Prevent reprocessing--vitrify now!(Biodevastation)

• Author: Myatt, Art

Spent nuclear fuel, as it is removed from reactor cores, is an extremely hazardous material. Intensely radioactive, it is typically stored under water--30 feet or so of water--for some years, until the short-lived radioactive elements have largely burned themselves out.

Then it is possible to store it dry, with only "minimal" danger of a meltdown so long as the rods are kept separated. Currently, most spent fuel, wet and dry, is stored at the reactor sites where it was used. Wet or dry, it is still quite dangerous, but generally we pretend this is the best we can do with it.

The plan, according to the Bush regime, is to prepare a man-made cave rn at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, to receive it in a decade or so. When the mountain is ready, spent fuel will be shipped from all over the country to a giant vitrification plant in Nevada near the storage site. The plant will make big ingots of borosilicate glass, much like ordinary window glass, with the spent fuel stirred into the melt.

The ingot will be suitable for long-term storage. The radioactivity will not be made less, but it will be dispersed in the glass and diluted, so it will be less intense. The spent fuel rods contain uranium and plutonium oxides, which tend to be finely divided powder easily dispersed by a breeze. Once dissolved in the glass, they will not be scattered on the wind. The glass also will prevent the radioactive oxides from being leached into the water table, or will at least very greatly reduce the rate at which they could be leached if the ingot were soaked in water.

The spent fuel rods, as they are now stored at roughly 120 commercial reactor sites in the United States, could be used by ordinary terrorists to make a "dirty bomb." They could be "reprocessed" to make new nuclear fuel rods or nuclear weapons. Once the spent fuel has been vitrified, it is much more difficult to use the material for any kind of bomb or fuel.

The glass ingots are not perfectly safe. You would not want one in your living room as the base of a lamp. But while still radioactive, they are much safer than untreated fuel rods. Vitrification eliminates the possibility of a meltdown altogether if it's done right. The glass has a much higher melting point than the metals in it.

The question is, why would we want to wait a decade before vitrifying the fuel rods? Why would we want to ship them from all over the country in their hazardous form and then make them relatively safe?

Would it not make more sense...