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Spent nuclear fuel, occasionally called used nuclear fuel, is nuclear fuel that has been irradiated in a nuclear reactor (usually at a nuclear power plant). It is no longer useful in sustaining a nuclear reaction in an ordinary thermal reactor and, depending on its point along the nuclear fuel cycle , it will have different isotopic ...
The Morris Operation in Grundy County, Illinois, United States, is the location of the only permanent (the rest are temporary) de facto high-level radioactive waste storage site in the United States and holds 772 tons of spent nuclear fuel. [1] It is owned by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy and located near the city of Morris. [2]
Because radioisotopes of all half-life lengths are present in nuclear waste, enough decay heat continues to be produced in spent fuel rods to require them to spend a minimum of one year, and more typically 10 to 20 years, in a spent fuel pool of water before being further processed. However, the heat produced during this time is still only a ...
The Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management is a 1997 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) treaty. [1] It is the first treaty to address radioactive waste management on a global scale.
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]
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. [38]
This page describes how uranium dioxide nuclear fuel behaves during both normal nuclear reactor operation and under reactor accident conditions, such as overheating. Work in this area is often very expensive to conduct, and so has often been performed on a collaborative basis between groups of countries, usually under the aegis of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's ...
A nuclear flask is a shipping container that is used to transport active nuclear materials between nuclear power station and spent fuel reprocessing facilities. Each shipping container is designed to maintain its integrity under normal transportation conditions and during hypothetical accident conditions.