Yucca Mountain nuclear

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. 

Spent nuclear fuel has fission products, uranium, and transuranic elements. Plans call for permanent disposal in underground repositories. Geological studies are in progress at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. Until a repository is completed, spent fuel must be stored in water pools or in dry storage casks at nuclear plant sites. 

Yucca Mountain, if it becomes the site for the isolation of SNF, will be laced with tunnels, waste in storage casks and monitoring equipment. A waiting period is planned while better isolation alteniadvcs are sought. IfYucca Mountain is not used, it is to be refilled with the tuff material removed earlier. In the United States the SNF that would be isolated in Yucca Mountain would be waste that has not been reprocessed it would be material that has come out of nuclear reactors and has been cooled at the plant site. 

December. U.S. Congress approves Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the only repositoiy site for high-level nuclear waste. 

Without confronting the complexity of studying and evaluating the TSPAs, one can gain some perspective on the scale of the hazards by considering the protective standards that have been proposed for nuclear waste repositories, in particular for the proposed US. site at Yucca Mountain (Bodansky, 1996). There have been three major proposals in recent years ... 

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. 

More than 6 billion has been spent on high-level waste disposal. Spent fuel can be deadly for tens of thousands of years. In order to isolate it from the environment, nuclear waste is to be buried deep underground. Nevada s Yucca Mountain has been under consideration for decades and many in the nuclear industry believe that the Clinton administration blocked action on this site to gain support in this area. 

Over 5001 of HLW have been vitrified in France and Germany. In the USA, the HLW at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in West Valley Plant, New York, have been vitrified (300 two-ton canisters) and vitrification is ongoing at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at Savannah River, South Carolina 1600 canisters by February 2004). A vitrification plant is under construction at Hanford, Washington. Vitrification of all of the HLW in the USA will generate approximately 20 000 canisters, which are destined for disposal at the geological repository at Yucca Mountain. 

Pearcy, E. C., Prokryl, J. D., Murphy, W. M. Leslie, B. W. 1994. Alteration of uraninite from the Nopal I deposit, Pena Blanca District, Chihuahua, Mexico, compared to degradation of SNF in the proposed U.S. high level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Applied Geochemistry, 9, 713—732. 

Murphy, W. M. Palauan, R. T. 1994. Geochemical Investigations Related to the Yucca Mountain Environment and Potential Nuclear Waste Repository. Southwest Research Institute, NUREG/CR-6288, San Antonio, TX. 

The state of Nevada is home to a number of nuclear weapons test sites as well as Yucca Mountain, a potential national long-term storage facility for nuclear wastes. This web address will bring you to the State of Nevada, Office of the Governor, Agency for Nuclear Projects, Nuclear Waste Project Office. 

Yucca Mountain in Nevada is a promising site for a permanent repository for nuclear wastes. Exploratory tunnels have already been drilled, and extensive tests are underway. 

NRC (2001). U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 10 CFR Part 63—Disposal of high-level radioactive wastes in a proposed geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, Final rule, 66 FR 55732 (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington). 

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. 

Choosing the waste repository sites is an especially sensitive issue. Many states have resisted the plan, but Congress has the power to override a state s disapproval. In fact, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1987 to make Yucca Mountain in Nevada the primary potential site. Studies are now being carried out to evaluate the feasibility of this site as a safety repository for nuclear waste. 

It is considered a form of HLW because of the uranium, fission products, and transuranics that it contains. HLW includes highly radioactive liquid, calcined or vitrified wastes generated by reprocessing of SF. Both SF and HLW from commercial reactors will be entombed in the geological repository at Yucca Mountain —100 mile (1 mile = 1.609344 km) northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. Disposal of spent nuclear fuel and HLW in the US is regulated by 40 CFR Part 191 (US EPA, 2001) and 10 CFR Part 60 (US NRC, 2001). It is discussed in more detail in a later section of this chapter. 

Introduction actinide solubilities in reference waters. In this section, the environmental chemistry of the actinides is examined in more detail by considering three different geochemical environments. Compositions of groundwater from these environments are described in Tables 5 and 6. These include (i) low-ionic-strength reducing waters from crystalline rocks at nuclear waste research sites in Sweden (ii) oxic water from the J-13 well at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the site of a proposed repository for high-level nuclear waste in tuffaceous rocks and (iii) reference brines associated with the WIPP, a repository for TRU in... 

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