In collaboration with the National Public Utilities Council, Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti created the following graphic to show the volume of all existing nuclear waste, categorized by its level of hazardousness and disposal requirements, based on data from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)..

Storage and Disposal

Nuclear provides about 10% of global electricity generation.

Nuclear waste, produced as a result of this, can be divided into four different types:

Very low-level waste: Waste suitable for near-surface landfills, requiring lower containment and isolation.
Low-level waste: Waste needing robust containment for up to a few hundred years, suitable for disposal in engineered near-surface facilities.
Intermediate-level waste: Waste that requires a greater degree of containment and isolation than that provided by near-surface disposal.
High-level waste: Waste is disposed of in deep, stable geological formations, typically several hundred meters below the surface.

Despite safety concerns, high-level radioactive waste constitutes less than 0.25% of total radioactive waste reported to the IAEA.

Stored and disposed radioactive waste reported to the IAEA under the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management. Data is from the last reporting year which varies by reporting country, 2019-2023.

The amount of waste produced by the nuclear power industry is small compared to other industrial activities.

While flammable liquids comprise 82% of the hazardous materials shipped annually in the U.S., radioactive waste accounts for only 0.01%.

Nuclear Waste Disposal and Peak Oil

January 2, 2023

Nuclear Waste Disposal and Peak Oil

Preface. One the greatest tragedies of energy decline will be the nuclear waste left to harm thousands of future generation for hundreds of thousands of years. We owe it to them to clean up our mess while we still have the fossil fuels to do it. If we do nothing, 263,000 tons of nuclear waste will poison the world. Both of my books explain why transportation and manufacturing can’t run on electricity, so let’s hope new nuclear plants are not built to cope with the energy crisis. The waste from existing plants is bad enough.

Though there probably isn’t time to build more of them if world peak oil production was in 2018. Though there is a tremendous push to build them (just listen to podcast Power Hungry for example).

Below are several articles about disposal of nuclear waste. Also see these related posts on nuclear waste. Especially “A Nuclear spent fuel fire at Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania could force 18 million people to evacuate” and Nuclear waste will harm future generations for hundreds of thousands of years, a book review of “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste”.

Finland will be the first nation in the world to store nuclear waste if all goes well starting in 2024 at 430 meters (1410 feet) deep. There are 2300 tons of waste to be stored. Other countries will have a hard time copying Finland, since their success was due to their high trust in institutions, community engagement, a lack of state-level power centers blocking the waste site from their area, and a balance of power between industry and stakeholders (El-Showk 2022).

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Conflict Between Nuclear-Powered Nations: Chernobyl Is Now a War Zone

February 27, 2022

Chernobyl nuclear power plant a few weeks after the disaster. Chernobyl, Ukraine, USSR, May 1986. (Photo: Igor Kostin/Laski Diffusion/Getty Images)

Conflict Between Nuclear-Powered Nations: Chernobyl Is Now a War Zone

The next Chernobyl scale nuclear disaster could happen in Chernobyl as the Ukraine conflict intensifies.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia poses several nuclear threats, including the possibility of deliberate or inadvertent military strikes or cyber-strikes on nuclear facilities.

There is also the obvious difficulty of safely operating nuclear reactors in a time of war, including the impossibility of carrying out safeguards inspections. Last but not least, there remains the possibility that the conflict will escalate into nuclear warfare.

We are about to learn what happens when nuclear-powered nations go to war, putting nuclear power plants at risk of deliberate or accidental military strikes and thus risking a Chernobyl scale catastrophe.

Retaliation

It seems highly unlikely that either nation—or any sub-national groups—would deliberately target nuclear reactors or spent fuel stores in the current conflict. But assuming there is a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ not to target nuclear power plants, how long would that agreement hold in a war that dragged on for years?

Either nation might choose to shut down its reactors in order to minimise risks. That would be a manageable and wise decision for a country with limited reliance on nuclear power—but it would be impractical for countries with a heavy reliance.

In any case, the radioactive reactor cores—whether kept in situ or removed from the reactors—would remain vulnerable, as would nuclear waste stores. Spent fuel cooling ponds and dry stores often contain more radioactivity than the reactors themselves, but without the multiple engineered layers of containment that reactors typically have.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fukushima Takes a Turn for the Worse

January 10, 2022

Fukushima Takes a Turn for the Worse

Photograph Source: IAEA Imagebank – CC BY 2.0

Tokyo Electric Power Company-TEPCO- has been attempting to decommission three nuclear meltdowns in reactors No. 1 No. 2, and No. 3 for 11 years now. Over time, impossible issues grow and glow, putting one assertion after another into the anti-nuke coffers.

