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Radioactive waste shipment arrives in Aomori

18 Comments

A cargo ship carrying high-level radioactive vitrified waste arrived in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, from Britain on Thursday.

The shipment of 76 cylinders of nuclear waste reprocessed on behalf of three Japanese power companies arrived in Japan for the first time since the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

The cylinders are to be placed in a storage facility of Japan Nuclear Fuel in Rokkasho for the time being, officials said.

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The cylinders are to be placed in a storage facility of Japan Nuclear Fuel in Rokkasho for the time being, officials said.

Well theres nothing much else to be done with it. Why Japan? Especially after the nuclear incident with Fukushima. Sod off with all the nuclear waste. Store it somewhere in Siberia ffs

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That is fuel/waste that was shipped to France for temp storage and or reprocessing and is now coming back as per the schedule agreed upon years ago.

Many countries used France for temp-storage, while they were supposed to build secure storage sites back home. France been kicking that stuff back now for years.

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I think if you read a little more carefully, you'll see it states that this was Japanese material reprocessed by Britain and now delivered back to it's origin.

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I like the "for the time being" bit. In twenty years time some office worker will lose the paperwork, and then they won't need to bother with building a fireproof, tsunami proof, earthquake proof, corrosion proof, storage place that needs to be maintained and regularly inspected for over 2000 years.

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Japan really is finished, isn't it.

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I think if you read a little more carefully, you'll see it states that this was Japanese material reprocessed by Britain and now delivered back to it's origin.

Yes, other news sourcess also states this clearly. Other news sources also mentions protesters shouting "Keep the waste out!".

All though I sympathize with them not wanting the waste to be stored in their back yard, if you do not want nuclear waste then how about not producing it at all. If you do not want waste, then convince your government to move quickly to alternative energy sources.

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Gee thanks! I live 40 kilometers from the Rokkasho "nuke dump" and that place is an accident waiting to happen.

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@zichi

Rokkasho has facilities for storage of low level wast and temporary storage of high level waste.

They also have facilities for reprocessing of nuclear fuel and for production of Mixed oxide fuel.

I think they were planning on accepting long term storage, but the deal fell through when the next generation of ITER (test reactor for fusion) was placed in Cadarache, France and not in Rokkasho as the local government had been promised. If they would have gotten the ITER it would have been.

Wikipedia states the following about ITER:

"ITER was originally expected to cost approximately €5billion, but the rising price of raw materials and changes to the initial design have seen that amount more than triple to €16billion"

So that would have been a substantial amount of money and jobs created in the region, which probably blinded the local government to any of the problems with accepting long time storage facilities.

I remember reading something about Rokkasho getting some advanced HPC simulation center to help save face.

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zichi,

Yes, so then I think the answer is that they have facilities for Short term storage. And they might get facilities for long term storage, but status of this is a bit unclear atm.

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@zichi,

So it would seem, but you want to locate this type of storage someplace that will be geologically predictable for thousands an thousands of years (does that even exist in Japan?) so I think their main criteria for choosing location has been to find stable bedrock to dig into. Well that and any place that had a local government that would accept their deals.

Now for lower level waste, such as the ash from incinerators and landmasses from decontamination areas etc, an extended Fukushima NoGo zone may be the logical place for that.

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There is bedrock under Fukushima.

Bedrock, yes. Stable? Not so sure.

Nuclear waste does not need to go deep into the ground just placed in dry caskets and stored in an earthquake and water tight storage.

The problem is finding drycaskets that stay dry for thousands of years, metal will corrode and corrosion is aided by the radiation. They typically want this to be deep enough to be below the ground water table.

If the right conditions can be met in the No Go zone, then I am all for it.

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Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste: Fast-neutron reactors could extract much more energy from recycled nuclear fuel, minimize the risks of weapons proliferation and markedly reduce the time nuclear waste must be isolated

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste

Excerpt: In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods—namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium. This nuclear fuel cycle would combine two innovations: pyrometallurgical processing (a high-temperature method of recycling reactor waste into fuel) and advanced fast-neutron reactors capable of burning that fuel. With this approach, the radioactivity from the generated waste could drop to safe levels in a few hundred years, thereby eliminating the need to segregate waste for tens of thousands of years.

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