Antinuclear

Escalating mass and escalating costs of nuclear wastes

There is no national disposal spot for the spent fuel, and for 32 states, no place to send their low-level wastes. Around the country, the inventory of low-level wastes with no place to go is growing by about 10,000 cubic feet a year……...as much as $1,625 per cubic foot of waste. Even with waste reduction technologies, the amount of waste per year amounts to thousands of cubic feet…………

(USA) Nuclear Dumps Argue Over Diluting Waste for Burial – NYTimes.com, By MATTHEW L. WALD June 17, 2010 Even low-level radioactive waste is a growing problem, with few licensed repositories to dispose of it. The problem dates from the early 1980s, when Congress said that the federal government would take care of high-level waste, like spent fuel from nuclear power plants, but that the states would have to find sites for low-level material, like the radiation sources used in cancer treatments and industrial X-rays, and filters used in nuclear plants.In reality, both the federal and state efforts mostly failed. There is no national disposal spot for the spent fuel, and for 32 states, no place to send their low-level wastes. Around the country, the inventory of low-level wastes with no place to go is growing by about 10,000 cubic feet a year………
By one estimate, the states have collectively spent about $1 billion in the last 25 years looking for places to put wastes, and some have entered into multistate compacts to handle the material………..
The size of the market is not clear, but the Government Accountability Office reported in 2004 that Barnwell was charging as much as $1,625 per cubic foot of waste. Even with waste reduction technologies, the amount of waste per year amounts to thousands of cubic feet…………

Studsvik, a Swedish company with operations in Tennessee, cooks wastes into smaller volumes to reduce storage costs and opposes the idea of dilution. Rebecca Kelley, a spokeswoman for Studsvik, said that with the higher-level waste blended in, the radioactivity emitted might meet the initial rules for the lowest category. However, she said that the higher-level waste stayed radioactive longer, and that after 100 years, it could still be 450 times more radioactive than the standard for the lowest category.

The fear is that an “inadvertent intruder” would decide, some decades or centuries hence, to build a house on top of the dump and excavate the wastes………
The commission has no timetable for making a decision, and the agency is not even certain whether its existing regulations already allow the kind of blending that EnergySolutions is proposing.

Nuclear Dumps Argue Over Diluting Waste for Burial – NYTimes.com

June 23, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | uranium | antinuclear, nuclear wastes, radioactive, uranium