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Managing the Nation's Nuclear Waste 1992 US Department of Energy
🕑 Added 2020-01-02 21:45:48 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Radioactive waste is waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is usually a by-product of nuclear power generation and other applications of nuclear fission or nuclear technology, such as research and medicine. Radioactive waste is hazardous to most forms of life and the environment, and is regulated by government agencies in order to protect human health and the environment.
Radioactivity naturally decreases over time, so radioactive waste has to be isolated and confined in appropriate disposal facilities for a sufficient period until it no longer poses a threat. The time radioactive waste must be stored for depends on the type of waste and radioactive isotopes. Current approaches to managing radioactive waste have been segregation and storage for short-lived waste, near-surface disposal for low and some intermediate-level waste, and burial in a deep geological repository or transmutation for the high-level waste.
A summary of the amounts of radioactive waste and management approaches for most developed countries are presented and reviewed periodically as part of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management...
Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years. The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are Np-237 (half-life two million years) and Pu-239 (half-life 24,000 years). Nuclear waste requires sophisticated treatment and management to successfully isolate it from interacting with the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment, followed by a long-term management strategy involving storage, disposal or transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form. Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, though there has been limited progress toward long-term waste management solutions.
In the second half of the 20th century, several methods of disposal of radioactive waste were investigated by nuclear nations, which are :
- "Long term above ground storage", not implemented.
- "Disposal in outer space" (for instance, inside the Sun), not implemented - as it would be currently too expensive.
- "Deep borehole disposal", not implemented.
- "Rock-melting", not implemented.
- "Disposal at subduction zones", not implemented.
- "Ocean disposal", used to be done by the USSR, the United Kingdom,[49] Switzerland, the United States, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, Russia, Germany, Italy and South Korea. (1954–93) This is no longer permitted by international agreements.
- "Sub seabed disposal", not implemented, not permitted by international agreements.
"Disposal in ice sheets", rejected in Antarctic Treaty
- "Direct injection", done by USSR and USA.
- Nuclear transmutation, using lasers to cause beta decay to convert the unstable atoms to those with shorter half-lives.
In the US, waste management policy completely broke down with the ending of work on the incomplete Yucca Mountain Repository. At present there are 70 nuclear power plant sites where spent fuel is stored. A Blue Ribbon Commission was appointed by President Obama to look into future options for this and future waste. A deep geological repository seems to be favored. 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics-winner Gérard Mourou, has proposed using Chirped pulse amplification to generate high-energy and low-duration laser pulses to transmute highly radioactive material (contained in a target) to significantly reduce its half-life, from thousands of years to only a few minutes...
