Spent Nuclear Fuel ~ 1980 US Department of Energy; Sandia National Laboratories

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Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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 may have considerably different isotopic constituents...

Fission products

3% of the mass consists of fission products of 235U and 239Pu (also indirect products in the decay chain); these are considered radioactive waste or may be separated further for various industrial and medical uses. The fission products include every element from zinc through to the lanthanides; much of the fission yield is concentrated in two peaks, one in the second transition row (Zr, Mo, Tc, Ru, Rh, Pd, Ag) and the other later in the periodic table (I, Xe, Cs, Ba, La, Ce, Nd). Many of the fission products are either non-radioactive or only short-lived radioisotopes. But a considerable number are medium to long-lived radioisotopes such as 90Sr, 137Cs, 99Tc and 129I. Research has been conducted by several different countries into segregating the rare isotopes in fission waste including the "fission platinoids" (Ru, Rh, Pd) and silver (Ag) as a way of offsetting the cost of reprocessing; this is not currently being done commercially.

The fission products can modify the thermal properties of the uranium dioxide; the lanthanide oxides tend to lower the thermal conductivity of the fuel, while the metallic nanoparticles slightly increase the thermal conductivity of the fuel...

Storage, treatment, and disposal

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). ISFSIs can be adjacent to a nuclear power plant site, or may reside elsewhere. The vast majority of ISFSIs store spent fuel in dry casks. The Morris Operation is currently the only ISFSI with a spent fuel pool in the United States.

Nuclear reprocessing can separate spent fuel into various combinations of reprocessed uranium, plutonium, minor actinides, fission products, remnants of zirconium or steel cladding, activation products, and the reagents or solidifiers introduced in the reprocessing itself. If these constituent portions of spent fuel were reused, and additional wastes that may come as a byproduct of reprocessing are limited, reprocessing could ultimately reduce the volume of waste that needs to be disposed.

Alternatively, the intact spent nuclear fuel can be directly disposed of as high-level radioactive waste. The United States has planned disposal in deep geological formations, such as the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, where it has to be shielded and packaged to prevent its migration to humans' immediate environment for thousands of years. On March 5, 2009, however, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate hearing that "the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste."

Geological disposal has been approved in Finland, using the KBS-3 process.

Risks

There is debate over whether spent fuel stored in a pool is susceptible to incidents such as earthquakes or terrorist attacks that could potentially result in a release of radiation.

In the rare occurrence of a fuel failure during normal operation, the primary coolant can enter the element. Visual techniques are normally used for the postirradiation inspection of fuel bundles.

Since the September 11 attacks the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has instituted a series of rules mandating that all fuel pools be impervious to natural disaster and terrorist attack. As a result, used fuel pools are encased in a steel liner and thick concrete, and are regularly inspected to ensure resilience to earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and seiches...