The problems, issues, enormous danger, and ill timing of deconstruction of a nuclear disaster is always unexpectedly complicated by something new. That’s the nature of nuclear meltdowns, aka: China Syndrome debacles.

As of today, TEPCO is suffering some very serious setbacks that have “impossible to deal with” written all over the issues.

Making all matters nuclear even worse, which applies to the current mess at Fukushima’s highly toxic scenario, Gordon Edwards’ following statement becomes more and more embedded in nuclear lore: “It’s impossible to dispose of nuclear waste.” (Gordon Edwards in The Age of Nuclear Waste From Fukushima to Indian Point)

Disposing of nuclear waste is like “running in place” to complete a marathon. There’s no end in sight.

As a quickie aside from the horrendous details of the current TEPCO debacle, news from Europe brings forth the issue of nuclear power emboldened as somehow suitable to help the EU transition to “cleaner power,” as described by EU sources. France supports the crazed nuke proposal but Germany is holding its nose. According to German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke: “Nuclear energy could lead to environmental disasters and large amounts of nuclear waste. (Source: EU Plans to Label Gas and Nuclear Energy ‘Green’ Prompts Row, BBC News, Jan. 2, 2022) Duh!

Minister Lemke nailed it. And, TEPCO is living proof (barely) of the unthinkable becoming thinkable and disastrous for humanity. Of course, meltdowns are never supposed to happen, but they do.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Experts to Trudeau: Your Nuclear Dream May Turn Nightmare

May 26, 2021

US Experts to Trudeau: Your Nuclear Dream May Turn Nightmare

Rethink backing the Moltex reactor, urge nine non-proliferation heavyweights.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC. His government is backing a new generation of reactors US experts now warn could fuel nuclear weapons proliferation. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick, the Canadian Press.

A blue-ribbon group of American nuclear non-proliferation experts warns that Canada’s investment in new nuclear technology could lead to the spread of nuclear weapons and new threats to the environment.

“We write as U.S. non-proliferation experts and former government officials and advisors with related responsibilities to express our concern about your government’s financial support of Moltex — a startup company that proposes to reprocess CANDU spent fuel to recover its contained plutonium for use in molten-salt-cooled reactors.”

The warning came in the form of an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that was delivered on Tuesday and signed by the nine experts.

The group is spearheaded by Frank von Hippel, professor and senior research physicist at Princeton University; it includes Matthew Bunn, the Schlesinger professor of the practise of energy, national security, and foreign policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Thomas Countryman, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation.

“We understand your government’s motivation to support nuclear power and to reduce fossil fuel use but saving the world from climate disaster need not be in conflict with saving it from nuclear weapons. Also, like other reprocessing efforts, Moltex, even in the R&D stage, would create a costly legacy of contaminated facilities and radioactive waste streams, and require substantial additional government funding for cleanup and stabilization prior to disposal,” they wrote.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Fuel Buried 108 Feet From the Sea

March 29, 2021

Nuclear Fuel Buried 108 Feet From the Sea

Photograph Source: D Ramey Logan – CC BY-SA4.0

“The most toxic substance on Earth is separated from exposure to society by ½” of steel encased in a canister.” (Blanch)

That eye-opener comes from renowned nuclear expert Paul Blanch in reference to spent fuel rods removed from San Onofre Nuclear Generation Plant buried near the sea on California’s southern coastline 50 miles north of San Diego.

Seventy-three 20-foot tall canisters of highly toxic nuclear spent fuel rods are nestled underground within 108 feet of the Pacific Ocean and not far from Interstate 5 from which passersby catch a glimpse of 73 large rectangular lids poking above ground, thus sealing the most toxic substances on Earth ensconced in ½” dry casks. (Footnote: In contrast, German CASTOR V/19 ductile cast iron casks, with permanent integrated monitoring, are nearly two-feet thick)

What could possibly go wrong on the seashore?

At the outset of San Onofre’s plans for its 73 buried canisters, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself admitted: (1) the thin ½” stainless steel canisters could crack within 30 years (2) there’s no current technology to inspect, repair or replace cracked canisters (3) limited monitoring means leaks may not be detected soon enough. (Source: Sanonofresafety.org) It is not believed the foregoing has changed one iota.

