Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology (TINT) low-level radioactive waste barrels.
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Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, nuclear decommissioning, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons reprocessing.[1] The storage and disposal of radioactive waste is regulated by government agencies in order to protect human health and the environment.
Radioactive waste is broadly classified into 3 categories: low-level waste (LLW), such as paper, rags, tools, clothing, which contain small amounts of mostly short-lived radioactivity; intermediate-level waste (ILW), which contains higher amounts of radioactivity and requires some shielding; and high-level waste (HLW), which is highly radioactive and hot due to decay heat, thus requiring cooling and shielding.
In nuclear reprocessing plants about 96% of spent nuclear fuel is recycled back into uranium-based and mixed-oxide (MOX) fuels. The residual 4% is minor actinides and fission products the latter of which are a mixture of stable and quickly decaying (most likely already having decayed in the spent fuel pool) elements, medium lived fission products such as strontium-90 and caesium-137 and finally seven long-lived fission products with half lives in the hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The minor actinides meanwhile are heavy elements other than uranium and plutonium which are created by neutron capture. Their half lives range from years to millions of years and as alpha emitters they are particularly radiotoxic. While there are proposed - and to a much lesser extent current - uses of all those elements, commercial scale reprocessing using the PUREX-process disposes of them as waste together with the fission products. The waste is subsequently converted into a glass-like ceramic for storage in a deep geological repository.
The time radioactive waste must be stored for depends on the type of waste and radioactive isotopes it contains. Short-term approaches to radioactive waste storage have been segregation and storage on the surface or near-surface. Burial in a deep geological repository is a favored solution for long-term storage of high-level waste, while re-use and transmutation are favored solutions for reducing the HLW inventory. Boundaries to recycling of spent nuclear fuel are regulatory and economic as well as the issue of radioactive contamination if chemical separation processes cannot achieve a very high purity. Furthermore, elements may be present in both useful and troublesome isotopes, which would require costly and energy intensive isotope separation for their use - a currently uneconomic prospect.
A summary of the amounts of radioactive waste and management approaches for most developed countries are presented and reviewed periodically as part of a joint convention of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).[2]
^"The Geological Society of London - Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste". www.geolsoc.org.uk. Retrieved 2020-03-12.
^"The Joint Convention". IAEA. Archived from the original on 2010-03-28.
Radioactivewaste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactivewaste is a result of many activities, including nuclear...
and surface runoff), radioactivewaste, and others. What constitutes waste depends on the eye of the beholder; one person's waste can be a resource for...
Bioremediation of radioactivewaste or bioremediation of radionuclides is an application of bioremediation based on the use of biological agents bacteria...
within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactivewaste in the United States. The site is on federal land adjacent to the...
of nuclear/radioactivewaste with an approximation of 200,000 tons sourcing mainly from the medical, research and nuclear industry. The waste materials...
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, is the world's third deep geological repository (after Germany's Repository for radioactivewaste Morsleben...
containment of radioactive gases—the primary focus of most reactor containment buildings—and the confinement of solid radioactivewaste, which is the primary...
long-term storage. The spent fuel, though low in volume, is high-level radioactivewaste. While its radioactivity decreases exponentially it must be isolated...
considered as a possible mechanism for reducing the volume and hazard of radioactivewaste. The term transmutation dates back to alchemy. Alchemists pursued...
Radioactive contamination, also called radiological pollution, is the deposition of, or presence of radioactive substances on surfaces or within solids...
considerations, including the specific type of radioactivewaste, the containers enclosing the waste, other engineered barriers or seals around the containers...
treaties have prohibited the dumping of radioactivewaste in the oceans. For decades, this dumping of nuclear waste went largely unnoticed by the public...
called vitrification. An important application is the vitrification of radioactivewaste to obtain a substance that is thought to be safer and more stable...
batteries Radioactivewastes (some home smoke detectors are classified as radioactivewaste because they contain very small amounts of radioactive isotope...
such as carbon dioxide or methane. Radioactivewaste treatment is the treatment and containment of radioactivewaste. National Management Measures to Control...
Soviet Union used Karachay as a dumping site for radioactivewaste from Mayak, the nearby nuclear waste storage and reprocessing facility, located near...
hazardous or radioactivewaste within a stable geologic environment, typically 200–1,000 m deep. It entails a combination of waste form, waste package, engineered...
radioactivewaste they produce have a chance to be supported by the public and governmental organisations (nuclear safety authorities and radioactive...
Central Organization for RadioactiveWaste (COVRA), also in Borssele, is the national storage facility for all radioactivewastes. It is a surface facility...
humans from inadvertently encountering radioactivewaste stored at sites like the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. The task force suggested "oral...
Chelyabinsk. Radioactivewaste can be described as high-level waste or low-level waste. High-level waste is what can be seen as the waste from the use...
forming in the pond and a buildup of radioactive sludge, it was impossible to determine exactly how much radioactivewaste was stored in the FGMSP. British...
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