nuclear-news

The world’s 240,000 tonnes of intensely radioactive civilian waste

Nuclear’s environmental costs No nation has come up with a permanent, safe way to dispose of radioactive waste Montreal Gazette, By IAN MACLEOD, Postmedia News December 17, 2011 “……More than 240,000 tonnes of intensely radioactive civilian waste has piled up around the globe since the dawning of the atomic age.

Sixty years on, no one is sure yet how to safely and permanently dispose of the stuff, much of it harmful to living organisms for thousands of years. Canada’s share of the highlevel heap stands at 44,000 tonnes. Virtually all is spenturanium fuel bundles – 2.3 million of them – that powered the commercial and research reactors that made Canada a leading nuclear nation…..
Spent fuel bundles are just one piece of fallout from the nuclear fuel cycle.

Radioactive rubbish comes from medical isotope production, nuclear
fuel fabrication, research operations, uranium mining, milling,
refining and conversion.

The latest figures show 644,000 cubic metres of shorter-lived, low-and
intermediate-level radioactive waste was stored at reactor and nuclear
research sites in Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Manitoba at the
end of last year.

Soil contaminated with radium and uranium accounts for an additional
1.7 million cubic metres.

Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), meanwhile, is in the sixth year
of an estimated $7-billion, 70-year federal cleanup of “legacy”
wastes, environmental restoration and decommissioning of outdated and
unused buildings.

It includes three partially decommissioned prototype nuclear reactors,
two former heavy water plants and widespread wastes at AECL’s Chalk
River Laboratories (CRL), as well as its former Whiteshell, Man.
research laboratories…..In all, the cleanup and disposal will cost
the industry and federal government billions of dollars and last most
of this century……The majority of Canada’s spent-fuel bundles are
in interim storage in large pools of cooling water and massive cement
casks at reactor sites in Ontario, ….

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Nuclear+environmental+costs/5875561/story.html#ixzz1h134mrEA

December 19, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, wastes