How long dose radioactive waste from power plants take to decay?

Question

I was watching CNN this morning and there was John McCain talking about his plans for America. Well, he starting going into how Nuclear energy is our (to me HIS) solution to the energy crisis. I know for a fact that fission creates no air pollution but what about the waste? I know alpha decay takes A LONG time but how long? I looked all over the web but still nothing... please help me find the facts!

Answer 1

Dr. Jello is right--

1. All the nuclear waste from all the reactors in the USA operating since the 1950s would fit on a football field.

2. If we had used breeder reactors and reprocessed the fuel -- it would have reduced the waste in #1 above by 70%! But Jimmy Carter and a compliant Congress passed a law forbidding reprocessing in the 1980s.

3. By altering the isotopes-- which is what happens in a breeder reactor -- we can reduce the half life to hundreds of years rather than thousands of years.

4. Nuclear waste is a SOLID-- encased in glass or other durable material and placed in a bore-hole reaching down 40,000 ft into a subduction zone-- its gone for millions of years. Yes we can drill that deep.

Nuclear power has ZERO CO2-- and by the way the first nuclear reactor at Penn State is still operating safely  (after more than 50 years).

As I have said before this is a social and political problem NOT a technical problem. By the way France reprocesses their nuclear fuel-- and generate 70% of their electric power from Nuclear fission. The USA generates about 20% of our total electric power from Nuclear.

Plutonium has a half life of 25,000 years -- read the articles below to see how to reduce the half life to hundreds of years rather than thousands of years.

Answer 2

It takes a long time, yes, and disposal methods took time to address and resolve.  Still, nuclear power is extremely clean and is the way to go.  I support it.

Answer 3

MILLIONS OF YEARS!

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/ind...

Answer 4

It varies depending on the material ,but about 10,000 years. In Mew Mexico they have some very good wast disposal in the salt mines. The salt will creep around it and stay for many years.

Answer 5

It never totally decays,,,,,,some components of nuclear waste have a half-life of 100,000 years, so a million years from now it will still be radioactive.

Answer 6

It matters how long it takes. But the shorter time it takes, the more energy could have been extracted and was not. Nuclear waste will essentially never stop emitting radiation, and the fuel before it went into the nuclear reactor likewise would always remain radioactive.

Putting the nuclear fuel into a reactor reduces the amount of radiation that fuel has to emit.

But it does not make it safe. It would need to have been in a fast breeder reactor to come close to that.  No. the waste from a fast breeder is not safe, there is just far less of it.

But what matters is how long we have to secure our waste from possible misuse. We can put it deep enough to be sure it will not leak, but we still need to make sure nobody can get at it while it is a significant risk.

We know that the longer it is going to take for nuclear waste to be truly safe, the less radiation it is giving off already. So lets not be concerned about  waste that will last for millions of years. That will have such low radiation as to be of little interest for weapons use.

For weapons, even dirty bombs, we would be looking for shorter half life. So if we secure a waste site for a couple hundred years after the last waste is deposited, we will have essentially no interest in stealing it. It would be more important to secure potential mine sites.

By that, I do not mean secure just the land above a deposit, but all the area around the deposits for miles, anywhere from which horizontal mining might be launched would need to be monitored for activity, and of course sonic monitors put into the rock to  detect mining.

Not too difficult, but we do not know all the places we might have to secure as potential mines. That, and not reactor waste, is the biggest area of risk in the ground.

We still have technology failure that might cause a major release from an active reactor. But we know that Chernobyl was a never to happen again mistake.

Answer 7

it takes a long time even millions of years

Answer 8

The amount of waste generated by a nuclear power plant during one year can fit under your desk.

Nuclear power already exists.  Nuclear waste is shipped and stored around this country every day.

The reason why no one makes a big deal out of it is because no one knows when and where the nuclear waste is being shipped.

The public would have no idea that there would be any difference if the amount of nuclear waste would double.

People need to get over their unrational fear of modern technology.

Answer 9

What most people even nuclear supporters is that the material being stored, as waste right now is more than 99% recyclable into usable material. Because of this stupidity in not recycling used material running our nuclear plants costs hundreds of times more than operation costs in Europe or Japan where they do recycle theirs. If the presidential decree against recycling was removed the cost of building and operating a nuclear plant in the US would drop to less than coal or oil fired plants just as in Europe and Japan.

There is no such thing as nuclear waste, only partially used material that needs to be freshened up to be used thousands of time again.