It also contains the undesirable isotope uranium-236, which undergoes neutron capture, wasting neutrons ( and requiring higher U-235 enrichment ) and creating neptunium-237, which would be one of the more mobile and troublesome radionuclides in deep geological repository disposal of nuclear waste.
42.
It expressed urgency to find a consolidated, geological repository, and said that any future facility should be developed by a new independent organization with direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund, which is not subject to political and financial control as is the cabinet department of the Department of Energy.
43.
As the planned geological repository in the form of Yucca Mountain is not going ahead, this fund has collected over the years and presently $ 25 billion has piled up on the Government's doorstep for something they have not delivered, that is, reducing the hazard posed by the waste.
44.
Since 1998, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency started planning an Underground Research Laboratory at Honorobe to be able to conduct tests on the suitability of sedimentary rock for use as a deep geological repository for Japan's spent nuclear fuel ( a similar research facility in crystalline rock is also being constructed at Mizunami in Gifu Prefecture ).
45.
Performance assessment calculations for the Belgian deep geological repository estimated 79 Se may be the major contributor to activity release in terms of becquerels ( decays per second ), " attributable partly to the uncertainties about its migration behaviour in the Boom Clay and partly to its conversion factor in the biosphere . " ( p . 169 ).
46.
In its first few decades of use, before the MLFP's decay to lower heat producing levels, geological repository capacity is constrained not by volume but by heat generation, and decay heat generation from medium-lived fission products is about the same per unit power from any kind of fission reactor, limiting early repository emplacement.
47.
The "'Waste Isolation Pilot Plant "', or "'WIPP "', is the world's third deep geological repository ( after closure of Germany's Repository for radioactive waste Morsleben and the Schacht Asse II Salt Mine ) licensed to permanently dispose of transuranic radioactive waste for 10, 000 years that is left from the research and production of nuclear weapons.
48.
The deep geological repository will provide a facility in which high-level waste will be safely stored and isolated from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years thanks to the so-called multi-barrier system which is made up of a natural barrier ( the rock mass which will remain stable for several million years ) and technical ( or engineered ) barriers, e . g . the waste container.
49.
An advantage of the IFRs actinides removal and burn up ( actinides include plutonium ) from its spent fuel, is to eliminate concerns about leaving the IFRs spent fuel or indeed conventional, and therefore comparatively lower burnup, spent fuel-which can contain weapons usable plutonium isotope concentrations in a geological repository ( or the more common dry cask storage ) which then might be mined sometime in the future for the purpose of making weapons ."
50.
The potential complete removal of plutonium from the waste stream of the reactor reduces the concern that presently exists with spent nuclear fuel from most other reactors that arises with burying or storing their spent fuel in a geological repository, as they could possibly be used as a positive void coefficient could be reduced to an acceptable level by adding technetium to the core, helping destroy the long-lived fission product technetium-99 by nuclear transmutation in the process . ( see more Long-lived fission products)
