Operated from 1972 to 1996 and produced 119 billion kilowatt hours of energy
Dry cask storage is a method for safely storing spent nuclear fuel after it has cooled for several years in water pools. Once the fuel rods are no longer producing extreme heat, they are sealed inside massive steel and concrete casks that provide both radiation shielding and passive cooling through natural air circulation—no water is needed. Each cask can weigh over 100 tons and is engineered to resist earthquakes, floods, fire, and even missile strikes. This makes it a robust interim solution until permanent deep geological repositories are available. The casks are expected to last 50–100 years, though the fuel inside remains radioactive for thousands. Dry cask storage reduces reliance on crowded spent fuel pools, provides a secure above-ground option, and buys time for nations to develop long-term disposal strategies. In essence, it’s a durable, self-contained “vault” for nuclear waste
I'm pro-nuclear power. don't get me wrong. but....spent nuclear fuel does not account for all the radioactive waste produced in fission power production. even the majority of it by mass or volume. low and intermediate radioactive waste represents a MUCH larger footprint
Very much so. Anything that gets too hot has to be interred.
Where does it go?
up ya bum
alright, low and medium level radioactive waste is large in volume, but it is low(er) in radioactivity. how dangerous is it really? what security mechanisms have to be present to ensure it doesn't contaminate the landscape? Would it be okay to just dump it somewhere in the great canyon or the rocky mountains? Would it reasonably do any harm there?
I wouldn't put it anywhere near a water table if you want to keep consuming that water.
it needs to be protected from weathering.
Yucca mountain was ideal for a lot of reasons - remoteness, stability, but I suspect there are many similar places - also mines. the good thing re: this waste vs fuel waste is it's relatively low half life will render it 'cool' in a few hundred to a few thousand years.
Same goes for the industry behind making photoelectric panels, etc. Fusion would also have a lot of side waste due to neutron bombardment.
I'm not sure how to parse this. are you suggesting that PV production involves radionucleotides?
the recycling of photovoltaic panels has improved enormously over the last decade, and made huge leaps in just the last few years. In some ways, it's becoming a focus for providing new panel production because the recycling can be quite profitable:
"In 2004, according to Germany’s state-owned Fraunhofer Society, Europe’s largest institute of applied-engineering research, one watt of solar power required about sixteen grams of polysilicon; this has dropped now to about two grams. As Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and a senior researcher at Oxford University, calculated recently, “the silver used in one solar panel built in 2010 would be enough for around five panels today.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment
re: Fusion - yeah, irradiated hardware is going to be a real thing, but we don't really have much of an idea how much of it will be produced. to be determined imho.
I'm saying there is an environmental cost to all energy generation, you have to include the whole process. In this case it is the mining of the rare earth metals used to produce them.
valid.