Reprocessed nuclear waste

In New York state a reprocessing plant near Buffalo began to reprocess nuclear wastes in 1966. After 6 years Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS), a subsidiary of W.R. Grace s Davison Chemical Company, abandoned the facility. There were 2 million cubic feet of radioactive material left behind along with 600,000 gallons of radioactive liquid waste that was seeping into a creek that flows into Lake Erie the source of drinking water for Buffalo. The cost of cleanup was estimated to be 1 billion. 

Nuclear fuel/ weapons material processing Nuclear fuel reprocessing Nuclear waste remediation... 

What is the current world capacity for reprocessing nuclear waste ... 

PVDF piping is utilized primarily for chemical processing and other industrial applications that are beyond the reach of the more common thermoplastics. These include the handhng of active materials such as chlorine and bromine and piping materials that subject it to higher temperatures. Because of its immunity to radiation, PVDF piping is also used in reprocessing nuclear wastes. 

The plants not only reprocessed domestic nuclear waste, produced by the French nuclear power plants, but they also reprocessed nuclear waste from Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Japan. 

Nuclear Waste Reprocessing. Liquid waste remaining from processing of spent reactor fuel for military plutonium production is typically acidic and contains substantial transuranic residues. The cleanup of such waste in 1996 is a higher priority than military plutonium processing. Cleanup requires removal of long-Hved actinides from nitric or hydrochloric acid solutions. The transuranium extraction (Tmex) process has been developed for... 

Nuclear Waste. NRC defines high level radioactive waste to include (/) irradiated (spent) reactor fuel (2) Hquid waste resulting from the operation of the first cycle solvent extraction system, and the concentrated wastes from subsequent extraction cycles, in a faciHty for reprocessing irradiated reactor fuel and (3) soHds into which such Hquid wastes have been converted. Approximately 23,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel has been stored at commercial nuclear reactors as of 1991. This amount is expected to double by the year 2001. 

Environmental Protection Agency - has sponsored work on the risk of chemical manufacture and transportation, the risk of reprocessing nuclear fuel, and the risk of nuclear waste disposal. 

The United States has the most radioactive nuclear waste and the most complicated array of waste types. Reprocessing of SNF is also practiced in some countries. Although costly, this practice... 

All the countries that produce nuclear waste have chosen the same alternative for the ultimate disposition of HLW, deep geological isolation, and they did so indepeiideiitly of one another. The United States has the most radioactive nuclear waste and the most complicated array of waste types of any nuclear country. Only in the United States can one find the same economy of scale for waste handling. Thus, it leads the world in most activities aimed at safe isolation. Ill France, Japan, and Great Britain, however, reprocessing is routinely practiced. Those countries reprocess HLW for many other countries. As mentioned above, reprocessing is not currently allowed in the United States. 

Similar demands for reference materials also arise in connection with the monitoring of radioactivity in and around nuclear installations (nuclear power plants, nuclear fuel and reprocessing plants, and nuclear waste facilities). These, in fact, are now the main applications of radionuclide reference materials. 

The fast reactor high level waste is accumulated at the reprocessing plants and retains its toxicity for only a few hundred years, rather than the tens of thousands of years ofthe spent fuel wastes from our present reactors,. Thus, the nuclear waste disposal problems are minimal and arrangements for disposal could be made on a global basis. 

Proliferation concerns have been and continue to be the basic cause ofthe official US. opposition to reprocessing and plutonium recycle, and have thus led to the official U.S. categorization of spent fuel as nuclear waste which should be permanently buried in geologic repositories. 

Because the concentration of "Tc in sea water is usually very low, there have been only limited reliable data, except for those cases in which the "Tc concentration is relatively high due to the release of nuclear waste from spent fuel reprocessing plants. However, the advent of highly sensitive detection by ICP-MS has changed this situation. 

Along with these power plants, the U.S. could build up a fuel reprocessing capability to allow spent nuclear fuel to be reused which would lower fuel cost and eliminate the storage of high-level nuclear waste. Fuel for the reactors has been estimated to be available for 1,000 years using standard reactors with high breeding ratios and breeder reactors where more fuel is produced than consumed. 

The scope and scale of pollution from radionuclides has been greatly reduced due to (1) the cessation of aboveground nuclear bomb testing, (2) an international ban on the dumping of nuclear wastes at sea, and (3) better control of discharges from power and fuel reprocessing plants. 

---