Maybe someone will come up with a plan..
In the meantime... 250,000 years of storage for plutonium.
From the day the last plutonium is produced..
Getting rid of all the plutonium
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link to www.thehindu.com]
[snip]
Japan is in a fix over its growing plutonium stockpile. Its plans to use the reprocessed fuelhas run into glitches
How is an atomic-powered island nation riddled with fault lines supposed to handle its nuclear waste? Part of the answer was supposed to come from this windswept village along Japan’s northern coast.
Good intentions
By hosting a high-tech facility that would convert spent fuel into a plutonium-uranium mix designed for the next generation of reactors, the town of Rokkasho was supposed to provide fuel while minimizing nuclear waste storage problems.
Hitch in the plan
Those ambitions are falling apart because years of attempts to build a “fast breeder” reactor, which would use the reprocessed fuel, appear to be ending in failure.
Rokkasho’s reprocessing plant extracted about 2 tons of plutonium from 2006 to 2010, but it has been plagued with mechanical problems, and its commercial launch has been delayed for years. The operator most recently delayed the official launch of its plutonium-extracting unit until next year.
A more permanent solution an underground repository that could keep nuclear waste safe for tens of thousands of years seems unlikely, if not impossible.
The government has been drilling a test hole since 2000 in central Japan to monitor impact from underground water and conduct other studies needed to develop a potential disposal facility. But no municipality in Japan has been willing to accept a long-term disposal site. “There is too much risk to keep highly radioactive waste 300 meters (1,000 feet) underground anywhere in Japan for thousands or tens of thousands of years,” said Takatoshi Imada, a professor at Tokyo Technical University’s Decision Science and Technology department.AP