I wish I knew a little more about the issues dealing with spent fuel. I know it still produces heat, otherwise there would be no need to have cooling water and pumps. So if it has to be cooled, is it even possible to 'cask it up'?
Yeah 999, what little I know is what I've read recently. I tried to re-find one particularly good article, but too many days gone past so, from memory...
There are approx. 176,000 tons of radioactive waste in the USA, stored in various forms in all states, but the authorities won't give exact amounts, distributions and locations of storage. Most is stored wet, in cooling pools either at or nearby reactors (some reactors have been deactivated, but like Trojan in Washington state, still store spent fuel rods). Some is stored dry, in specially constructed casks that have a 'life' of about a few hundred years, or way less than the half-life of what they are storing.
All the dry cask storage in the USA is done in the Western US states because these casks have to be kept spread out, and that takes lots of land area. I'm guessing that section of ruined earth at Umatilla, Wa. has some of this, Utah as well. Who knows?
So, from that, I take it there is a method to move these spent rods from active use to one form of storage, and possibly then to another. Hopefully done very, very carefully.
