Sentences with phrase «waste of spent nuclear fuel»

A third idea proposed would also deal with the hazardous waste of spent nuclear fuel.

Not exact matches

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.

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.

In the U.S., because of a lack of a long - term plan for dealing with such nuclear waste, spent - fuel pools are even more densely packed, making it easier for a meltdown to occur in the event of a loss of water.

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.

The half - lives (the period in which radioactivity halves) of these atoms range up to tens of thousands of years, a feature that led U.S. government regulators to require that the planned high - level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada isolate spent fuel for over 10,000 years.

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).

Therefore, either reprocessing or recycling spent nuclear fuel, as the French and Japanese do, is likely to be a waste of money better spent on improving the light - water reactors presently in use.

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.

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.

DENVER — Along the way to testing an old - but - new concept in nuclear waste storage — burying spent fuel in a hole drilled kilometers below the surface — the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors relearned a lesson that seems frequently forgotten: Get the locals on board first.

The law limited WIPP to defense transuranic (plutonium - contaminated) waste and prohibited transportation or disposal of high - level waste or spent nuclear fuel.

The Obama administration established the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future on January 29, 2010 to conduct a comprehensive review of spent fuel and high - level waste policies and recommend a new plan.

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.

Over the years, science has given way to raw politics as the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and supporters of DOE's repository project in Congress have sought to obfuscate and compensate for an ever - multiplying set of flaws and problems with the site and with the notion of transporting unprecedented amounts of deadly spent nuclear fuel and high - level nuclear waste across the country.

Executive Chairman Mr. Beckman has forty - five years of experience in the management, operation, maintenance, design, and regulation of nuclear power plants, spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste, and US Department of Energy nuclear research and defense facilities.

Using its licensed casks, NAC has safely completed more than 3,700 cask movements of spent fuel, high - level waste and other nuclear materials.

It would be great if there was a new generation of replacement reactors that was safe, cost - effective, and reliable and if there was a satisfactory resolution to the problem of nuclear wastes and accumulating spent fuel.

The current nuclear waste that we have sitting at the bottom of spent fuel pools and in dry cask storage would be more than enough to fuel the first reactors.

There are many nuclear fuel options: thorium, unenriched uranium (e.g. in heavy water reactors), enriched uranium in many different types of reactors, depleted uranium, «spent fuel» / used fuel» / «nuclear waste».

In the United States, some 60,000 tons of nuclear waste have already been produced, and existing reactors add some 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel annually.

It is telling that while there are thousands of articles, studies, books and movies about the relatively miniscule quantities of well - managed spent fuel that comes out of nuclear plants, there is to date only one estimate of how much solar waste the world is on track to produce, and it was calculated for the first time by an 18 - year - old nuclear engineering student from UC Berkeley and (proudly) published yesterday by Environmental Progress.

Given the evident concern about nuclear waste, it will be interesting to see if there is any reactions from young people to the governments recent admission that, on current NDA plans, the proposed Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) is not expected to be available to take spent fuel from new nuclear power stations until around 2130, which they note «is approximately 50 years after the likely end of electricity generation for the first new nuclear power station».

For my part, I have no problem with nuclear power, but we have to seriously rethink how we go about handling and processing spent fuel, i.e. recycling it more effectively, to reduce the waste and possibility of contamination as much as possible.

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