-Photo courtesy of Robert Del Tredici
[
画像:Candu Fuel Bundle]
A fuel bundle contains many processed uranium
rods. "Each bundle is about 50 cms long and weighs about 23 kgms...
Several thousand of these bundles are required to initially fuel
a reactor. After that, several bundles a day, per reactor, are replaced
as the reactors operate at full power." *
Once a bundle is "spent" (after 12-18 months in the
reactor), it is
highly radioactive.
The 1978 "
Ontario Royal Commission on Electric
Power Planning" (aka: "Porter Commission") stated, "The
extreme lethality of a freshly removed spent fuel bundle is such that
a
(unprotected) person standing
within a metre of it would die within an hour."
For decades, authorities have unsuccessfully tried to identify and secure
safe places to
permanently
store spent fuel. When spent fuel bundles are removed from the
reactor, they are placed in water filled pools "to cool and shield them
until their radioactivity declines." * After about 10 years, the
fuel bundles have cooled sufficiently to be transferred robotically to
"high level" dry storage
facilities
. These
temporary
storage units are said to have a "design life" of about 50 years,
and perhaps longer under favourable conditions. Meanwhile, some
of the material inside the containers remains radioactive for thousands
and thousands of years.
Ontario Power Generation (OPG) says that as of December
1999, "the total number of used fuel bundles in storage was approximately
1.3 million." * In 1978, the Porter Commission report predicted
that, "During the next forty years (and probably for thousands of years),
the management of hundreds of thousands of such bundles (in Ontario alone),
which at all times must be isolated from the earth's ecosystem, will clearly
present a problem of massive proportions."
* Unless otherwise noted, facts and quotes
come from the Ontario Power Generation publication
: "
Nuclear Waste Management - Managing Ontario Power Generation's
Nuclear Waste Safely and Responsibly", October
2000
