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Spent fuel pool at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on 27 November 2013. Spent nuclear fuel is stored either in spent fuel pools (SFPs) or in dry casks. In the United States, SFPs and casks containing spent fuel are located either directly on nuclear power plant sites or on Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations (ISFSIs).
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 established a timetable and procedure for constructing a permanent, underground repository for high-level radioactive waste by the mid-1990s, and provided for some temporary storage of waste, including spent fuel from 104 civilian nuclear reactors that produce about 19.4% of electricity there. [39]
An infographic about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. Spent nuclear fuel is the radioactive by-product of electricity generation at commercial nuclear power plants, and high-level radioactive waste is the by-product of reprocessing spent fuel to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. [19]
McGinnis is also the CEO of Curio, a nuclear technology firm, and has partnered with major U.S. utilities to explore the feasibility of recycling the massive stockpile of spent nuclear fuel ...
Spent fuel pool. High-level radioactive waste is stored for 10 or 20 years in spent fuel pools, and then can be put in dry cask storage facilities.. In 1997, in the 20 countries which account for most of the world's nuclear power generation, spent fuel storage capacity at the reactors was 148,000 tonnes, with 59% of this utilized.
The Russian dry storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, the HOT-2 at Mining Chemical Combine in Zheleznogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai in Siberia, is not a 'cask' facility per se, as it is designed to accommodate the spent nuclear fuel (both VVER and RBMK) in a series of compartments. The structure of the facility is made up of monolithic reinforced ...
Spent nuclear fuel contains abundant fertile uranium and traces of fissile materials. [20] Methods such as the PUREX process can be used to remove useful actinides for the production of active nuclear fuel. Another option is to find applications for the isotopes in nuclear waste so as to re-use them. [115]
The radiation hazard from spent nuclear fuel declines as its radioactive components decay, but remains high for many years. For example 10 years after removal from a reactor, the surface dose rate for a typical spent fuel assembly still exceeds 10,000 rem/hour, resulting in a fatal dose in just minutes. [20]