Nuclear waste disposal sites

FIGURE 17.30 This 35-year-old drum of radioactive waste has corroded and leaked radioactive materials into the soil. The drum was located in one of the nuclear waste disposal sites at the U.S. Department of Energy s Hanford, Washington, nuclear manufacturing and research facility. Several storage sites at this facility have become seriously contaminated. 

Farallon Islands Nuclear Waste Disposal Site (FINWDS) and Point Arena (reference site), 1986-1987... 

Figure 6. Location of sampling stations at nuclear waste disposal sites (a—facing page) Pacific...

Figure 8. Concentration profiles of a0Pb for 3800-m deep stations at the Hudson Canyon Nuclear Waste Disposal Site (Atlantic) (a—facing page) Stations 3, 4, 5, 8, and 15 and (b) Stations...

Similar findings have been reported at a number of other abandoned nuclear waste disposal sites. In most cases, radioactivity from... 

Glynn P. D. (2003) Modeling Np and Pu transport with a surface complexation model and spatially variant sorption capacities implications for reactive transport modeling and performance assessments of nuclear waste disposal sites. Comput. Geosci. 29(3), 331-349. 

Winograd, I. J., and Szabo, B. J., 1988, Water-table decline in the south-central Great Basin during the Quaternary period—implications for toxic waste disposal, in Geologic and Hydro-logic Investigations of a Potential Nuclear Waste Disposal Site at Yucca Mountain, U.S. Geol. Surv. Bulletin 1790, pp. 147-152. 

This computational model calculates the annual radiological dose to humans over geological time scales due to the underground migration of radionuclides from a hypothetical nuclear waste disposal site through a system of idealised natural and engineered barriers. 

Francis AJ, Iden CR, Nine BJ, et al. 1980. Characterization of organics in leachates from low-level radioactive waste disposal sites. Nuclear Technol 50 158-163. 

For nuclear waste disposal, in a site such as Yucca Mountain, if the maximally exposed individual receives the proposed annual limit of 0.15 mSv, present estimates (based on the linearity hypothesis) suggest a 0.00 1 % risk of an eventual fatal cancer. The maximum dose is reached only if the wastes are dissolved in a small volume of water, and therefore only a limited number of people would receive this dose. If this number were as high as 1000, the implied toll for Yucca Mountain neighbors would be one cancer fatality per century per repository site.19 This toll would not start for many centuries, when the waste canisters begin to fail, and it not unreasonable to expect that cancer prevention and treatment will be much improved by then. Ignoring this prospect, and assuming many repositories and some doses above the prescribed limit, it still appears that the expected toll would be well under a thousand deaths per century. 

Dyer, R.S., "Environmental surveys of two deep sea radioactive waste disposal sites using submersibles" in Symposium, Management of Radioactive Waste from the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, IAEA, 317-338, 1976. 

Nuclear waste. The nuclear waste disposal scheme remains to be finalized. The Yucca Mountain project in Nevada has made good advances recently, and when licensed it can provide a destination for the spent fuel accumulating at the plant sites. The development of a closed fuel cycle that involves the extraction and use of the fissile contents from the irradiated fuel would reduce the long-lived radioactivity associated with the waste to be sent to the repository. 

In addition to processes of the nuclear fuel cycle, release of uranium has been detected in surface water adjacent to a radioactive waste disposal site in Massachusetts (Cottrell et al. 1981). measurements indicated that surface water located adjacent to the waste disposal site had concentrations of up to 155 pCi/L. Additionally, groundwater measurements of and at the disposal site were 4,400 pCi/L and 2,400 pCi/L, respectively. These values were elevated compared to values obtained in a study performed for the EPA (Drury 1981). For the EPA study, a total of 35,000 surface water samples from across the United States were analyzed the average total uranium concentration was 1.1 pCi/L (range 0.01-582 pCi/E). Of these, 28,000 were considered samples of domestic water supplies. In this same study, 55,000 groundwater samples had a total mean uranium concentration of 3.2 pCi/L (range 0.01-635 pCi/L). 

Evaluate environmental issues associated with nuclear wastes. Research the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal plan, the Hanford nuclear site, or a local nuclear facility. Prepare a poster or multi-media presentation on yonr findings. 

Virtually all applications of nuclear chemistry create radioactive waste and, along with it, the problems of safe handling and disposal. Most disposal sites, at present, are considered temporary, until a long-term safe solution can be foimd. Figure 10.8 conveys a sense of the enormity of the problem. Also, An Environmental Perspective Nuclear Waste Disposal on page 279, examines this problem in more detail. 

A series of site investigations are planned as part of the Swedish nuclear waste disposal programme. In order to provide the necessary rock mechanics support for these site investigations, a strategy has been developed (Andersson et al. 2002b) which includes the following items ... 

Several of the major nuclear facilities in the United States use plutonium and some of these have released plutonium to the environment. These releases have taken place at remote sites and generally have not been measurable outside the plant property. Approximately 0.002 kCi (7.4x10 Bq) of plutonium have been disposed in the Los Alamos National Laboratory canyon waste disposal sites (Harley 1980). The Savannah River Plant, Aiken, South Carolina, has released a total of 0.005... 

In the United States, the Yucca Mountain site (Fig. 3.30) is reported to be a good location because of the low water content in the site. The proposed design for nuclear waste disposal is for steel canisters containing the spent fuel to be stored within other steel canisters and buried horizontally in chambers 300 m below the earth s surface. The canisters were designed to last at least 1000 years, which will depend on the mountain itself to provide a natural barrier to survive the minimum 10,000 years required by the government however, there is no guarantee that the canisters at Yucca Mountain will be free from water flow for 10,000 years. 

Source Chaney, R., and Fang, Fl.Y., Static and dynamic properties of marine sediments A state of the art. In Marine Geotechnology and Nearshore/Offshore Structures. STP 923, Chaney, R.C., and Fang, H.Y., eds., ASTM Press, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 74-111,1986. Reprinted with permission. Copyright ASTM, 1986 also in Chaney, R.C. et al.. Abyssal plains Potential sites for nuclear waste disposal. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Environmental Geotechnology, AUentown, PA, 1986. Reprinted with permission of Envo Publishing. 

Chaney, R.C., Richards, A.F., and Murray, C.N. 1986. Abyssal plains Potential sites for nuclear waste disposal. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Environmental Geotechnology, Allentown, PA,pp. 276-284. 

The process of site characterization and performance assessment for nuclear waste disposal facilities should include the following steps. 

The major sources contributing to Tc in the environment are fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests and releases from the nuclear fuel cycle, i.e., authorized or accidental releases from nuclear installations (e.g., reprocessing or enrichment plants, nuclear reactors), releases from waste disposal sites, and from dumping of nuclear materials. Contributions from natural processes, i.e., spontaneous fission of in mineral ores such as pitchblende or nuclear reactions in molybdenum ores irradiated with cosmic-ray neutrons are negligible. 

---