What is High-Level Waste?
High-level radioactive wastes are the highly radioactive materials produced
as a byproduct of the reactions that occur inside nuclear reactors. High-level
wastes take one of two forms:
- Spent (used) reactor fuel when it is accepted for disposal
- Waste materials remaining after spent fuel is reprocessed
Spent nuclear fuel is used fuel from a reactor that is no longer efficient
in creating electricity, because its fission process has slowed. However,
it is still thermally hot, highly radioactive, and potentially harmful.
Until a permanent disposal repository for spent nuclear fuel is built,
licensees must safely store this fuel at their reactors.
Reprocessing extracts isotopes from spent fuel that can be used again
as reactor fuel. Commercial reprocessing is currently not practiced in
the United States, although it has been allowed in the past. However,
significant quantities of high-level radioactive waste are produced by
the defense reprocessing programs at Department
of Energy (DOE) facilities,
such as Hanford, Washington, and Savannah River, South Carolina, and
by commercial reprocessing operations at West Valley, New York. These
wastes, which are generally managed by DOE, are not regulated by NRC.
However they must be included in any high-level radioactive waste disposal
plans, along with all high-level waste from spent reactor fuel.
Because of their highly radioactive fission products, high-level waste
and spent fuel must be handled and stored with care. Since the only way
radioactive waste finally becomes harmless is through decay, which for
high-level wastes can take hundreds of thousands of years, the wastes
must be stored and finally disposed of in a way that provides adequate
protection of the public for a very long time.
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