When people talk about nuclear waste, what are they really talking about? Whats in those scary barrels buried deep in a bunker if it isn’t “glowing green goo?”
In: Physics
Mt grandfather briefly hauled low grade waste from the Pickering nuclear facility in Ontario. What he hauled were booties, masks, coveralls and such, any low grade contamination. That all got put into barrels, which was then sealed in over-barrels and hauled away somewhere. No body worries too much about that stuff though.
The dangerous stuff is the spent fuel from the reactor. Calling it spent though is very misleading. It is still quite radioactive and will be for a very VERY long time. It’s just that the active isotopes in it have decayed to the point where it just doesn’t get hot enough for efficient operation of the reactor. In addition, depending on the exact fuel in question, the products made by nuclear decay can themselves inhibit nuclear reactions. So not only does it not get “hot” enough any more, it will actively absorb “hot” from the neighbouring rods. This stuff amounts to **small rods of black ceramic material** that would feel quite hot to the touch. They could be hot enough to burn you from thermal energy alone, in addition to the radiation burns you’d receive. So at most generation facilities, they have cooling ponds full of water. Water is a decent moderator of radiation. Depending on how deep the top layer of barrels are, you could survive swimming across the pool. But diving down to touch them would kill you.
The big problem with these cooling ponds is that they are only so big. They were designed to be _temporary_ holding pens until they were safe enough to shop to a central facility for disposal or re-processing. But, for a variety of reasons, fear of nuclear power being high on the list, the central facility never got built and power companies haven’t been able to get permission to build bigger pools. (many of American reactors are still inn use decades after their design life and keep getting recertified because they don’t have a good way to get rid of the waste, they can’t get permission to build new reactors and we need the power too much to shut them down.) As a result, we have quite elderly reactor designs chugging away producing power and cooling ponds that are over capacity.
And, as others have said, having a facility to reprocess that fuel into new fuel comes up hard against fears of nuclear proliferation. The reason we have spent fuel that can be turned into weapons is because of a political choice made in the US during the Cold War. Thorium cycle reactors could produce just as much power or more from an even more abundant fuel than uranium. The down side was that it doesn’t produce Uranium-238 or Plutonium-239 which are needed for nuclear weapons. So the gov’t supported the development of Uranium-235 reactors.
The total amount of “spent fuel” amounts to a football field sized stack of ceramic slugs six and a half stories high. But, for a number of reasons, it can’t be stored that compactly.
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