Radioactive Waste facts

While investigating facts about Radioactive Waste Management and Radioactive Waste Disposal, I found out little known, but curios details like:

Lake Karachay, a lake in Russia that was used as a radioactive waste dump, and has been described as the most polluted place on the planet. Standing on the shore for an hour would give you a lethal dose of radiation.

how radioactive waste is disposed?

In 1984, a pipe-fitter for a uranium core processing plant in Ohio was discovered in a processing furnace. At the time the plant was discovered dumping a massive amount of radioactive waste into the atmosphere. Co-workers of the deceased worker suspected he was a whistleblower and was murdered.

What radioactive waste look like?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what radioactive waste disposal. Here are 50 of the best facts about Radioactive Waste Definition and Radioactive Waste Management Limited I managed to collect.

what's radioactive waste?

The US government commissioned teams of artists and scientists to devise ways to warn humans 10,000 in the future of buried radioactive waste. One suggestion was to breed cats whose fur changed color when exposed to radiation, then immortalize the cats in song and legend.
In order to protect people in the future from radioactive waste, two philosophers proposed we genetically engineer cats to change color when exposed to radiation then create folklore and songs about the cats.
We can't dispose of nuclear waste in volcanoes because they aren't hot enough to split uranium's atomic nuclei and make it's radioactivity inert
The US Army admits it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard gas agent in the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, landmines and rockets, and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste.
The waste produced by coal power plants is more radioactive than that generated by nuclear power plants
Southern California Edison plans to bury 3.6 million pounds of lethal radioactive waste at the closed San Onofre nuclear power plant, about 100 feet from the ocean and just a few feet above the water table.
The most radioactive place on earth isn't Chernobyl or Fukushima, but a lake in the southern Urals that was once home the the Soviet's nuclear waste storage area. You could receive a lethal dose of radiation in 30 minutes just standing on the shore of the lake.
A top secret US Cold War project "Iceworm" to build nuclear missile sites under the Greenland ice sheet. Abandoned due to ice instability it was assumed the chemical and radioactive waste would remain under the ice forever. It's now predicted this waste will re-enter the environment in 2100.
Sunflowers can clean up radioactive waste. Certain radioactive isotopes are similar to the nutrients sunflowers normally need, so as they grow, they take up radiation out of the soil.
Half a million people in the Chelyabinsk province of Russia, the most polluted spot on Earth, have been irradiated exposing them to as much as 20 times the radiation suffered by the Chernobyl victims due to massive dumping of radioactive waste in water villagers drank and were never told

radioactive waste facts — What radioactive waste management?

Why radioactive waste is bad?

You can easily fact check why is radioactive waste so dangerous by examining the linked well-known sources.

In 1984, the creation of an atomic priesthood to generate a religious mythology involving genetically engineered cats that would glow in the presence of radioactive waste was proposed to warn future generations of the danger and location of radioactive waste in New Mexico.

The Manhattan Project beginning in the 1940s resulted in radioactive material being released into Columbia River. The nuclear reactors have leaked waste that is now traveling by groundwater to the river.

Radioactive waste and industrial waste such as acids and toxins often reach the ocean adding to the pollution and substantial loss of marine life.

The nuclear waste repository located in the Yucca Mountain, a terminal storage facility for spent nuclear reactor and radioactive waste, is in tuff and ignimbrite.

At a US nuclear test site in middle of the Pacific, radioactive waste was buried and covered with a concrete dome. Cleanup was so poor that the dome fails American standards for landfills for household trash and radiation inside the dome is dwarfed by the radiation in the sediments outside it. - source

What happens when you touch radioactive waste?

Thousands of tons of radioactive waste was illegally dumped near St. Louis, MO and now a growing underground fire threatens it.

How radioactive waste affects the environment?

Breeding cats that glow near radiation was one idea brought forward by the Department of Energy to protect future generations from radioactive waste.

The Human Interference Task Force, a group of academics and science fiction writers assembled by the US government to figure out how to reduce the likelihood of future humans unintentionally intruding on radioactive waste isolation systems.

Radioactive carbon from nuclear waste can be used to create diamond batteries that would last over 5000 years

In 1942, a company in St Louis, MO began processing radioactive material for use in the Manhattan Project. The waste was illegally dumped in a landfill in a residential area in St. Louis, and a SubSurface Smoldering Event (the landfill is on fire) is encroaching on the nuclear waste.

Interesting facts about radioactive waste

the 1961 Antarctic Treaty treaty (Article V) prohibits any nuclear explosions in Antarctica and the disposal of any radioactive waste material there

Somali rebels received weapons from an Italian Criminal Org. in return for allowing them to dump radioactive waste on their shores

Radioactive waste from oil and natural gas exploration and production is exempt from the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Resource Conservation and Recovery Act which guarantees oversight and enforcement of all hazardous materials from their production to disposal.

Following the end of numerous nuclear bomb testing during and after WW2, the United States filled a small atoll in the Marshall Islands with radioactive waste, seal it, and left. It's at sea level and has been leaking for decades.

People have been investigating the possibilities to dump radioactive waste into the Mariana Trench to have it pushed into the Earth's Mantle, but international law prohibits this.

How radioactive waste is produced?

After purposely polluting areas around Point Hope, Alaska, with radioactive waste, the residents spoke out, and the government decided not to detonate 3 nuclear bombs near the settlement to create a harbor.

The Hanford site of the Manhattan Project dumped hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive waste into the ground and Citizens downwind of the radioactive emissions reported increased rates of thyroid cancer as a result of the iodine releases.

The Hanford nuclear waste site - the largest in the US - produced 53 million US gallons of high-level radioactive waste, 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, and 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater beneath the site

A Superfund dump site in Missouri that contains radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project that is near a smoldering underground fire, is on a major fault line and sits iin the Ohio River flood plain.

During the Korean War General MacArthur proposed a strategy of creating a barrier of radioactive waste to keep North Korea from pushing back into South Korea

There are possibly hundreds of barrels of radioactive toxic wasted dumped in the Mediterranean and buried in Somalia, and to this day nobody knows where.

One way to warn future civilizations about radioactive waste would be to genetically engineer a breed of cat that changes color in its presence then immortalize them in song and legend.

There is a giant pile of radioactive waste sitting at an abandoned military base in Utah

Enough radioactive waste sits on Cape Cod that if it burned, the resulting fire could send across New England many times the amount of radioactive cesium-137 released in the Chernobyl disaster, and that due to a lack of waste storage nationwide the situation is common across American reactors.

Stericycle - a hazardous waste incineration company - is under investigation by the State of Utah, for burning radioactive waste far above EPA allowance near an elementary school. They also falsified their audit records to look as if they were following protocol.

There is a subterranean fire in a landfill in St. Louis that is heading toward an area containing radioactive waste

Lake Karachay in Russia is so radioactive that when scientists measured the activity in the lake in 1990 they found that the radiation would give you a lethal dose in an hour. The sediment bed is almost entirely high level radioactive waste.

Sunflowers are sometimes used to clean up nuclear waste and radioactive soil. Sunflowers actually pick up radioactive isotopes, so as they grow, they literally suck the radiation up out of the soil. The flowers and stems are then radioactive, so no word on if they glow at night.

Lake Karachay in Russia is so polluted with radioactive waste that being there for 30 minutes would give you a lethal dose of radiation

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