The Nuclear Waste Problem

One of the complications of nuclear power as a major energy source is that it produces some very dangerous waste. Even I have to admit that this is an immense drawback for nuclear power and until there is more research conducted on the repossessing of radioactive waste, it will be a byproduct of nuclear power.

Again I turned to NPR to develop a basic understanding of the subject, this time I found a story from March of 2011, What Are Spent Fuel Rods? by Joe Palca. The story presents a basic description of how fuel rods work and how they are stored at the reactor when all the fissionable material is used up. The spent fuel rods sit in a huge pool of water until they cool down enough to be transported to a disposal site or a reprocessing plant.

Let's go Swimming.
Source:  http://politically-confused.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/japan-alarm-over-spent-fuel-rods.html

I was merely looking for information on the basic process of what happens to a fuel rod after it has been depleted but ended up discovering the dangers of nuclear reactors in earthquake prone areas. Any sort of incident in these earthquake zones that damages the ability for these storage pools to function properly would be potential catastrophic. If during an earthquake, or other disaster, power is disrupted there is no way to cool the pools of water and they will eventually evaporate leaving the fuel rods exposed which will lead to airborne radiation when the casings melt. This scenario is usually covered by various fail-safes and contingency plans but all the plans in the world can't quell the public's fear of potential disasters. This leads me to wonder what happens to the fuel rods after the cooling process because at this point you are left with radioactive isotopes with really long half-lives (millions to billions of years.)

I ended up stumbling upon a report done by the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission that was published in May of 2002 titled Radioactive Waste: Production, Storage, Disposal.(Yet another PDF.) This report covers how the many types of waste are stored and disposed of in the United States. It describes how much waste is produced and the regulatory limits of public exposure during transportation and storage. In the section for High-Level Radioactive Waste it covers the construction of the Yucca Mountain Storage site in Nevada, a long term storage project that is now cancelled.

The report contains some interesting information but makes me ask why did we give up on putting all our high-level waste in a mountain that is in the same area we used to test atomic bombs? After crunching some of the numbers they have given in the report we produce around 3,000 square feet of high-level waste a year and this waste needs to be properly stored, the question is, where do we store it?

Yucca Mountain, Middle of Nowhere
Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/energy.html

In nuclear power we have a huge source of energy with a low carbon footprint but with an enormous downside, long term radioactive waste. Are there other ways of getting the energy contained within an atomic nucleus that doesn't produce dangerous waste? Is there a way to produce a safer nuclear reactor? Can the public still embrace nuclear power even though it can be potential dangerous?