Unfortunately, when it comes to nuclear risks, what can go wrong isn’t known until it actually goes wrong. Then, it’s too late. Which explains the contention of a professional group associated with publicwatchdogs.org that discussed issues of credibility and truthfulness of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission at a public hearing on March 9^th, 2021. More on that follows later.

The 73 San Onofre rectangular lids symbolize the final act of decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, remnants of 50 years of nuclear power…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear waste disposal drilled deep into earth’s crust

November 15, 2020

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Preface. One the greatest tragedies of the decline of oil will be all the nuclear waste left to harm future generations for up to a million years. We owe it to them to clean up our mess while we still have the fossil energy to do it, they won’t be able to discard the waste with horses and biomass-based energy like the civilizations before fossils that we’re returning to. If we don’t do anything, nuclear waste will sit at reactors, military and nuclear warhead sites.

The first of three articles below criticizes the deep borehole method of disposal that follow. I disagree. There are groups opposed to moving nuclear waste to a faraway site in case the train goes off the rails or there is a truck accident making it hard to use any repository anywhere. Drilling a borehole onsite gets around that. It is also much easier, faster, and far cheaper than new tunnel sites like Yucca mountain, which has cost $15 billion so far. Of course there are issues with boreholes, but no showstoppers. It is simply politically impossible to build large repositories. Nevada is one of the least populated states and it couldn’t be done there. The perfect is the enemy of the good, so I vote boreholes. Equally good, reopen Yucca Mountain, which the book “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste” shows is a perfectly fine place– thousands of combinations of scenarios of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, high rainfall, and other hazards have been modeled and nothing released the wastes below.

Related: posts on nuclear waste, especially “A Nuclear spent fuel fire at Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania could force 18 million people to evacuate”

***

Krall, L. 2020. Nuclear waste disposal: Why the case for deep boreholes is … full of holes. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear reactor issues

April 18, 2020

Nuclear reactor issues

Preface. There are half a dozen articles below. Although safety and disposal of nuclear waste ought to be the main reasons why no more plants should be built, what will really stop them isbecause it takes years to get permits and $8.5–$20 billion in capital must be raised for a new 3400 MW nuclear power plant (O’Grady 2008). This is almost impossible when a much cheaper and much safer 3400 MW natural gas plant can be built for $2.5 billion in half the time or less.

U.S. nuclear power plants are old and in decline. By 2030, U.S. nuclear power generation might be the source of just 10% of electricity, half of their 20% production of electricity now, because 38 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are past their 40-year life span, and another 33 reactors producing a third of nuclear power are over 30 years old. Although some will have their licenses extended, 37 reactors that produce half of nuclear power are at risk of closing because of economics, breakdowns, unreliability, long outages, safety, and expensive post-Fukushima retrofits (Cooper 2013).

If you’ve read the nuclear reactor hazards paper or my summary of it, then you understand why there will continually be accidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl. That makes investors and governments fearful of spending billions of dollars to build nuclear plants.

Nor will people be willing to use precious oil as it declines to build a nuclear power plant that could take up to 10 years to build, when that oil will be more needed for tractors to plant and harvest food and trucks to deliver the food to cities (electric power can’t do that, tractors and trucks have to run on oil).

And if we are dumb enough to try, we’ll smack into the brick wall of Peak Uranium.

Nuclear Safety in the news

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Power Offers an Abundant Supply of Low-Carbon Energy. But What to Do With the Deadly Radioactive Waste?

August 5, 2019

NUCLEAR POWER OFFERS AN ABUNDANT SUPPLY OF LOW-CARBON ENERGY. BUT WHAT TO DO WITH THE DEADLY RADIOACTIVE WASTE?

The race is on to develop new strategies for permanently storing some of the most dangerous materials on the planet.

Photo of Chernobyl confinement structure © iStockphoto.com/E_Kryzhanivskyi

There’s a small red hammer and sickle flag of the old Soviet Union on my dresser at home. I found it years ago on the floor of a primary school in Pripyat, the town built for workers at the doomed Chernobyl nuclear plant in what is now Ukraine. Perhaps it had been waved by a child at a state occasion, or had been left behind in the rush to evacuate Pripyat after the world’s worst nuclear disaster in April 1986.

Less than 2 miles (3 kilometers) away, the stricken, crumbling Reactor No. 4 was one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Everything for miles around, from the mushrooms in the woods to the trucks left in the parking lots to the toys in the nursery and the hospital beds, was radioactive to some degree.

