If concrete acts anything like rock, the movement most fission products or decay products will be greatly slowed down by the concrete, so it would be very possible to have water coming thorough but little radiation. Some elements aren't really affected though, iodine, for example, will move at the same speed as the ground water, not slowed at all. It depends a lot of the porosity of the rock however, and I'm not sure how concrete measures up.
As for gamma rays, since they are simply high energy photons, a lot of concrete can be a pretty effective shield. At least, as long as your sources stay outside the concrete.
As with anything, take this with a grain of salt. I'm not consulting a book for this, I'm simply trying to remember what I can from my waste class. We were looking at the movement of waste from failed packages in a geological repository, but the concept seems pretty similar.
Preview button didn't work and it looked good in the box. I'm off to a great start. Properly formatted:
I actually created an account just to respond to this post.
I'm a nuclear engineering student, and just finished a class on waste. The Hanford site cleanup (which my professor said is currently the largest civil engineering endeavor in the nation) is due to poor storage by the federal government, which explicitly wrote itself out of the regulations involving waste storage.
The waste was generated during production of weapons grade material, not commercial power generation, and was not even properly solidified. The liquid waste was simply buried in large tanks and slowly separated out, forming a sludge which is what eventually leaked into the Columbia. It amazes me that they specifically wrote themselves out of the laws and let this happen, it's a pretty amazing double standard.
This sort of disaster should not be held against commercial nuclear power, which is held to incredibly stringent guidelines concerning the storage and disposal of waste. Currently, spent fuel is kept in all sorts of different dry cask designs. These designs (again, from my class notes) are designed for a realistic lifespan of a couple hundred years, which means they'll be relatively easy to move to Yucca Mountain or whatever final repository we come up with. Even better, the material could be retrieved and burned in a breeder or reprocessed, but that's a whole different post.
Basically, Hanford is a mess because it was an early source of waste (material from Hanford was used for the first bomb, Trinity in NM and for Fat Man) before a lot of the methods for disposal were worked out, and because even once they were, the government, in its infinite wisdom, chose to exempt itself from the disposal regulations that commercial power plants have to follow.
I actually created an account just to respond to this post.
I'm a nuclear engineering student, and just finished a class on waste. The Hanford site cleanup (which my professor said is currently the largest civil engineering endeavor in the nation) is due to poor storage by the federal government, which explicitly wrote itself out of the regulations involving waste storage.
The waste was generated during production of weapons grade material, not commercial power generation, and was not even properly solidified. The liquid waste was simply buried in large tanks and slowly separated out, forming a sludge which is what eventually leaked into the Columbia. It amazes me that they specifically wrote themselves out of the laws and let this happen, it's a pretty gross double standard.
This sort of disaster should not be held against commercial nuclear power, which is held to incredibly stringent guidelines concerning the storage and disposal of waste. Currently, spent fuel is kept in all sorts of different dry cask designs. These designs (again, from my class notes) are designed for a realistic lifespan of a couple hundred years, which means they'll be relatively easy to move to Yucca Mountain or whatever final repository we come up with. Even better, the material could be retrieved and burned in a breeder or reprocessed, but that's a whole different post.
Basically, Hanford is a mess because it was an early source of waste (material from Hanford was used for the first bomb, Trinity in NM and for Fat Man) before a lot of the methods for disposal were worked out, and because even once they were, the government, in its infinite wisdom, chose to exempt itself from the disposal regulations that commercial power plants have to follow.
And thus ends my first slashdot post.
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If concrete acts anything like rock, the movement most fission products or decay products will be greatly slowed down by the concrete, so it would be very possible to have water coming thorough but little radiation. Some elements aren't really affected though, iodine, for example, will move at the same speed as the ground water, not slowed at all. It depends a lot of the porosity of the rock however, and I'm not sure how concrete measures up.
As for gamma rays, since they are simply high energy photons, a lot of concrete can be a pretty effective shield. At least, as long as your sources stay outside the concrete.
As with anything, take this with a grain of salt. I'm not consulting a book for this, I'm simply trying to remember what I can from my waste class. We were looking at the movement of waste from failed packages in a geological repository, but the concept seems pretty similar.
I actually created an account just to respond to this post.
I'm a nuclear engineering student, and just finished a class on waste. The Hanford site cleanup (which my professor said is currently the largest civil engineering endeavor in the nation) is due to poor storage by the federal government, which explicitly wrote itself out of the regulations involving waste storage.
The waste was generated during production of weapons grade material, not commercial power generation, and was not even properly solidified. The liquid waste was simply buried in large tanks and slowly separated out, forming a sludge which is what eventually leaked into the Columbia. It amazes me that they specifically wrote themselves out of the laws and let this happen, it's a pretty amazing double standard.
This sort of disaster should not be held against commercial nuclear power, which is held to incredibly stringent guidelines concerning the storage and disposal of waste. Currently, spent fuel is kept in all sorts of different dry cask designs. These designs (again, from my class notes) are designed for a realistic lifespan of a couple hundred years, which means they'll be relatively easy to move to Yucca Mountain or whatever final repository we come up with. Even better, the material could be retrieved and burned in a breeder or reprocessed, but that's a whole different post.
Basically, Hanford is a mess because it was an early source of waste (material from Hanford was used for the first bomb, Trinity in NM and for Fat Man) before a lot of the methods for disposal were worked out, and because even once they were, the government, in its infinite wisdom, chose to exempt itself from the disposal regulations that commercial power plants have to follow.
And thus ends my first slashdot post.
I actually created an account just to respond to this post. I'm a nuclear engineering student, and just finished a class on waste. The Hanford site cleanup (which my professor said is currently the largest civil engineering endeavor in the nation) is due to poor storage by the federal government, which explicitly wrote itself out of the regulations involving waste storage. The waste was generated during production of weapons grade material, not commercial power generation, and was not even properly solidified. The liquid waste was simply buried in large tanks and slowly separated out, forming a sludge which is what eventually leaked into the Columbia. It amazes me that they specifically wrote themselves out of the laws and let this happen, it's a pretty gross double standard. This sort of disaster should not be held against commercial nuclear power, which is held to incredibly stringent guidelines concerning the storage and disposal of waste. Currently, spent fuel is kept in all sorts of different dry cask designs. These designs (again, from my class notes) are designed for a realistic lifespan of a couple hundred years, which means they'll be relatively easy to move to Yucca Mountain or whatever final repository we come up with. Even better, the material could be retrieved and burned in a breeder or reprocessed, but that's a whole different post. Basically, Hanford is a mess because it was an early source of waste (material from Hanford was used for the first bomb, Trinity in NM and for Fat Man) before a lot of the methods for disposal were worked out, and because even once they were, the government, in its infinite wisdom, chose to exempt itself from the disposal regulations that commercial power plants have to follow. And thus ends my first slashdot post.