How do nuclear waste dumps effect the environment?

Question

Can somebody please answer the following questions for me:

How do nuclear waste dumps effect the environment? such as if it is dump in the ocean, what happens?

In countries that have nuclear reactors, where is the waste buried?

How does nuclear waste affect people?

What will happen to the earth if nuclear waste is burried in there?

Answer 1

Nuclear wastes are highly radioactive. This can cause mutations and even death to most living things. They are most of the time dumped into the deepest part of the ocean or underground contained in specialized and tough containers. In an incident in our country, radioactive wastes were dumped without proper procedures. This caused mutation to many living things including humans. It was horrible. Many died and got sick then later died. A lot of babies were mutated at birth. Some have messed up faces and many lacked some body parts.

Answer 2

nuclear waste is also radioactive but its not economical to generate electricity from it so its waste.dumping it in the ocean will affect the marine life.  nuclear wastes are kept under water in lead containers in specially made dumping ground

Answer 3

Waste is disposed of/stored in deep unused salt mines. It is not "Dumped" anywhere.

Waste is a danger because of the so called "half life", it takes a long time for waste to decay to the point that it is harmless.

Answer 4

There are many classes of nuclear waste. Everything from the radioactive sources used in medical treatment to sources used in manufacturing processes to the spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Each is handled differently, and in many cases the same type of waste is handled differently from one country to the next.

It sounds like you are talking about spent fuel. In the U.S. there have been over 100 nuclear reactors operating since the 60's/70's. All of that spent fuel is still sitting on site where it was produced, since the U.S. has no waste repository. These plants are spread all around the country, yet no significant accident involving this waste has ever occurred or else would be sure to hear about it from Greenpeace to this day.

The term "spent fuel" is misleading in itself. The spent fuel taken from  a reactor actually has a huge amount of usable nuclear fuel left in it. The problem is that over time, the fragments of fissioned uranium act to "poison" the reactor so that the remaining burnable fuel is not actually usable. If you read the linked page about France you will see mention of "reprocessing". What they do is take out the good fuel still left in the spent fuel, and then only bury the "poisonous" parts. The usable fuel is then put back into a reactor to produce more energy. These reactor "poisons" sound bad, but in actuality their high radioactivity means that they decay away much faster.

When the greenies complain that waste is deadly for 10's of thousands or even millions of years they are really talking about the uranium and plutonium that should be getting reused. The U.S. has a stupid policy of not reprocessing our spent fuel because the same people who don't understand nuclear power in the first place are afraid of reprocessing as well.