Even though a dosimeter showed that after being washed down, the little flag was barely more radioactive than normal background levels found in nature, it should have been packaged up and landfilled as low-level nuclear waste.

By contrast, Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 site will remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years. In July 2019, 33 years after the explosion, 200 metric tons (220 tons) of uranium, plutonium, liquid fuel and irradiated dust was finally encased below an enormous 36,000-metric-ton (40,000-ton), €1.5 billion steel and concrete structure taller than the Statue of Liberty. The new sarcophagus will last about 100 years — after which it will deteriorate and future generations will have to decide how to dismantle and store it permanently.

The new sarcophagus covering Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 is expected to remain functional for a century. Graphic courtesy of Berria from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Click to enlarge.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Book review of Jaczko’s “Confessions of a rogue nuclear regulator”

May 26, 2019

Book review of Jaczko’s “Confessions of a rogue nuclear regulator”

Preface. After presenting a lot of evidence for why nuclear power plants are inherently unsafe, Jaczko concludes: “There is only one logical answer: we must stop generating nuclear waste, and that means we must stop using nuclear power. You would think that it would make sense to suspend nuclear power projects until we know what to do with the waste they create”.

Jaczko isn’t the first to sound the alarm on the safety of nuclear power plants. There’s also the 128 page report by Hirsch called “Nuclear Reactor Hazards Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century”, or my summary of this paper at energyskeptic “Summary of Greenpeace Nuclear Reactor Hazards”.

I read this book hoping Jaczko would explain why he shut Yucca mountain down. The 2013 book “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste” by William M. Alley & Rosemarie Alley, Cambridge University Press goes into great detail about why Yucca Mountain is the ideal place to put nuclear waste.

I have a lot of problems with Yucca being shut down. How is it safer to have 70,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and 20,000 giant canisters of high-level radioactive waste at 121 sites across 39 states, with another 70,000 tons on the way before reactors reach the end of their life?

Spent fuel pools in America’s 104 nuclear power plants, have an average of 10 times more radioactive fuel stored than what was at Fukushima, most of them so full they have four times the amount they were designed to hold.

All of this waste will harm future generations for at least a million years, all of these above ground sites are vulnerable to terrorists, tsunamis, floods, rising sea levels, hurricanes, electric grid outages, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other disasters.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Help Stop Radioactive Waste Dump and Thousands of Dangerous Shipments Across the US

October 5, 2018

Help Stop Radioactive Waste Dump and Thousands of Dangerous Shipments Across the US

The private company Waste Control Specialists (WCS) or “Interim Storage Partners” wants to place a high-level radioactive waste dump site (called a “centralized interim storage facility”) in West Texas.

If approved, opening this high-level waste dump would launch nation-wide transports of a total of 40,000 tons of irradiated reactor fuel (misleadingly known as “spent” fuel), to Texas from all over the country. The shipments are to be by rail, highway, and floating barge (even on Lake Michigan!). The planned-for thousands of such transports create risks for nearly everyone in the United States, because the ferociously radioactive material would pass near schools, hospitals, businesses, and farms, would travel on and over lakes, rivers, and waterways, and go through areas where our food is grown and where families live, play and work. Amazingly, no public meetings on the subject are planned in Texas or elsewhere.

Act now to stop this dangerous nuclear waste dump

Environmental and community right-to-know groups are demanding: 1) public meetings in Texas and along transportation routes across the country; 2) a halt to these transport and dumping plans; and 3) uniform publication of application and related materials in Spanish. You can add your voice to these urgent demands by writing to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on the license application by WCS until Oct. 19th .

Tell NRC: Listen to the people! No mass radioactive waste shipments to Texas.

Under WCS’s license application, the 40,000 tons of high-level waste from commercial power reactors could move on railroads, highways and even on waterways using barges for decades. Then, because the Texas site is supposedly “temporary,” after being shipped there the waste would have to be packed-up and transported again, to a “permanent” waste dump site — if one is ever approved. This means that new transportation and repackaging dangers will continue for additional decades.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Chernobyl in a Can” – 71 Vulnerable-To-Cracking Radioactive Waste Canisters Set for CA Ocean-Front Burial at San Onofre: Donna Gilmore, NH #335

November 24, 2017

“Chernobyl in a Can” – 71 Vulnerable-To-Cracking Radioactive Waste Canisters Set for CA Ocean-Front Burial at San Onofre: Donna Gilmore, NH #335

This Week’s Featured Interview:

Donna Gilmore of SanOnofreSafety.org reports on Southern California Edison’s plans to bury 1,800 tons – that’s 3,600,000 pounds <!> of high-level radioactive waste a mere 36 yards from high tide in canisters that are vulnerable to cracking and leaking. Each one contains a Chernobyl’s worth of radiation on the Pacific Ocean less than 70 miles from Los Angeles!

