Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 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. 

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. 

Yucca Mountain, Nevada, is being considered as the site for deep geological disposal of U.S. high-level nuclear wastes. Any release of uranium (or other radionuclides) from the waste to... 

Just over 20% of the electricity generated in the United States is produced by nuclear power plants. In 1995, 32,200 metric tons of spent fuel, with a total activity of 30,200 MCi, was stored by the electric utilities at 70 sites (either in pools or in dry storage systems) (Ahearne 1997, Richardson 1997). By 2020, the projected inventory will be 77,100 metric tons of heavy metal (MTHM) with a total activity of 34,600 MCi. Although the volume of the spent fuel is only a few percent of the volume of HLW, over 95% of the total activity (defense-related plus commercially generated waste) is associated with the commercially generated spent nuclear fuel (Crowley 1997). At present in the United States, none of the spent fuel will be reprocessed all is destined for direct disposal in a geological repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada (Hanks et al. 1999). 

A second problem associated with nuclear power is waste disposal. Although the amormt of nuclear fuel used in electricity generation is small compared to other fuels, the products of the reaction are radioactive and have very long half-lives (thousands of years or more). What do we do with this waste Currently, in the United States, nuclear waste is stored on site at the nuclear power plants. A permanent disposal site was being developed in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The site had originally been scheduled to be operational in 2010, and that date was later delayed to 2017. However, the Obama administration determined that the Yucca Mountain site was untenable, and in the spring of 2010, the license application to develop this... 

In 1982, lawmakers passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which established a program to build this countiy s first underground nuclear waste repositoiy, a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste. In 1987, Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was chosen for study as a potential site. The stable rock formations deep underground combined with sparse population and little rainfall make it an ideal location for the site. Nuclear waste will be encased in several layers of containment material and placed in tunnels drilled out of the rock formations 1000 ft beneath the ground. The storage facility should keep these materials isolated from us and from the environment for the foreseeable future. However, as might be expected, the construction of the facility is controversial, with many opposing even the idea. The facility had been scheduled to be operational in 2010, but delays have pushed back that date to 2017 at the earliest. 

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