What is high-level nuclear waste?
Every truck or train rumbling through your town on its way to Yucca Mountain will be hauling an extremely radioactive load of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants, the Navy, and government-run nuclear reactors. The spent fuel from the hot core of commercial nuclear power plants accounts for 95 percent of the radioactivity generated in the United States in the last 50 years from all sources, including nuclear weapons production. About 90 percent of the waste travelling to Nevada will be from these commercial nuclear power plants. [DOE EIS Appendix A, figure A-2] Splitting uranium-235 atoms in a nuclear reactor creates intensely radioactive elements known as fission products, such as cesium, strontium, and plutonium. When spent nuclear fuel is removed from the reactor core, it is about one million times more radioactive than when it was loaded. A typical rail cask of high-level nuclear waste contains more than 200 times the long-lived radiation (cesium and strontium) than the ato
