Cancer institutes under the lens: radioactive waste

When we talk of garbage not being disposed off well, we do not think about garbage other than the regular kitchen waste and plastic. One major type of waste that we hardly talk about is radioactive waste, produced at cancer hospitals. While our kitchen waste may not be so harmful, radioactive waste can be hazardous. On a casual inquiry, I found out that the cancer hospitals in Bengaluru were apparently disposing residual radioactive waste into the public sewerage and garbage.

This sounds alarming, but this is what they are supposed when the radioactive material (used for treatment) is ‘fully used’. On matters of radioactive waste disposal, cancer hospitals in India are governed by guidelines issued by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB). According to radiotherapy physicists (doctors), once the radioactive material is fully used (or spent) and decayed, it does not remain harmful.

Utah left out of loop with radioactive waste buried here

Nuclear waste from Canada and Mexico is buried in Utah, and state regulators didn’t even know.

Gov. Huntsman says the shipment of low-level nuclear waste into Utah by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is shameful. Today he’s vowing it won’t happen again.

Federal regulators granted two waste disposal licenses to a Mexican nuclear power plant and one for Canadian waste between 2004 and 2006, but no one bothered to notify Utah.

The feds say the amounts were “insignificant”, so they didn’t feel they needed to notify the state. The Mexican waste was more than 1,000 cubic feet, and the Canadian waste was more than 6,000 tons. Utah authorities want to know how much would be “significant.”

Gov. Huntsman said, “This is unacceptable, and it always will be unacceptable. The fact that we didn’t know about it in years gone by, I think is unacceptable.”

But could the feds be sneaking in more radio-active waste now? Huntsman doesn’t think so. “Our people are very, very good in working with the Northwest Compact, which regulates all of this,” he said.

The governor vows never again.

Radioactive Waste and Uranium Mines

Radioactive Materials and Wastes covers materials from a wide range of sources that emit radiation of different types, at levels that impact human health. Radioactive materials are used for power generation, military purposes, for treatment and analyses in the medical sector, for material control and treatment in industry, products of daily life and in scientific applications.

Radioactivity is the sign that matter is decaying in order to reach, according to the law of physics, a better energetical state. As materials decay, they emit radiation, eventually disintegrating entirely and becoming innocuous. For some materials, this process can happen in a fraction of a second. For others however, it can take as long as millions of years. There are four basic types of radioactivity that affect human health: Alpha, Beta and Gammy decay and Neutron radiation. Each poses a particular type of threat to human health1.
Context

Radioactive waste is categorized broadly as high or low level waste. The former results primarily from fuel used in civilian or military reactors, and the latter from a range of processes including reactors, and industrial and commercial uses.

High-Level Waste typically refers to ‘spent’ fuel from a nuclear reactor. Most reactors are powered by uranium fuel rods, which is at the beginning only slightly radioactive. However, when the fuel rod is ‘spent,’ or used, it is both highly radioactive and thermally hot. Radioactive materials will reduce their activity with a so-called half-life time. The half-life time is the time required for reducing the activity to half of its initial value. Radioactive half-life times can span from fractions of a second to millions of years.

Radioactive materials cannot be treated, but only become harmless when they have finished their decay. Because this can take millennia, these materials must be stored appropriately. There are worldwide efforts to find ways that high-level wastes can be reliably sealed off from the biosphere for at least a million years in so-called final repositories. The issues surrounding the long term storage of high level waste are complex and often controversial. Given the levels of hazard involved, this matter is essentially a government responsibility.

Deactivating Radioactive Waste

The disposal of radioactive waste is often mentioned as an unsolved problem when it comes to using nuclear energy. A particular subject matter of many controversies and discussions is the isolation from the environment, an isolation that should be guaranteed for millions of years. If the duration of the necessary isolation can be diminished, we could this way “eliminate” the waste. Nuclear physicists of the Vienna University of Technology (TU) are researching, as part of a consortium represented in the entire Europe, the interaction of neutrons with relevant materials for the purpose of building an appropriate facility for the transmutation of dangerous residues. These results are the necessary basis for the development of facilities that would process radioactive waste. At the end of September 2008, the operations at the upgraded n_TOF facility at CERN will be resumed.
Vienna (TU) – In order to decrease the isolation time for radioactive waste, first of all, the actinides – elements whose nuclei are heavier than uranium (i.e. curium, actinium) – must be removed from the waste by processing (transmutation) into short-lived nuclei. “The core concept of transmutation – which was formulated as early as mid 20th century – consists of irradiating the actinides by fast neutrons. The highly stimulated nuclei that are generated this way suffer a fission, which leads to relatively short-lived nuclei, which in turn rapidly disintegrate into stable isotopes. Then, they cease to be radioactive,” explains Professor Helmut Leeb from the Atomic Institute of the Austrian Universities. Thus, the required radioactive waste isolation time of several millions years could be decreased to 300 and up to 500 years. The technological progress made in the last decades has made the transmutation possible at the industrial level.

Nuclear authority “right” to withold report on radioactive waste

Nuclear authority
The government says underground waste storage like this facility in Sweden is the “realistic” approach for nuclear waste disposal

As the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority launched a fresh consultation last week on how best to communicate with the public on a new radioactive waste disposal site, it was been told it does not have to publish a draft report on possible locations.

The NDA was asked for an earlier, draft version of the 2006 report “Potential Areas of Future Geosphere Research” , which identified geological factors requiring research regarding the possibility of locating an underground disposal facility for nuclear waste.

Idaho slated for radioactive waste: Idaho Slated to be Navy Dumping Ground

Still dealing with the fallout of being a repository for contaminated sand from Kuwait, Idaho is reportedly slated to be the dumping ground for literal fallout: radioactive remnants from a World War II-era Navy shipyard, according to a San Francisco alternative newsweekly.

“Currently, the Navy is proposing to excavate soil from IR-07 and IR-18, including known mercury and methane spots, and ship it to dumps in Idaho and Utah,” said the San Francisco Bay Guardian, in a July 16 story.

Tullytown fights to keep radioactive waste out of landfill

TULLYTOWN, Pa. – Borough leaders want “Trash Mountain” to grow green, not glow green. Thats why they’re fighting a plan to bring radioactive sludge to the Tullytown Landfill.