World's Nuclear Plants Still Searching for Permanent Waste Sites

[Fledermaus]

Nuclear power plants are clean, efficient and silent. But they face complex safety issues. There is the danger of radiation leaks. They are vulnerable to terrorist attacks. And perhaps most vexing of all, they produce large amounts of waste in the form of spent uranium fuel, which remains dangerously radioactive for thousands or perhaps millions of years. How and where to safely store that waste has been a central question in the decades-old debate over nuclear energy.

The catastrophic failure of Japan's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, spotlighted the terrible risks of generating electricity with nuclear reactors. It also focused renewed attention on the dangers of keeping the reactors' highly radioactive spent fuel in temporary storage, on-site. Over the past six decades, the world has built some 400 nuclear plants, and none of them has a permanent, long-term storage plan for this lethal waste.

Linda Gunter is an international specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a Washington-based environmental group . "The nuclear waste problem has never been solved and there is a strong possibility that it will never be solved and therefore we talked about it as the Achilles hill of the nuclear industry," she said.

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/science-technology/Worlds-Nuclear-Plants-Still-Searching-for-Permanent-Waste-Sites-119028639.html

[PamW]

1. Nuclear waste is a SOLVED technical problem - RECYCLE

Linda Gunter is an international specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a Washington-based environmental group . "The nuclear waste problem has never been solved and there is a strong possibility that it will never be solved
=================================

Nuclear waste is a solved technical problem - recycle all the long-lived actinides
like plutonium and burn them down to short-lived fission products.

See the following from nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till of Argonne National Lab,
courtesy of PBS's Frontline:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: The fission products.

A: Fission products. But none of the long-lived toxic elements like plutonium and americium or curium, the so-called manmade elements. They're the long-lived toxic ones. And they're recycled back into the reactor ... and work every bit as well as plutonium.

Q: So they go in, and then those are broken into fission products, or some of it is. Right?

A: Yes.

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.


PamW