The article argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the operational aspects of the U.S. radioactive waste management system when it grows to the scale necessary to handle wastes produced by a fully deployed plutonium economy. Without such information, many of the unsettling speculations which have become part of the public debate and are summarized herein cannot be clearly addressed...

The flow of fluids in complex geometries like porous media [1] plays an important role in a wide variety of technological and environmental processes including chromotography, oil recovery, the degradation of building materials and the spread of hazardous wastes in soils. The complexity of such flow processes makes their theoretical and experimental study a great challenge. Recent developments ...

The Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State is the location of the largest nuclear waste storage area in the United States. Since plutonium production facilities at Hanford were shut down in 1987,cleaning up the leftover waste at the Hanford Site has become one of the largest environmental cleanup projects in history. Legal, political, technical, and social aspects of the cleanup contribu...

The emerging interest in using stable bedrock formations for industrial purposes, e.g., nuclear waste disposal, has increased the need for understanding microbiological and geochemical processes in deep crystalline rock environments, including the carbon cycle. Considering the origin and evolution of life on Earth, these environments may also serve as windows to the past. Various geological, ch...

The production of pure deuterium and the removal of tritium from nuclear waste are the key challenges in separation of light isotopes. Presently, the technological methods are extremely energy- and cost-intensive. Here we report the capture of heavy hydrogen isotopes from hydrogen gas by selective adsorption at Cu(I) sites in a metal-organic framework. At the strongly binding Cu(I) sites (32 kJ...

Costs and benefits in the distant future—such as those associated with global warming, long-lived infrastructure, hazardous and radioactive waste, and biodiversity—often have little value today when measured with conventional discount rates. We demonstrate that when the future path of this conventional rate is uncertain and persistent (i.e., highly correlated over time), the distant future shou...

Radioactive isotopes were first applied to investigate industrial problems some sixty years ago and since then, there has been a continuous expansion in their usage. The oil industry, in particular, was quick to recognise the potential usefulness of this technology and one of the earliest industrial studies in the literature is concerned with the use of radioactive material to tag the cement of...

Given the scale of the contamination associated with 60 years of global nuclear activity, and the inherent high financial and environmental costs associated with invasive physical and chemical clean-up strategies, there is an unparalleled interest in new passive in situ bioremediation processes for sites contaminated with nuclear waste. Many of these processes rely on successfully harnessing ne...

The use of cement and concrete to immobilise radioactive waste is complicated by the wideranging nature of inorganic cementing agents available as well as the range of service environments in which cement is used and the different functions expected of cement. For example, Portland cement based concretes are widely used as structural materials for construction of vaults and tunnels. These const...

In September 1987 an accident occurred with a cesium chloride (CsCl) teletherapy source taken from a cancer therapy institute in Goiânia, Brazil. Misuse of the abandoned source caused widespread contamination of radioactive material (about 50 TBq of Cs) in the town of Goiânia. Decontamination of affected areas did lead to about 3,500 m of solid radioactive wastes, which were disposed in two nea...