Nuclear Waste Radioactivity Mostly Disappears After 40 Years: Advocacy Group

The president of a Canadian nuclear advocacy group has addressed concerns about nuclear waste, saying the radioactivity mostly disappears after 40 years.
Australia is now considering taking up nuclear power after the federal opposition said it would adopt the policy if it wins the election next year.
Since the declaration in June, there has been ongoing debate about the feasibility of nuclear, including concerns around cost, the length of time required, whether a workforce can be trained up, and disposal of nuclear waste.
Australia banned civilian nuclear power in 1998.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has on several occasions, said the amount of waste produced by the preferred small modular reactor (SMR) was small and the size of a can of coke per year.
Keefer, based in the province of Ontario, where nuclear accounts for around 60 percent of the power grid, said there was a straightforward process for disposing of used fuel rods.
“Our fuel is removed from the reactor. It’s stored in a deep pool, kind of like a swimming pool, but seismically very robust,” he told the Select Committee on Nuclear Energy.
“It cools off for about five or six years, and it’s packaged into concrete and steel canisters, which then sit in a large warehouse.
“These casts are robust. They last hundreds of years.”
The president noted that he had toured those facilities with a dosimeter, a device used to measure ionising radiation exposure. He found there was less radiation exposure from the facilities compared to sitting on a plane and flying from Canada to Australia.
Moreover, Keefer said nuclear waste went through exponential radioactive decay in just a few decades.
Hoff, who worked as an operator at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California, said the station was among the most robust facilities in her community.
Hoff explained that Diablo Canyon was constructed with the deliberation of potential seismic events.
“You might also know that when Diablo Canyon was originally designed, we knew there was an earthquake fault off the coast, and then later on, we discovered another fault even closer to the plant.
“[This] sounds terrifying, but when we did all the analysis to see what kind of different shaking or increased ground movement that might put on the plant, we found that even with a new fault, there was still enough margin.
“The plant was designed to such a high standard that even with more shaking, the vital systems would not be damaged.”