Desechos nucleares

Nuclear Waste Repositories, Use and Power Plants
Most scientists believe the safest way to store nuclear waste is in rock formations deep underground--called geological repositories. In 1982, theU.S. Congress agreed and passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. This law directed the U.S. Department of Energy to site, design, construct, and operate America's first repository by 1998. The repositorywill store radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and from defense weapons plants.
The same law also established the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for the repository. People who use electricity fromnuclear power plants contribute 1/10 of a cent for each kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity they use. An average American household, which uses about 7,500 kilowatt-hours a year, wouldcontribute $7.50 a year to the fund if it got all its electricity from nuclear power. The nation contributed $600 million to the fund in 1993.
More recently, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste PolicyAmendments Act in 1987. Among other things, this act proposed Yucca Mountain, Nevada as the nation's first repository site.
If the current plan is approved (it's not a done deal), nuclear waste will besealed in steel canisters and stored in underground vaults located 1,000 feet below the surface by the year 2003.
Yucca Mountain is being studied as a repository site because it is dry (water won'tpercolate through the repository) and geologically stable (the chance of erupting volcanoes or damaging earthquakes is extremely slim). Another plus about the Yucca Mountain site is its isolation.Hardly anyone lives near it.
Although utility companies currently store their nuclear waste in pools of water at the power plant, some companies will run out of storage space by 1998--the originaldeadline for the opening of the repository. Utility companies are asking the Department of Energy to accept responsibility for the waste in 1998. The Department of Energy would need to store the waste in a...