nuclear waste posts, articles, and infographics

NRC’s Waste Confidence Update

January 25, 2012 by Dan Yurman
with 358 views

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced in early January it is starting work on an update to the Waste Confidence decision. With the Obama administration’s successful bid to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository project, one of the agency’s key assumptions for the update is that interim storage of spent fuel will be the norm... [read more]

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – Good for Aluminum; Good for Uranium

July 13, 2011 by Rod Adams
with 322 views

(Note: Video credit to Barry Brook of Brave New Climate.) The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy is taking issue with the idea of recycling used nuclear fuel to recover the energy that remains after the first pass of the fuel through a nuclear reactor. They have issued a call for action to encourage their members to... [read more]

Strange Feeling – I Never Even Liked The Yucca Mountain Project

June 16, 2011 by Rod Adams
with 397 views

Circumstances sometimes create some rather strange alliances. This week, despite being a proud liberal who proudly supports public education, comes from a family of union school teachers, appreciates the value of being covered by a single payer medical plan and voted for President Obama, I find myself cheering for a group of... [read more]

Areva to Push Spent Fuel Recycling Plans

June 13, 2011 by Dan Yurman
with 370 views

CEO Jacques Besnainou sees startup of effort by 2015 The head of the U.S. operation of French state-owned nuclear giant Areva told a breakfast meeting of news reporters hosted by the Energy Daily on June 6 that the solution to the U.S. bottleneck in managing spent nuclear fuel is a recycling center. Jacques Besnainou, CEO of Areva’s... [read more]

Tackling TEPCO's Water Problem

June 9, 2011 by Dan Yurman
with 518 views

The utility has 15 million gallons of radioactive liquid created by efforts to cool its crippled nuclear reactors TEPCO is a bearer of a water problem that sets daunting challenges ahead of its ambitious plan to decommission the Fukushima reactor site. In many ways, getting the millions of gallons of radioactive water out of buildings... [read more]

Japan Nuclear Concerns Update & Energy Ethics from Germany

June 5, 2011 by Anja Atkinson
with 718 views

TEPCO has detected radiation of up to 4,000 millisieverts per hour in the air at the building housing reactor unit 1 at the Fukushima nuclear facility. Readings were collected from a robot sent into reactor unit 1 on June 3rd. Heavy steam has also been observed rising from the floor of reactor unit 1.Record Radiation Levels at... [read more]

Failure to Launch

May 19, 2011 by Dan Yurman
with 637 views

Blue Ribbon Commission opts for conventional wisdom A federal advisory committee on the future management of spent nuclear fuel has labored long to get it hands wrapped around the issue. This week the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future (BRC) issued a series of draft recommendations. While some of them document obvious... [read more]

Jaczko Decided To Halt Yucca Review By February 2010, Not October 2010

May 12, 2011 by Rod Adams
with 346 views

Chairman Gregory Jaczko testified recently that the NRC decided to begin closing down the agency’s effort to review the Yucca Mountain license application in early October, 2010. Some of his fellow commissioners testified that they did not agree with the decision and they do not agree that the commission has made the policy decision to... [read more]

Will U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Find A Home In Mongolia?

May 10, 2011 by Dan Yurman
with 358 views

Japan, U.S. plan a nuclear waste site in the remote desert state Reuters reports that Japan and the United States plan to work together to build a spent nuclear fuel storage facility in Mongolia. The announced purpose of the site would be to take back spent fuel from countries that buy new nuclear reactors from manufacturers in both... [read more]

Avoiding Nuclear Safety

April 10, 2011 by Charles Barton
with 680 views

The real question about nuclear safety is not "can nuclear accidents be avoided," but "do we want to do what ever is required to avoid nuclear accidents." As it turns out avoiding and mitigating nuclear accidents is not terribly expensive, nor does it make nuclear power impractical, but does require the nuclear industry to change the... [read more]

Unhappy About Management Of Spent Fuel?

March 31, 2011 by Dan Yurman
with 288 views

Blue Ribbon Commission says that applies to just about everyone A government special study group that is looking at the future of management of spent nuclear fuel has released a summary of testimony it has heard over the past year. The staff report, which makes no recommendations, is a set of talking points about the things people have... [read more]

Nuclear Reprocessing: Waste not, want not

March 10, 2011 by Joseph Koblich
with 485 views

Stubborn resistance to the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, driven by some long-held myths, has caused the United States to fall behind other countries as the rest of the world moves toward a “closed fuel cycle” by recycling its nuclear fuel. More than 30 years of inactivity in this area has diminished our technological capability and... [read more]

Working for my grandchildren - why I am a pronuclear activist

February 23, 2011 by Rod Adams
with 1,628 views

I am haunted this early morning (0230) by a phrase seen on a blog comment yesterday.Joe Shuster, author of "Beyond Fossil Fools", was once asked WHO he worked for (implying that he was a paid mouthpiece for some evil concern). His reply was simple, true and spot-on! He replied, "For my grandchildren." (You can find this quote in the... [read more]

Carnival Issue: Biggest Nuclear Stores in 2010

December 31, 2010 by Meredith Angwin
with 1,019 views

Retrospectives and Prospects for the FutureMost of the blog posts for this Carnival put the Big Issues of the previous year in useful perspective.The SMRs, the Hatchets, the Laurels, the HardLy-sDan Yurman of Idaho Samizdat looked at the blog posts that drew the most readers to his blog this year in Top Blog Posts for 2010. He notes that... [read more]

Kirk Sorensen Talks to Google About Reusing Used Nuclear Fuel

December 31, 2010 by Rod Adams
with 855 views

Kirk Sorensen is one of the most energetic pro-nuclear activists I have ever met. Not only is he the head nuclear technologist at Teledyne, but he is teaching at the University of Tennessee, obtaining his PhD, and raising some of the brightest young ladies I have ever met. Somehow, he manages to find time every once in a while for a... [read more]