Nuclear Waste: Where does it belong?.
Nuclear waste is best defined as the leftovers from nuclear power. It is very radioactive and unstable and can cause severe, permanent damage to all those in constant contact with it. It is even linked to lung cancer and leukemia. Is this something you want in your neighborhood and around your children? Probably not. Well, the Western Shoshone tribe has to deal with this in their neighborhood. Congress recently passed legislation to dump a lot of the waste from the US on their reservation. I believe that this is not the right thing to do because it endangers lives and I think there has to be another way.
For the most part, nuclear power is on of the cleanest, most efficient forms of energy with the exception of one thing. At a nuclear power plant, heat is generated due to fission. This heat creates steam that turns turbines and makes electricity. The fission occurs due to the nuclear fuel. Nuclear fuel is made of very small pellets of enriched uranium, about the size of a pencil eraser. The fuel will continue to be used until it is spent, meaning it has no effect in generating heat. The spent fuel is the one exception. Once it is spent, it becomes the nuclear waste. This kind of waste is called High-Level Radioactive Waste (HLW) (United States DOE 11). HLW basically consists of the following elements: Krypton-85, Cesium-137, Plutonium-241, and Americium-241 ("Selected- sec. 1-4). I'll go into more detail about those later, but basically, they all make a very radioactive substance.
Currently, the HLW from all the nuclear power plants are stored on site in giant pools of water. However, these only serve as a temporary spot. The pools are getting full and there's no other place to put it on site. It has to go somewhere away from people.
As of right now, there is approximately 45,000 metric tons of the spent nuclear fuel on 72 sites across the US.
