fusion

Heater test area of the Rockwell Near Surface Test Facility at Hanford, Wash, that will demonstrate what happens to
rock formations under the simulated thermal output of nuclear waste.
important because they have very long decay times and,
therefore, require long-term storage.
It is only this small portion of the spent fuel, less than
4 percent, that is considered high-level waste and must be
disposed of.
Since President Carter's decision to stop fuel reprocessing,
the United States has been left with the situation
where all spent fuel is considered to be nuclear waste
material. This has increased the amount of waste products,
radioactivity, and heat production levels to be handled,
since all spent fuel (100%) must be treated as high-level
waste (see Figure 1). In addition, the prohibition of reprocessing
essentially throws away 40 percent of the required
fuel for new fuel elements that could be recycled
back into the reactor—a combination of uranium-235,
plutonium-239, and plutonium-241. Over a 40-year lifetime
of a single 1,000 megawatt-electric nuclear power
plant, this would amount to the equivalent of throwing
away more than 130 million barrels of oil or 37 million
tons of coal!
Furthermore, if the primary concern is to get rid of
plutonium as quickly as possible, the best way by far is to
get it back into a light water reactor or the fast breeder
reactor to burn it up as fuel, instead of wastefully burying
it.
The only competent way of dealing with nuclear waste
is to integrate the waste products into a fully closed
nuclear fuel :ycle; that is, a fuel cycle with fuel reprocessing.
In a do ed fuel cycle, nuclear waste becomes a byproduct
to b disposed of in a straightforward manner—
a solution backed by the Fusion Energy Foundation, the
nuclear indu ,try, the advanced sector nations, and, most
recently, by the developing nations.
To implenrent a program of safely and economically
disposing of nuclear wastes in the United States, it is
essential tha the nation reinstitute a fuel reprocessing
policy. Until that time, a temporary measure for waste
disposal mus be the finding or constructing of adequate
storage areas away from present reactor sites, simply to
store the cu rent and future spent fuel coming out of
operating niclear plants. It should be emphasized that
this is only a ;top-gap measure; the actual solution to the
problem mus: involve reprocessing. Once fuel reprocessing
is reestab ished, it will be a simple matter of shipping
these stored uel bundles to the reprocessing plant. Currently,
there are no plans to bury any of these valuable
fuel element until sometime in the mid to late 1990s,
which is long after the nuclear fight will have been won.
As of early I979, the amounts of the nuclear waste being
stored were as follows: the United States has approximately
4,400 netric tons of commercially spent fuel stored
either in reactors or in the few available away-from-reactor