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How Nuclear Waste is Stored

© Kenneth Friedman

At Fernauld, Ohio, another radioactive waste management site, workers once converted uranium ore into uranium metal for use in reactors that produced weapons-grade plutonium and tritium. The waste pit at this site is being cleaned up and what will remain is a 138-acre site for radioactive and hazardous waste.

Low-level waste has been in stored at the government's Savannah River, Ga., site in approximately 30,000 4-foot by 4-foot by 6-foot carbon-steel boxes stacked in a trench, backfilled with dirt, sloped and seeded with grasses.

One of the problems with radioactive waste management is urbanization around the sites like at Rocky Flats, 17 miles northwest of Denver. Once an isolated location, Rocky Flats now has 2 million people living with 50 miles. This number is expected to increase by 30 percent (600,000 people) in the next 20 years as the suburbs of Denver and Boulder converge on one another.

In addition to the problem of encroaching urbanization, another problem is lack of technologies for removing certain high levels of radioactive materials. Savannah River, Ga., for example, has some facilities that are expected to remain contaminated indefinitely because of the lack of cost-effective removal technologies. One technology that is working at Savannah River is a collection of 150 monitoring wells varying from "quite shallow" to as much as 200 feet deep that keep track of contamination left after a cleanup removed waste, capped an old disposal area and pumped and treated groundwater.

In Idaho, a facility that solidified high-level waste from the reprocessing of nuclear fuel was disassembled and then the rubble pile was filled with grout to stabilize the residual contamination in place.

More Information
Frankly, there are too many web sites on nuclear waste storage to pick even a few that will suit the interests of a broad audience, so I suggest you do your own search with your favorite search engine. I prefer Google where I entered the phrase "nuclear waste storage" and found more than enough for several term papers.