Sentences with phrase «spent radioactive fuel»

That would be 10 TIMES DEEPER than the proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Storage Facility for spent radioactive fuel rods.

He concedes the U.S. «is extraordinarily inept» in developing a safe way to store spent radioactive fuel, pointing to the decades - long attempt to use Yucca Mountain as a repository.

To ensure that moving spent radioactive fuel is being carried out with the minimum of risks, Sandia National Laboratories recently completed a nuclear «triathlon» of a simulated cargo of spent fuel rods over 14,500 mi to record the stress and jolts that fuel undergoes in transit.

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.

Solid radioactive wastes include laundry (considered low - level waste) and irradiated spent fuel (considered high - level waste.)

Since at least August 2005, radioactive contaminants such as tritium and strontium - 90 have been leaking from Indian Point's spent fuel pools into the groundwater and the Hudson River.

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.

Heath said nuclear power produces spent fuel rods which are radioactive and require constant maintenance.

The issue concerns what to do with radioactive waste after uranium and plutonium have been recovered from spent nuclear fuel using reprocessing methods such as Plutonium Uranium Redox EXtraction (PUREX).

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.

It's not just spent nuclear fuel but all the radioactive waste from a nuclear power plant that has no place to go

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.

They say enriching uranium at a processing plant poses less risk than handling spent nuclear fuel, which is highly radioactive, at a reactor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Dounreay also suffered an explosion at its dumping ground for used sodium coolant that may have contributed to radioactive particles from spent fuel turning up on nearby beaches.

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.

Though the concept of borehole disposal, which would see radioactive waste entombed far deeper than traditional repositories, has existed for decades, the idea has been revived in recent years, spurred by troubles in finding a long - term home for the country's spent fuel.

It is relatively easy to separate this plutonium, because the depleted uranium blanket is less contaminated with highly radioactive fission products than regular spent fuel.

The many serious technical deficiencies of the Yucca Mountain site and DOE's flawed approach to geologic disposal notwithstanding, the most potentially explosive aspect of the federal program is the reality that tens of thousands of shipments of deadly spent nuclear fuel and high - level radioactive waste will travel the nation's highways and railroads - through 43 states and thousands of communities, day after day for upwards of 40 years.

«The most compelling reason to look seriously at the PRISM is that it can burn all the long - lived actinides in spent nuclear fuel, leaving only fission products with a roughly 300 - year radioactive lifetime.

Accordingly, we should not construct any additional nuclear reactors until and unless we devise a way to render the spent fuel therefrom harmless = not be more radioactive than the world Mother Nature has created in which we live.

The «spent fuel» is easily radioactive enough to kill with a short contact exposure many years after removal from reactors.

With a new federal nuclear waste program necessary and on the long - term horizon, the Natural Resources Defense Council sought to learn what state officials think should be done with the spent fuel and radioactive waste from America's 99 commercial nuclear reactors.

Once the relatively clean - running nuclear plant is online, it produces radioactive waste in the form of spent fuel rods.

Annually, Entergy will be responsible for moving a set number of spent fuel rods from its dangerous storage pools to dry cask storage on site - a much safer technology for storing radioactive material.