What can be done about this nuclear waste which has nowhere to go? It's been about 2 years since the accident. Nuclear power plants across the country still store huge amounts of spent fuel. No one has found a way to deal with the spent fuel. Nor no sites have been found for its final disposal. The spent fuel kept piling up. It now amounts to 17 thousand tons for Japan as a whole. Some nuclear plants could run out of storage space in about 2 years if they were to go back online. Japanese regulation is required all the spent fuel need to be reprocessed. Rokkashomura have been encountering many problems & it's not been full scale of operation. Consequently number of spent fuel have been piling up throughout the nations. Even the disposal site is being built; the regulation will prohibit it to store without reprocessing. Unless Rokkashomura being operated nuclear business will be affected. So all spent fuel needs to be reprocessed. Reprocessing plant is to separate fuel and radioactive waste. The extracted fuels from the reprocessing plant would be multiplied in the fast breeder reactor and be recycled repeatedly. It was to be a dream nuclear fuel cycle for unlimited power to produce for resourced poor Japan. In 1995 Monju Fast Breeder reactor sodium leak accident occurred. Since then it has been stopped operating. The reactor never be operational. The plan came to a dead end. we can't deceipt the public any more. A person engaged in Japan's energy policy granted our interview. Some people estimated that running of reprocessing plant would cost 11 trillion (paid by ratepayers) yen for 40 years running following the start of the operation. We knew the fast breeder reactor would not be completed economically & politically a meaningless to continue. some shareholders in Tepco started to feel doubtful Rokkasho was too costly. If reprocessing plant halted then spent fuel material won't be recycled. & the Aomori government is entitled to send back spent fuel if that happened. Nuclear power plants won't be able to operate if we processing is abandoned. . As far as they are concerned reprocessing is a matter of life or death. Power companies and the government failed to agree on a frame work to eliminate huge financial burden placed on the public. Then the issue resurfaced after the Fukushima nuclear accident.. The Aomori government, Miura issued a vigorously protest. "We are worry that spent fuel will remain in Aomori. This is not what we agreed on. If it's not going to be reprocessed it must be returned. Aomori is not a dumping ground for nuclear waste." Radioactive wastes contain radioactive material. They are usually by-products of nuclear power generation & other applications of nuclear fission or nuclear technology. Radioactive waste is hazardous to most forms of life and the environment. Radioactivity naturally decays over time, so radioactive waste has to be isolated and confined in appropriate disposal facilities for a sufficient period of time until it no longer poses a hazard. The period of time waste must be stored depends on the type of waste & radioactive isotopes. It can range from a few days for very short-lived isotopes to millions of years for spent nuclear fuel. Current major approaches to managing radioactive waste have been segregation & storage for short-lived waste, near-surface disposal for low & some intermediate level waste & deep burial or partitioning transmutation for the high-level waste. A few incidents have occurred when radioactive material was disposed of improperly, shielding during transport was defective, or when it was simply abandoned or even stolen from a waste store. In the Soviet Union, waste stored in Lake Karachay was blown over the area during a dust storm after the lake had partly dried out. At Maxey Flat, a low-level radioactive waste facility located in Kentucky, containment trenches covered with dirt, instead of steel or cement, collapsed under heavy rainfall into the trenches and filled with water. The water that invaded the trenches became radioactive & had to be disposed of at the Maxey Flat facility itself. In other cases of radioactive waste accidents, lakes or ponds with radioactive waste accidentally overflowed into the rivers during exceptional storms. In Italy, several radioactive waste deposits let material flow into river water, thus contaminating water for domestic use. In France numerous incidents happened at the Areva plant in Tricastin, during a draining operation, liquid containing untreated uranium overflowed out of a faulty tank & about 75 kg of the radioactive material seeped into the ground &, from there, into two rivers nearby; in another case, over 100 staff were contaminated with low doses of radiation. Although Japan did commit itself in 1977 to these inspections in the safeguard agreement with the IAEA, the reports were kept secret for the inspectors of the IAEA.

• published: 21 Jul 2014
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