casks and cooling pools. By the end of the year 2000, there will be more than 40,000 metric tons of high-level waste in casks and storage pools. There will also be more than 8,000 metric tons of high-level waste from defense programs. The high-level waste from defense programs is currently being stored in Idaho, South Carolina, and Washington. (General Information)Reprocessing is the chemical process by which uranium and plutonium are recovered from spent fuel. This means that it is the recycling process of high-level waste. The reason private industries aren't reprocessing their high-level waste is because reprocessing costs more than mining and making new fuel. Several countries that actually care about their environment reprocess their high-level waste. (General Information)Dry casks and cooling pools are being used to store spent fuel in power plants everywhere. (Shulman, 14) Dry casks and cooling pools are only meant to be temporary storage facilities until a permanent repository is made. The need for a permanent disposal for high-level radioactive waste is becoming more urgent every year because the dry casks and cooling pools at nuclear power plants are filling up. A dry cask is a concrete of steel container that protects the outside world from its radioactive innards. A cooling pools is a pools of water that the spent fuel is put into. The water is a radioactive shield and coolant. (General Information)The cooling pools were supposed to contain no more than 400 fuel assemblies, approximately 80,000 rods. The pools contain over four times as much of the spent fuel that they're supposed to. Nearly all of the nations older power plants are in this state of overload.In the late 1980's, government industry researchers became concerned that if the rods were too closely stored in the pools, a nuclear reaction would occur. When researched further, the chain reaction theory became very remote. News of this resulted in ev...
