Radioactive waste generated in a nuclear power plant annually?

Answer 1

It must be understood that the nuclear waste produced is contained in the spent fuel discharged from the reactor, and in physical terms it comes out looking just the same as the new fuel put in (but you would be very unwise to look at it except by remote means). A large PWR or BWR will contain about 75 tonnes of fuel and about 1/3 of this is discharged every refuelling outage which occurs at intervals of 18 months to two years, depending on the reactor's load factor while running. So you could say about 25 tonnes of waste every 2 years, in round figures.

Now this 'waste' in composition is still mainly uranium 238, which if separated is almost harmless. The dangerous part is the active fission products, which will be about 3 percent of the total weight. There is also the remaining U235 which has not been burned up, probably about 1 percent, and some plutonium formed from the U238, again about 1 percent.

At present in the US all the spent fuel is stored intact, but if reprocessing was carried out, the amount of actual waste would be reduced to the fission products, if a use could be found for the uranium and plutonium, so the weight per reactor of waste would come down to about 750 kg/ 2 years. This would be stored in some sort of sealed containers, perhaps mixed with molten glass (vitrified), and then buried in a long term repository.