Continued Accumulation of Nuclear waste around the World. The need for a safe economical way to dispose
of this waste within guidelines that minimize effects of long lived radioactivity of high level nuclear waste.
The Waste Problem
- How to safely store the High Level waste for a minimum of 10,000 years in a safe environment.
- How to retrieve the waste for a period of time in the future if needed.
- How to accomplish this process economically.
- How to accomplish this process in an environmentally safe manner.
- How to please every one of the stakeholders.
Scientific Consensus
“There is a strong worldwide consensus that the best, safest long-term option for dealing with HLW is geological isolation…. Although the scientific community has high confidence that the general strategy of geological isolation is the best one to pursue, the challenges are formidable.”
(Rethinking High-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal (NRC, 1990), )
A TYPICAL NUCLEAR POWER PLANT PRODUCES 30 TONS/YEAR OF HIGH LEVEL WASTE FOR EACH 1,000 MW CAPACITY OF POWER GENERATION