What happens to spent nuclear waste/ nuclear fuel? How do they dispose it?
Most of it is kept in spent fuel pools for many years because it still generates heat. Afterwards its put in dry storage in casks. Other spent fuel is reprocessed. Not many countries reprocess spent fuel. During reprocessing plutonium and other useful materials are recovered from the spent fuel. The remaining radioactive waste is much less in volume compared to the spent fuel. What to do with spent fuel is a political issue. There has been a proposal to bury the fuel in special underground vaults such as the Yucca mountain facility in the US. The swedes have also developed a process where the waste is englassed and buried. After many years (a few hundred) the radioactive material transmutes into more stable elements and is not dangerous anymore. Also longlived radioactive materials can be irradiated with neutrons and transmuted into shortlived radioactive elements which will take fewer years to decay. You must also distinguish spent fuel from low level and medium level waste which are
Stick it into the end of missiles/bullets and dump it on other countries. Any excuse for genocide! It’s disgusting. Read below: Iraq has experienced a dramatic increase in child cancers, leukemia and birth defects in recent years. Wisam, Iraqi medical authorities and growing numbers of American activists cast blame on the U.S. weapons containing depleted uranium that were used in the 1991 Gulf War and in the 1998 missile attacks on Baghdad and other major cities. They also assert that such munitions — which were also used by U.S. forces in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia in far smaller quantities — may be a cause of Gulf War diseases, elusive maladies that have affected 50,000 to 80,000 U.S. veterans of the 1991 conflict. The Pentagon says studies it has sponsored have found no evidence that depleted uranium, known as DU, causes serious illnesses, while many international medical experts remain on the fence, citing the lack of definitive scientific evidence on the issue. But with the renew
They don’t yet. All spent nuclear fuel is still being kept at the power plants that used them. The US government has been studying for a very very long time a reposiory to store the waste. The latest candidtate is Yucca Mt. in Nevada. Previous contendors for the sorage site have been deep basalt layers in Eastern Washington State, Salt mines in Kansas, and the Permian evaporite deposits in the Texas Panhandle.
