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... instead of e.g. Svahnnah River which was close to 10 times the reprocessing capacity, operated for 50 years, was closed less than a decade ago, and by your accounts should have flooded half of the country in nuclear waste by now ... but hasn't.

Yeah, lets look at Savannah River Site:

High-activity liquid waste is generated at SRS as by-products from the processing of nuclear materials for national defense, research and medical programs. The waste, totaling about 36 million gallons, is currently stored in 49 underground carbon-steel waste tanks grouped into two “tank farms” at SRS.

36 million gallons of high level liquid waste, prone to leaking and chemical reactions. Each of these one tank farm covers an area of 20 acres, or 40 acres total.

OTOH the entire lifetime output of all power reactors operating or ever operated in the U.S. could fit into a 100 acre dry cask storage field with generous cask spacing.

Well.....we already transport it to Savannah River in SC.

http://www.srs.gov/general/srs-home.html

Love canal - waste doesn't have to be radioactive to be harmful.

The waste planned at Yucca Mountain is high level stuff.
Spent fuel rods, waste products of Plutonium production.
Stuff that can hurt you.

One main reason people don't want a disposal site near them
is this stuff has to be transported, and accidents happen.

Gloves, clothing, furniture, tools and stuff of that nature
are just put in a plastic bag, boxed up and buried, not
that deep either.

In this area they turn high level waste into glass. Similar to this
http://www.srs.gov/general/programs/solidification/index.htm
it not only reduces the waste (no liquids) it stop it from
being airborne, or getting into the ground water.

Plastic is used in some tritium applications: http://sti.srs.gov/fulltext/ms9900143r1/ms9900143r1.html Sound's like it has to be accessible since it becomes nuclear waste after the plastic degrades from the effects of th tritium. Thus, I doubt that the use of plastic pipes in this case could have been correct.

Plutonium-238 IS a fissile material and the criticality limits are similar to that of Pu-239. http://sti.srs.gov/fulltext/ms9900313/ms9900313.html

It doesn't make a good weapon trigger candidate since it has a fairly short half-life (decay products inhibiting the reaction), can get very hot on it's own (bad mechanically for the bomb itself), and the fission is fast and spontaneous (hard to control).

Most Pu-238 is stored as PuO, however since Pu-238 is a heavy alpha emitter it emits neutrons from the (alpha,n) reaction with O-17 & O-18. Therefore they try and selectively heat treat it so the vast majority of the oxygen isotopes are O-16. gloveboxes designed for Pu-238 still require several inches of dense hydrogenous shielding.

I can suggest at least one use for Helium-3. Just ask out friends over in South Carolina. From what I hear, they play with it all the time.

Excellent point.

However, as another /. reader pointed out with reference to landfill, we're simply stockpiling exactly the materials we have proven to use most regularly. It's not in an immediately-usable form but it is there nonetheless, growing ever more usable as our recycling technologies continue to improve.

I believe the Yucca mountain issue (i.e., the growing pile of nuclear waste in the States) is largely political. If the U.S. decided that reprocessing no longer equals proliferation, or collectively found the risk/reward of doing so reaches a more appealing ratio, all those swimming-pools full of spent rods local to the reactors become partially usable fuel again. With the use of breeders even more potential can be realised.

This of course ignores the important point that reprocessing is a non-trivial operation requiring specialised facilities that likely wouldn't be added to an existing plant for reasons of cost.

That leaves one in the unenviable position of transporting hot poo across the country to your reprocessing plants (the Mobile Chernobyl problem). Perhaps when factoring in this risk it may prove cheaper in the long run to equip each power station than clean up after a disaster.

Still, we need look no further than France, Japan, or the U.K. for a known-good and reasonably safe operational model for managing the entire nuclear fuel cycle.

The DCS http://www.srs.gov/general/srs-home.html Savannah River http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel MOX project may even make this a reality; my guess is it'll be down to how the public receive the finished plant.

The ultimate in safety, especially if combined with modern glassification techniques. But why bother? Recycle using breeder reactors -- there is after all a finite supply of mine-able uranium on the planet.

That's true. People change. President Bush went from being a partying drunk to a born-again teetotaller. One of my best friends' dad went from being a staunch Republican to a rabid liberal who makes my excoriations of the GOP and their camp-followers look like praise.

FWIW, I'm less against nuclear power than I was 30 years ago. The post about reprocessing the waste sooner brings up an idea that certainly has merit. But I wish they'd quit dumping it in South Carolina.

Not sure exactly how much T2 gas compresses to form a liquid but the Tritrium Reclemation Center will be recieving several overpack's of commercially produced netron absorber rods per year and
The total amount of tritium per overpack is equivalent to 15,411 standard cc of T2
linky

15K cubic centimeters at STP is quite a bit, probably not a couple kg but still quite a bit more than a few hundred mg.

Look, it's obvious that you know nothing about how nuclear waste is (or even what it is).

For an example of how nuclear waste is processed, let us take the Savannah River Site (an excellent example of how nuclear reactors can help the environment through lots of government funding). There, they had several reactors built during the Cold War in order to create weapons-grade plutonium and tritium. In the process, a lot of waste was created.

There has been built a huge building (called a canyon) designed for waste processing. First, the waste is chemically processed and diluted with borosilicate glass (the same glass that Pyrex is made of). Next, it is melted, stirred up, and poured into huge double-layered steel drums with double-welded tops. The melted glass solidifies into one solid chunk. After it cools, a giant, shielded truck (basically) moves the tanks into a building with fairly shallow holes in the ground - but this is only until Congress and whomever decide to allow shipping these to designated sites.

The sites that Congress will (hopefully eventually) pick are designed not to be very near any water sources. They are planning remote locations and far away places.

So, what if one of these containers breaks when it's buried?
Well, nothing. Since all of the waste is a solid piece of glass, it won't pour out.

Well, what if some of the glass breaks off into, say, a stream?
Since the glass is much denser than water, it will sink. Since it is completely solid, no radioactive particles will be mixed with and contaminating the water.

Um, but it's still radioactive, right?
Basically, the worst it can do to the water is make H2O into DHO or D2O (by adding neutrons to the hydrogens). This isn't important at all, since what we call H2O already has some deuterium isotopes in it.

In other words, before you decide to make a "scathing" post that you plan on getting modded "Insightful," it might be a Good Thing to check up on your facts beforehand.