fire in the spent fuel store of reactor unit 4 has probably released the worst of the radioactive materials so far.

The Bellevue, Wash., startup says it has verified the theory behind its slow - burning reactor through supercomputer simulations and now needs to build a pilot version of the reactor, to evaluate how the metal fuel casings in the core will withstand decades of radioactive bombardment.

Highly packed spent fuel pools at the Japanese facility have caught fire, lost coolant, and released unknown quantities of radioactive material, underscoring the need to remove as much fuel from overcrowded pools as possible.

The pools — water - filled basins that store and cool used radioactive fuel rods — are so densely packed with nuclear waste that a fire could release enough radioactive material to contaminate an area twice the size of New Jersey.

A report to Congress in 2006 by a National Research Council panel investigating terrorist threats to spent fuel storage concluded that «under some conditions,» if a pool were partially or completely drained, that «could lead to a propagating zirconium cladding fire and the release of large quantities of radioactive materials to the environment.»

Science answers: Spent fuel is more dangerous because it contains a mixture of fission products, some of which can be long - lived radioactive waste, and also plutonium which is highly toxic.

Nuclear fusion seems like the perfect solution, with virtually limitless supplies of fuel, no greenhouse gases, and little radioactive waste.

The difference between this accident and Chernobyl, they say, is that at Chernobyl a huge fire released large amounts of many radioactive materials, including fuel particles, in smoke.

The spent fuel pools are of significant concern, Marvin Resnikoff, a radioactive waste management consultant, said in a Wednesday press briefing organized by the nonprofit organization Physicians for Social Responsibility.

There is radioactive rubble to contain or dispose of, undamaged fuel rods to be safely removed (and discarded), and an unknown amount of melted nuclear fuel to contain.

In addition, if the melted nuclear fuel proves bad enough — like Chernobyl's lethal mass of molten core known as the «elephant's foot» — it will have to be entombed for a number of years rather than removed, because of radiation risk from what is essentially a cooled shell of ceramic armor surrounding a highly radioactive core that remains hot and is still undergoing radioactive decay.

In 2010, the Obama administration abandoned a 2 - decade effort to bury much of the high level waste — spent fuel rods from commercial reactors and radioactive material from nuclear bomb manufacturing — inside Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert (although Congress has ordered parts of that process to keep moving).

Pound for pound, nuclear explosives — which derive their power from runaway chain reactions in their radioactive fuel — carry about a million times the energy density of chemical explosives.

And that means there may be two direct paths for radioactive particle byproducts of nuclear fission, such as cesium 137 and iodine 131, to escape and spread radiation — cracks in containment as well as the spent fuel pools now open to the air.

Throughout the nuclear fuel cycle, many separations are required — in mining, enrichment and fuel fabrication, and then after fuel use, for the recovery of usable spent isotopes and the encapsulation and storage of unusable radioactive components.

That is about 20 kilometres southeast of the proposed burial site of at least 25 000 tonnes of highly radioactive spent fuel and high - level waste from the US's -LSB-...]

For example, an entire nuclear cycle involving light - water reactors, reprocessing of the spent fuel, and disposal of small «packages» of highly radioactive nuclear waste in deep boreholes could prove an attractive option, Moniz noted.

They feared that spent fuel stored in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.

Natural circulation in the reactor alone is enough to remove all the heat generated by the radioactive decay of the elements in the reactor fuel.

The unstable element, which will remain radioactive for millennia, is the residue of ill - fated efforts to recycle used nuclear fuel.

Even with a fleet of such fast reactors, nations would nonetheless require an ultimate home for radioactive waste, one reason that a 2010 M.I.T. report on spent nuclear fuel dismissed such fast reactors.

That antineutrino is the «tell» for a reactor because only the radioactive elements in nuclear fuel emit lots of them at a steady rate.

Now, however, physicists with Daya Bay report data that support a much simpler explanation: Scientists are merely overestimating the number of neutrinos born from the various radioactive nuclei produced in the fission of one component of standard nuclear fuel.

The report recommended two options that fulfilled this objective: the consumption of plutonium in MOX fuel and the immobilization of plutonium with high level radioactive waste (HLW).