What exactly is nuclear waste product from nuclear power plants? What do we do with it? Any use for it?

Question

What exactly is nuclear waste product from nuclear power plants? What do we do with it? Any use for it?

Answer 1

I used this to answer another question and it seemed to fit yours, hopefully it helps...........

Believe it or not the worst of the waste that most people think about, the radioactive fuel, never leaves the plant site. Yucca Mountain Depository which was supposed to handle the waste of all of the nuclear power plants in the country has never opened to this date. Although they are still trying it has not been successful. There are too many road blocks, right now, one of them being transportation. States do not want the waste crossing their borders to get there. The possibility of accidents during transportation is a huge issue, no matter how strong you build containers, no one believes there is a guarantee on whether or not the container would be damaged in an accident. So far used fuel bundles are kept in what is called a "Spent Fuel Pool." The fuel is kept under many feet of ultra filtered, borated, water and cooled. Recently nuke plants have started transferring their spent fuel, that is ready(there are specifications it must meet before this can happen), into fuel casks and transferring them to concrete on-site storage facilities where they will keep them, indefinitely, for now. There are other types of waste that a nuclear station generates: anything and I mean anything that comes in contact with radioactive contamination that cannot be cleaned off (the term used is fixed contamination); if it does not clear a test for contamination it goes to a radioactive trash container this does not mean it will leave the site or never be used again. Items range from rubber gloves and rags(non-reusable trash) to components in the radiation control area such as valves, pipes being replaced, pumps, and so on. This "trash" used to get sent to places like Barnwell, South Carolina where Chem-Nuclear Systems owns a depository for nuclear trash. You can liken it to a county landfill where your family sends their trash. Not everything at a nuke plant is radioactive trash. There really isn't that much whether you believe that is up to you unless you work at one. ;)

This is really just a very brief answer to your question.

The only other thing I will add is that the spent(used) fuel can be reprocessed to be reused again but there is a moratorium in the USA against reprocessing. The end result is you get weapons grade plutonium out of it and our country does not want this.

Answer 2

basically nuclear power plants use radioactive materials to heat water, generate steam, spin turbines which generate power. radioactive material is basically heavy metals that are unstable and break down into lighter metals. the nuclear waste is the metal you get after the "nuclear fuel" has broken down, most of the time it is still radioactive. there are two things to do with the waste, recycle it(using it as fuel for further power generation) or store it until it breaks down into a non radioactive metal. only problem with the storage method is that it takes a long time for the spent fuel to break down, on the order of >10,000 years.