Chernobyll, Japan accidents - this one is hair rsianing and should be viewwed with care Hisashi Ouchi, the Victim of Fatal Radiation Kept Alive for 83 Days
We have already reached capacity in terms of storage, no more after 2016
https://teia.tw/en/content/10924
But the last time the government chose a dumping site, its actions were deemed deceitful. From 1982 to 1996, about 100,000 barrels of nuclear waste were stored at a facility off Taiwan’s southeast coast on Lanyu Island. Prior consent was not sought from Lanyu’s aboriginal residents, and no notice was given to them of the nuclear waste stored there.
Originally, the plan was to dispose of the toxic radioactive material in a nearby ocean trench, but this idea was abandoned when dumping nuclear waste in the ocean was prohibited by international agreement after 1993.
After years of protests, the government promised 12 years ago that the radioactive waste will be removed from Lanyu as soon as a permanent storage facility is available. To date, the government has not honored this promise.
About 20,000 bundles of fuel rods have been used by the nation’s three nuclear power plants to date, and existing storage facilities are already full and sealed off, he said, adding that Taiwan is not suitable for nuclear power as there is insufficient land to properly handle nuclear waste.
The tsunami and resultant disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in 2011 forced the evacuation of people living within a 250km radius of the plant, he said.
If a similar disaster were to occur at the Jinshan plant, it would require a 1,000km-radius evacuation, given the amount of fuel rods stored at the plant, he said.
But we are in good company: US has a similar problem.
Because no permanent repository for spent fuel exists in the United States, reactor owners have kept spent fuel at the reactor sites. As the amount of spent fuel has increased, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authorized many power plant owners to increase the amount in their storage pools to as much as five times what they were designed to hold. As a result, virtually all U.S. spent fuel pools have been “re-racked” to hold spent fuel assemblies at densities that approach those in reactor cores. In order to prevent the spent fuel from going critical, the spent fuel assemblies are placed in metal boxes whose walls contain neutron-absorbing boron.
What are the risks and vulnerabilities?
If a malfunction, a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack causes the water to leak from the pool or the cooling system to stop working, the rods will begin to heat the remaining water in the pool, eventually causing it to boil and evaporate. If the water that leaks or boils away cannot be replenished quickly enough, the water level will drop, exposing the fuel rods.
Once the fuel is uncovered, it could become hot enough to cause the metal cladding encasing the uranium fuel to rupture and catch fire, which in turn could further heat up the fuel until it suffers damage. Such an event could release large amounts of radioactive substances, such as cesium-137, into the environment.
