First-of-Its-Kind US Nuclear Waste Dump Marks 20 Years (apnews.com)

"In a remote stretch of New Mexico desert, the U.S. government put in motion an experiment aimed at proving to the world that radioactive waste could be safely disposed of deep underground..." reports the Associated Press: Twenty years and more than 12,380 shipments later, tons of Cold War-era waste from decades of bomb-making and nuclear research across the U.S. have been stashed in the salt caverns that make up the underground facility. Each week, several shipments of special boxes and barrels packed with lab coats, rubber gloves, tools and debris contaminated with plutonium and other radioactive elements are trucked to the site.

But the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has not been without issues. A 2014 radiation leak forced an expensive, nearly three-year closure, delayed the federal government's cleanup program and prompted policy changes at national laboratories and defense-related sites across the U.S. More recently, the U.S. Department of Energy said it would investigate reports that workers may have been exposed last year to hazardous chemicals. Still, supporters consider the repository a success, saying it provides a viable option for dealing with a multibillion-dollar mess that stretches from a decommissioned nuclear weapons production site in Washington state to one of the nation's top nuclear research labs, in Idaho, and locations as far east as South Carolina. If it weren't for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, many containers of plutonium-contaminated waste would be outside, exposed to the weather and susceptible to natural disasters, said J.R. Stroble, head of business operations at the Department of Energy's Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees the contractor that operates the repository.

"The whole purpose of WIPP is to isolate this long-lived radioactive, hazardous waste from the accessible environment, from people and the things people need in order to live life on Earth," he told The Associated Press.

Comments

Re:Dry Cask handling

[Smidge204]

> radically decrease the severity of other types of potential nuclear accidents, is to start moving spent fuel rods from pools to dry cask storage.

They do.

When the spent fuel rods are removed from the reactor, they are still highly radioactive and still produce a significant amount of heat. They will continue to output significant amounts of heat for years (About 5 years IIRC). To keep them cool, they are stored in water. The water has the additional benefit of shielding much of the radiation

After the most radioactive elements in the spent fuel have decayed away, and they rate of heat generation is low enough that air cooling is sufficient to keep them from melting, they are removed from the pool and put into dry concrete casks.

It's not feasible to go directly to dry storage. There's too much heat, too much radioactivity, to store or transport the material in any significant quantity.

It's worth noting that the potential for accident is extremely low for the storage pools. The pools are large enough (at least in the US) that they do not need to be actively cooled. This is by design. The biggest threat is keeping the reactor core cool, which will always require active pumping of coolant and is thus vulnerable to prolonged power loss.
=Smidge=

Re:Indeed

[b0s0z0ku]

You need both: waste storage and reprocessing. Some contaminants are also highly radioactive (like Sr-90 and Cs-137), but aren't terribly useful in a reactor. Yeah, yeah, you can use Sr-90 in a radiothermal generator, but it isn't terribly safe or economical to do so.

Re: Totally disrepectful to the earth

[angel'o'sphere]

Half life is a completely overrated argument on /. (or in america?)
The questions are:
* does it get into the body?
* where does it accumulate?
* what particles are emitted?
* what energy do those particles have?
* is it harmful already if the emissions come from the outside (alpha/beta versus gamma) or only from inside the body
* is it an element that body is hungry for, like Cs?
* and in case it is released into the environment are there biologic path's by which they get accumulated, e.g. Cs again, you simply do not want to eat mushrooms around Chernobyl, regardless that the accident was 30 years go, it is still _forbidden_ to gather mushrooms in _south Germany_ because they are to contaminated with unhealthy levels of Cs

Re:Now give it another 200'000 years or so

[Loki_1929]

Nuclear is already the safest form of electrical power generation ever implemented by mankind. And that's with all the greed, shortcuts, extreme risk taking, etc. factored into it. Nearly every nuclear plant ever built simply operated day after day, providing safe, clean power from the moment it achieved criticality to the final day of service. The few examples of problems you can think of either didn't kill anyone or caused so few deaths that it doesn't begin to compare to any other source. People die setting up wind turbines and solar installations (particularly rooftop). People die building hydro dams and many more die when those dams fail. Every source has risk and every source has a cost. Thus far, with decades of experience, nuclear has the lowest risk to human life - as implemented - compared to any other option. And its designs have only become far safer.

Refusing to back nuclear due to safety concerns is based purely on a provably inaccurate assessment of risk. Provably with 65 years of real-world data. It works and it's safe. Is it perfect? Of course not. It's just closer to perfect than any other option we've got.