Facilities that have been open for decades will have millions of Boise State Broncos Heart Shirt of spent fuel on site. Some of this is held in open air cooling ponds and most of it in the older plants will be in dry cask storage. The biggest concern is the cooling ponds. Nuclear waste is filled with very radioactive long lived radioactive byproducts of power production. These products are far worse than what a nuclear weapon delivers as they were produced by the long exposure to high levels of radiation in the reactor core. A nuclear bombs residual radiation has dropped to near zero in a few months whereas the byproducts found in spent nuclear fuel will remain dangerous for thousands of years. A nuclear bomb only has a few kg of nuclear material while a spent fuel pond likely has more highly radioactive material than all the nuclear weapons of the world combined. Each reactor, everyone of them, everywhere.
Comments