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Some of the highly radioactive vitrified nuclear waste being churned out by the fuel reprocessing plant in the village of Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, has been found to contain unexpected highly soluble chemical compounds that are escaping the vitrification process as liquids, Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. said Thursday.

To reverse the current outdated policy, we need to set up four regional used-fuel storage facilities to act as transfer stations. These would provide geographic equity and allow relocation of the backlog of used fuel to locations where it can be stored safely, securely, and efficiently for up to 90 years before reprocessing or permanent disposal. This can be done with existing revenue and provides the time to implement the second part of the plan: developing and demonstrating an acceptable approach for permanent geologic disposal.

During the first presidential debate, while reciting their lists of energy sources that each candidate supports, something caught my ear: a discussion of nuclear-waste reprocessing. Twenty percent of our electricity comes from 104 nuclear power plants. Currently, spent nuclear waste is stored in temporary facilities at 125 sites in 39 states. These storage sites are located in a mixture of cities, suburbs and rural areas. The plan is for this waste to be permanently stored at a geologic repository, 1,000 feet below surface, 1,000 feet above groundwater at Yucca Mountain.

ROBOTS are being employed to help clean up Dounreay. Decommissioning bosses have turned to specialist demolition firm Brokk to supply the remotely-operated equipment that can work inside cells and a pond where radiation levels are still too high for human access. The robots - mounted on tracks like a construction excavator and powered by electricity - have been fitted with specially-designed tools. They will go inside the cells and pond to cut up and package the vessels and pipes where more than 10,000 spent fuel elements were dissolved and reprocessed before the plant shut down in 1996.

The Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency should be restructured. It should look for nuclear technology opportunities using Yucca Mountain for Nevada rather than be against Yucca. Nevada could benefit greatly from nuclear technology by allowing nuclear power plants using "reprocessing."

Radioactive gas emissions from a nuclear plant in southeast France were higher than normal in June and July but there was no threat to public safety, nuclear authorities said on Wednesday. The gas emissions occurred at a waste reprocessing installation at the Tricastin nuclear site in southeastern France, where a separate uranium leak was reported last month.

The (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Sep. 1--The federal government lost two lawsuits in August that illustrate the nation's struggle between needing nuclear energy but not really wanting it. A federal appeals court in Washington ordered the Energy Department to pay two nuclear power plant operators damages that could run close to $200 million. The Energy Department was required by contract with the plant operators to remove their nuclear waste for permanent storage or reprocessing, beginning Jan. 31, 1998.

THE final defuelling of one of the reactors at Chapelcross began last week. The first fuel element was removed from the core of Reactor 1, beginning the active commissioning of the newly-upgraded fuel route. About 40,000 fuel elements will be systematically removed from all four reactors and dispatched for reprocessing at the Sellafield site in west Cumbria.

The credibility of the nuclear industry was shaken last night after the estimated cost of cleaning up Britain's atomic waste was raised by a further £10bn. The latest clean-up estimate from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) suggests the commonly accepted figure of £73bn should rise to £83bn. But the agency insisted that £10bn of income from generating and fuel reprocessing plants should also be taken into account.

The Bush administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program, already under siege, has been further imperiled after recent action by several congressional panels and an April report from the congressional watchdog agency. Administration officials have claimed that GNEP, which seeks to develop new nuclear technologies and new international nuclear fuel arrangements, will cut nuclear waste and decrease the risk that an anticipated growth in the use of nuclear energy worldwide could spur nuclear proliferation.

Tokyo, Japan - A controversial spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the northern region of Aomori prefecture in Japan may be built directly above an active fault at least 10 miles in length, according to some geologists. This warning comes ahead of the expected opening of the plant this coming autumn.

While Nevada officials were about to rally Tuesday in Las Vegas against plans for licensing a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain was in Colorado saying such a facility might not be necessary. "I would seek to establish an international repository for spent nuclear fuel that could collect and safely store materials overseas that might otherwise be reprocessed to acquire bomb-grade materials," McCain, R-Ariz., said in a speech on international nuclear security at the University of Denver.

As revealed in The Whitehaven News, the option of storing spent fuel in underground vaults, is becoming a possible alternative to reprocessing for Britain's expected fleet of new nuclear reactors and a graphic illustration of the mountain of spoil, as large as the Egyptian pyramids, that would be created by an underground repository has been reproduced by a Welsh council that feared such a repository coming to Wales.

A US House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee unanimously approved a Department of Energy funding bill Tuesday that would fully fund a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, while eliminating funding for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, the international spent fuel reprocessing program.

After a recent opinion piece, facts need to once again be clarified. To this date only a minor fraction of separated uranium has actually been recovered by reprocessing from spent nuclear fuel. And apparently, there are no expectations that this may change in the near future.

Transport of radioactive waste to an interim storage facility near the German town of Gorleben from a reprocessing plant in La Hague in France has been cancelled for the coming year, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on Tuesday.