Need Info for Nuclear energy paper

[IsZ]

I am not a nuclear engineer, but I am very interested in this topic and am working on a article about nuclear power. I was wondering if anyone here might be able to offer me some information.

My father was a nuclear engineer and traveled most of the time because after TMI the political climate had changed considerably. He died in 1990.

Specifically, I am interested in information about storage. Here are some questions:

How big is nuclear waste? Somewhere I read that the waste to be buried was about 1 cubic meter a year per power plant (not sure of the wattage of the plant - also how is output determined?)

Does reprocessing change the amount of radioactivity in the waste to be buried or the size of the waste to be buried?

At what point is the danger of a radioactive leak the greatest?

I hope the engineers here don't mind a laypersons questions.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Lisa

 

[xnuke]

The following website might prove useful to you:

http://www.radwaste.org

Good luck!

 

[nuke]

The other respondant provided a good website reference for radioactoive waste (radwaste) info. The sites below also have some good public info on radwaste and nuclear energy.

For starters....
There are two major categories for radioactive waste identified in the regulations and they are high level and low level. These two categories are based mainly on the time it takes for the radionuclides to decay. High level wastes are materials like spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors and weapons grade nuclear materials from government facilities. These require very long periods of isolation from the environment before the radioactivity decays to safe levels. These are the responsibility of DOE and will require a stable geolgical repository like the proposed Yucca mountain facility. The largest volume of waste is the low level and these materials will decay to environmentally benign levels in about 300 years. Check out the sites below and you should get plenty of info for your paper.
The commercial nuclear industry has changed siginificantly since TMI and it appears that the energy situation in the US is forcing us to reconsider the positive environmental aspects of Nuclear Power again.

http://www.em.doe.gov/em30/

http://www.cnie.org/nle/waste-2.html#_1_17

http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=1&catid=1