Yucca Mountain waste site

The primary issue is to prevent groundwater from becoming radioactively contaminated. Thus, the property of concern of the long-lived radioactive species is their solubility in water. The long-lived actinides such as plutonium are metallic and insoluble even if water were to penetrate into the repository. Certain fission-product isotopes such as iodine-129 and technicium-99 are soluble, however, and therefore represent the principal although very low level hazard. Studies of Yucca Mountain, Nevada, tentatively chosen as the site for the spent fuel and high level waste repository, are underway (44). 

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. 

If one just concentrates on the radioactive material in SNF, the volume is very small, especially compared to waste from other power production practices. However, one can only discuss the separated radioactive material if it has undergone extensive reprocessing. If SNF is to be isolated, as in a place such as Yucca Mountain, with perhaps 70 miles of tunnels, the volume is that of the interior of this minor mountain. Isolation of up to 100,000 metric tons of SNF in Yucca Mountain means that for the United States, approximately all the SNF made to date and that expected in the operating lifetime of all current reactors can be put there. Approximately 2,000 metric tons of SNF are produced each year in the United States. Waste volume and placement depend on the amount of compaction and consolidation at the sites. The plans for the Yucca Mountain present a realistic and understandable picture of the volume of SNF. 

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

Some utilities are providing long-term on-site dry cask storage others are negotiating with Native American nations for storage on reservations, while others propose shipment of spent fuel to Yucca Mountain for interim, retrievable storage. But these options do not address waste disposal and will not convince an informed public that the waste problem has been solved. 

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. 

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. 

In 1992, Congress directed EPA to issue a new environmental standard for disposal of spent fuel and high-level waste that would apply only to the candidate geologic repository at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada (NEPA, 1992). Thus, the existing EPA standards in... 

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. 

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... 

US Department of Energy (DOE) (1988) Site Characterization Plan, Yucca Mountain Site, Nevada Research and Development Area, Nevada. US Department of Energy, Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. 

Wilson M. L., Swift P. N., McNeish J. A., and Sevougian S. D. (2002) Total-system performance assessment for the Yucca Mountain Site. In Scientific Basis for Nuclear Waste Manage. XXV (eds. B. P. McGrail and G. A. Cragnolino). Materials Research Society, vol. 713, pp. 53-164. 

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. 

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. 

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