Radiation dafety

The Evolving Scientific and Political Challenges of Nuclear Waste Disposal

Nuclear waste was initially removed from the reactors and placed in cooling pools. A typical fuel assembly (weighing under a ton) produces between 250 and 500 watts of heat until the short-lived radioactivity dies off. (These are primarily Sr-90 and Cs-137, both of which have 30-year half-lives.)

The Department of Energy planned to transfer all this waste to a permanent disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, by 1998. The facility ran into technical problems (ground water was leaking into the storage chambers) and state opposition (even though the local communities were amenable); Senator Harry Reid convinced many people in Nevada that this was an example of the rest of the US treating Nevada as a garbage dump. Reid convinced President Barack Obama to shut down the Yucca facility shortly after Obama was elected President.

Several Republicans now want to reopen Yucca, but doing so will be expensive. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates that storing waste there will cost $96 billion.