Check out NEI’s blog- NEI Nuclear Notes’ last entries about the Yucca Mountain hearing. The purpose of the hearing will be to receive testimony about enhancing the management and disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste… click here to read what NEI Nuclear Notes has to say.
MYTH: Low-level waste is hazardous for thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years.
REALITY: In less than 100 years, most of what we call low-level radioactive waste becomes harmless trash.
All radioactive materials decay over time - much like batteries in a flashlight that weaken and eventually stop working. That is why, for example, a physician who uses Cesium-137 to treat uterine cancer must periodically replace the materials.
Scientists know the precise half-lives of all radioactive materials. After ten half-lives, scientists consider a material to be no longer radioactive.
The Cesium-137 used to treat uterine cancer, for instance, has a half-life of 30 years. Cobalt-60, also used in medicine, and a by-product of nuclear reactors, has a half-life of 5.3 years. Low-level waste facilities contain some trace amounts of radioactive materials with much longer half-lives, such as plutonium. But such small amounts pose no threat to public health or the environment.
In a recent analysis of low-level waste that will go into a facility planned for Ohio. The researchers know exactly how much of each radioactive material shippers will send to the facility.
Here is what they found:
I just learned that there is talk of a new solution in dealing with nuclear waste. During the recent G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to take the nuclear waste that the rest of the world shuns, hoping for economic gains in the billions, and President Bush, in a reversal of U.S. policy, is offering to help.
The two countries plan on starting negotiations on a civilian nuclear agreement that would support Putin’s top energy goals: expand his country’s power reactors and take advantage of the mass amount of territory and store the world’s used reactor fuel.
Although this seems like viable solution, there are plenty of risks. First of all, in the past the U.S has opposed a civilian nuclear agreement with Russia because they support Iran’s nuclear energy program. Major hurdles must be reached- including making sure that all waste is secure and safe.
Some believe that Putin wants the civilian nuclear agreement so much that it gives the administration leverage to get more cooperation from Russia to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “Russia can make billions of dollars (from accepting foreign reactor waste), but only with U.S approval. And that gives us a lot of leverage,” says Matthew Bunn, a leading nuclear proliferation watchdog who leads the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University.
To see the entire article from which I pulled this info - CLICK HERE