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 Jossey rated 7 months ago - Warning! Please openly protest against Nuclear power and Arms..
they are the biggest threat to humanity.
DISMANTLING NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS
Large quantities of nuclear waste are also produced when a nuclear reactor is shutdown. This is because many of its component parts, including the fu...
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- Jossey rated 7 months ago
- Warning! Please openly protest against Nuclear power and Arms..
they are the biggest threat to humanity.
DISMANTLING NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS
Large quantities of nuclear waste are also produced when a nuclear reactor is shutdown. This is because many of its component parts, including the fuel, have become radioactive. They cannot simply be thrown away. The process of dealing with the power station at this point is called "decommissioning". Apart from removing the used fuel, however, there is not a clear agreement about what should happen next. No full size reactors has yet been fully dismantled anywhere in the world. Although some countries are planning to remove the entire structure, including the radioactive parts, leaving a flat empty space, others have suggested leaving the building where it stands, covering it in concrete or possibly burying it under a mound of earth.
The cost of decommissioning nuclear power reactors is highly speculative. Cost estimates have been derived from generic studies, from scaling up the costs of decommissioning smaller research facilities. The detail and sophistication employed in developing these estimates varies greatly and their lack of standardisation makes comparisons difficult. Moreover, limited decommissioning experience - none with large reactors - makes it impossible to know if the estimates are on target, but it has been suggested that decommissioning costs could be up to 100% of the initial cost of construction.
During the next three decades, more than 350 nuclear reactors will be taken out of service. Yet more than 40 years after the first nuclear power plant started producing electricity the nuclear industry still has no answers on how to safely and cost effectively dismantle a reactor.
Nuclear waste is produced at every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to reactors to the reprocessing of irradiated nuclear fuel. Much of this nuclear waste will remain hazardous for thousands of years, leaving a poisonous legacy to future generations.
Dangerous radioactive isotopes such as caesium, strontium, iodine, krypton and plutonium are created when operating a nuclear reactor. Plutonium is particularly dangerous in that it can be used in nuclear weapons if it is separated from the irradiated nuclear fuel in a chemical treatment called reprocessing.
S P E N T F U E L
One of the biggest problems facing the nuclear industry is what to do with the radioactive waste that is left over after operating a nuclear reactor.
After the fuel rods have finished their life inside a power station they become high level waste. In some countries such as Sweden and the United States, the spent fuel rods are stored in the form which they come out of the reactor. In other countries like Britain, France and Japan, they are sent for reprocessing. Reprocessing not only makes this high level waste more difficult to handle, it also creates much larger volumes of all types of waste.
The nuclear industry has had almost 50 years to find a solution to the nuclear waste problem and has failed to do so.
Given the global radioactive waste crisis, Greenpeace believes that no more nuclear waste should be produced anywhere in the world.
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The tables presented below represent extracts from the report produced by NAC in 1995. The report was given to Greenpeace anonymously.
http://archive.greenpeace.org/nuclear/stockpiling/stockmi.html
The two reprocessing companies British Nuclear Fuels and Cogema operate reprocessing plants at Sellafield and la Hague. They have contracts with both domestic and overseas electrical utilties. These utilities send their nuclear spent fuel from the reactors to Sellafield and la Hague, where the material is stored and then reprocessed. The tables below reveal the times when spent fuel from individual utilities and their reactors will be reprocessed.
What is most significant is that according to NAC, the information for the start and end of reprocessing of specific spent fule is the reprocessor - that is BNFL and Cogema.
For Cogema's details, Greenpeace feel quite confident that it is an accurate representation of what material will be reprocessed at the French dedicated plant - UP2-800 and the overseas dedicated plant - UP3 during 1998.
In contrast, the figures for Sellafield having been drafted in 1995, do not reflect the problems BNFL have had with the operation of THORP since start-up in 1994. Although the source of the information in the tables below is BNFL, delays in operation, including the total amount of spent fuel reprocessed so far mean that they are not on schedule for reprocessing fuel in the first ten years of their campaigns. In a report to be released by Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Envir
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