Radioactive waste

“Radioactive waste will last billions of years and it is unfair to gain benefit from nuclear

today and leave the next generation to deal with the nuclear waste.”

As in our past posts about spent fuel, Spent or Irradiated fuel contains 96% uranium, 1% plutonium and 3% radioactive wastes.Long-lived radioactive waste from the back end of the fuel cycle, the actinides have a significant influence due to their characteristically long half-lives. For example, nuclear fuels with thorium(Th-232) this fertile material that can undergo a neutron capture reaction and two beta minus decays, resulting in the production of fissile U-233. The spent fuel cycle with thorium will contain U-233, an isotope with a half-life of 160,000 years.  While, the burnt fuels are Thorium with Reactor-Grade Plutonium (RGPu), Thorium with Weapons-Grade Plutonium (WGPu) and Mixed Oxide fuel (MOX).

Radioactive waste may last billions of years, but in the ways to reducing the waste management problems, reprocessing or common known as recycling can be reduced. Based on the spent fuel, we found out that uranium and plutonium recovered can be use back into the reactor for enhance the energy production. Like mentioned above, Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) are product from the mixture of uranium oxide with the recycled plutonium oxide. Yet not all reactors can be feed by MOX nowadays, because of the problem isotopes in the plutonium recycling processes.
 In fuel cycle recycling process, uranium are converted, re-enriched and fabricated to be use again in the reactors. And plutonium were been diluted with depleted uranium before undergoes fabrication.

Besides, reprocessing spent fuel there are new method discovered which are partitioning-transmutation and partitioning-conditioning. Why transmutation introduced???It is because, transmutation are able to shorter the long life nuclides into more stable elements. Transmutation of one radionuclide into another is achieved by neutron bombardment in a nuclear reactor or accelerator-driven device. While, the remaining very small amount to be conditioned and place in disposal site.

Nuclear technology are introduced so manys years ago, now is our duty to keep and reduce the amount of Long-term storage and final repository. We must bear in mind about that spent fuel is not a new thing in our world. So now……

 “We are the young generation, we are the young Malaysians, it is our future we are talking about, and we want a sustainable, green, beautiful, secure planet that we can show our own children with our very own eyes instead of just through pictures in history books – We want a future. And let us manage the waste”.

Do what we believe in, and believing what we do…together we work together towards green world.