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Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced by nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear power plants. Nuclear decay processes are used in niche applications such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators in some space probes such as Voyager 2. Generating electricity from fusion power remains the focus of international research.
Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, nuclear decommissioning, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons reprocessing. The storage and disposal of radioactive waste is regulated by government agencies in order to protect human health and the environment.
In nuclear physics, a decay product is the remaining nuclide left over from radioactive decay. Radioactive decay often proceeds via a sequence of steps. For example, 238U decays to 234Th which decays to 234mPa which decays, and so on, to 206Pb :
The Goiânia accident was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, in Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil, after an unsecured radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city. It was subsequently handled by many people, resulting in four deaths. About 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 of them were found to have been contaminated.
The Mayak Production Association is one of the largest nuclear facilities in the Russian Federation, housing a reprocessing plant. The closest settlements are Ozyorsk to the northwest and Novogornyi to the south.
Shagan or Chagan is a lake in Zhanasemey District, Abai Region, Kazakhstan. The Balapan complex is currently one of the main tourist attractions of the Semipalatinsk Test Site.
Ozyorsk or Ozersk is a closed city in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. It has a population of 82,164 as of the 2010 census.
Caesium-137, cesium-137 (US), or radiocaesium, is a radioactive isotope of caesium that is formed as one of the more common fission products by the nuclear fission of uranium-235 and other fissionable isotopes in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Trace quantities also originate from spontaneous fission of uranium-238. It is among the most problematic of the short-to-medium-lifetime fission products. Caesium-137 has a relatively low boiling point of 671 °C (1,240 °F) and easily becomes volatile when released suddenly at high temperature, as in the case of the Chernobyl nuclear accident and with atomic explosions, and can travel very long distances in the air. After being deposited onto the soil as radioactive fallout, it moves and spreads easily in the environment because of the high water solubility of caesium's most common chemical compounds, which are salts. Caesium-137 was discovered by Glenn T. Seaborg and Margaret Melhase.
Lake Karachay, sometimes spelled Karachai or Karachaj, was a small lake in the southern Ural mountains in central Russia. Starting in 1951, the Soviet Union used Karachay as a dumping site for radioactive waste from Mayak, the nearby nuclear waste storage and reprocessing facility, located near the town of Ozyorsk. Today the lake is completely infilled, acting as "a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility."
The Maxey Flats low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) disposal site is a Superfund site in Kentucky which served as a disposal site for low-level nuclear waste from 1963 to 1977. Investigations by the Environmental Protection Agency, among others, determined that plutonium stored at the site had migrated beyond the site's trenches, and the site was closed in 1977.
Atomic Ed and the Black Hole is a documentary released in 2001 by filmmaker, Ellen Spiro. The documentary was made for HBO's Cinemax Reel Life Series. Sheila Nevins served as Executive Producer and Lisa Heller served as Supervising Producer. Karen Bernstein served as Producer. Laurie Anderson provided her song, Big Science, for the soundtrack.
Maralinga: Australia's Nuclear Waste Cover-up is a book by Alan Parkinson about the clean-up of the British atomic bomb test site at Maralinga in South Australia, published in 2007.
Republic Services, Inc. is a North American waste disposal company whose services include non-hazardous solid waste collection, waste transfer, waste disposal, recycling, and energy services. It is the second largest provider of waste disposal in the United States after Waste Management.
High-level radioactive waste management addresses the handling of radioactive materials generated from nuclear power production and nuclear weapons manufacture. Radioactive waste contains both short-lived and long-lived radionuclides, as well as non-radioactive nuclides. In 2002, the United States stored approximately 47,000 tonnes of high-level radioactive waste.
Lynas Rare Earths, Ltd. is an Australian rare-earths mining company with two major operations: a mining and concentration plant at Mount Weld in Western Australia, and the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (LAMP) in Kuantan, Malaysia. The company was founded in the 1990s and is headquartered in Perth, Western Australia.
Bangladesh first conceived building a nuclear power plant in 1961. The Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1973. The country currently operates a TRIGA research reactor at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Savar.
The Malaysian Nuclear Agency never reviews nuclear power as an option to meet the increasing demands of energy in Malaysia. There is a need to build a nuclear power generation plant, with plans still in the feasibility stage.
Rebecca Cammisa is an American documentary filmmaker two-times Oscar nominated, Emmy award winner, and founder of Documentress Films.
West Lake Landfill is a closed, unlined mixed-waste landfill located in Bridgeton, Missouri. It was featured in the 2015 documentaries The First Secret City, The Safe Side of the Fence and the 2017 HBO documentary Atomic Homefront. Its contents have been shown to include radioactive waste; it is thus also an EPA Superfund cleanup site.
Lake Karachay was a small natural lake in eastern Russia. It is best known for its use as a dumping ground by the Soviet Union's Mayak nuclear weapons laboratory and fuel reprocessing plant. A string of accidents and disasters at the Mayak facility has contaminated much of the surrounding the area with highly radioactive waste. In the 1960s, the lake began to dry out and its area had dropped from 0.5 km2 in 1951 to 0.15 km2 by the end of 1993. In 1968, following a drought in the region, the wind carried 185 PBq (5 MCi) of radioactive dust away from the dried bed of the lake, irradiating half a million people. Lake Karachay has been described as the "most polluted spot on Earth" by the Worldwatch Institute.
References
- ↑ "TV tonight: HBO doc 'Atomic Homefront' examines nuclear waste". USA Today .
- ↑ "HBO's Atomic Homefront Will Make You Furious".
- ↑ Gerard, Jeremy (14 November 2017). "'Atomic Homefront' – How A Story About The Threat To Local Journalism Joined A Crusade Against Government Inaction On Radioactive Waste".
- ↑ "'Atomic Homefront': Film Review". The Hollywood Reporter . 17 November 2017.