What to do:

Download petition and info sheets HERE – it’s the top story on the page.
Get signatures on the petition and send to San Onofre Safety (hard copy signatures on paper are necessary).
Use the info sheet to engage in conversation on the issues.
CA RESIDENTS: Call your state representative; locate her or him HERE: www.findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov
CALL the California Coastal Commission: (562) 590-5071
To read the Federal Register containing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s admission of no requirements for aging of radioactive waste-containing canisters, CLICK HERE.

Numnutz of the Week (for Outstanding Nuclear Boneheadedness):

“Shelter in place” after a nuclear accident… and stay there? New study provides a great way to keep the bodies out of the streets and the clean-up to a minimum! Beware of “*NEW IMPROVED*” methods of measuring radioactive risk… and always check out who’s behind the funding for this kind of bogus pro-nuclear “research.”

The Real Nuclear Triad: Energy, Weapons and Waste

November 7, 2017

The Real Nuclear Triad: Energy, Weapons and Waste

Photo by Maxwell Hamilton | Public Domain

Clear and Present Danger

Never before has the unbreakable connection between nuclear energy, weapons and waste been so blatantly obvious to the public eye…yet, with so little notice.

Although President Trump has threatened to obliterate North Korea and its 25 million people ‘with fire and fury the like of which the world has never seen,’ the NYT is reporting that America’s Asian allies doubt Washington’s ‘resolve’ to defend them with nuclear weapons and they want their own – an idea recently also floated by Trump himself.

In a new twist on the last century’s discredited ‘Atoms for Peace’ meme, the new nuclear delusion seems to be that the more countries that have nuclear weapons (Iran and North Korea excepted), the more ‘secure’ the world will become.

Speaking recently at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, Trump’s VP Mike Pence, a self-declared devout Christian who ‘gave my life to Jesus,’ declared “… there’s no greater force for peace in the world than the United States nuclear arsenal.”

Implication: every country should feel safer if they have a nuclear arsenal of their own. That seems precisely Kim Jong-Un’s own calculus, given his country’s previous horrific carpet-bombing experience with the US – “we… eventually burned down every town in North Korea,” Gen. Curtis LeMay told Congress – not to mention the recent history of Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Nuclear Circular Firing Squad

As agitation reportedly builds in South Korea and Japan for building their own nuclear arsenals, the Times reveals that, as a result of the radioactive waste output of their already existing nuclear energy reactor fleets, each of these tiny countries has accumulated enough weapons-grade plutonium to produce – respectively – 4,600 and 6,000 nuclear bombs.

How about that? Nations without their own ‘commercial power’ nukes must certainly take note.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nuclear Power Costs Enter Uncharted Territory

April 20, 2016

Nuclear Power Costs Enter Uncharted Territory

Many international businesses are hoping to cash in on disposal of nuclear waste. (StefrogZ via Flickr)

LONDON—If you want a job for life, go into the nuclear industry—not building power plants, but taking them down and making them safe, along with highly-radioactive spent fuel and other hazardous waste involved.

The market for decommissioning nuclear sites is unbelievably large. Sixteen nations in Europe alone face a €253 billion waste bill, and the continent has only just begun to tackle the problem.

Among the many difficulties the industry faces is lack of trained people to do the highly-paid work. Anyone who enters the business is likely to be sought after for the rest of their career because the job of decommissioning Europe’s nuclear sites alone will take more than 100 years—even if no new nuclear power stations are ever built.

Add to the European nuclear legacy the dozens of old nuclear power stations in North America, Japan, Russia and central Asia, and nuclear decommissioning could already be classed as one of the biggest industries in the world, and it can only grow.

And this does not count the millions of dollars still being spent annually to contain the damage from the nuclear accidents in Chernobyl, Russia, in 1986, and Fukushima, Japan, in 2011.

Longer-term problem

So far, the nuclear industry has largely avoided drawing too much attention to this legacy, emphasising that its sites are safe, and concentrating instead on claiming that new nuclear stations are the answer to climate change.

But this approach has not solved the longer-term problem of how to safely contain the radioactivity of old sites to avoid damaging future generations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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