Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Strontium-90 is a radioactive byproduct produced by nuclear reactors used in nuclear power. It is a component of nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel. The half life is long, around 30 years, and is classified as high-level waste. [14] Researchers have looked at the bioaccumulation of strontium by Scenedesmus spinosus in simulated wastewater.
Nuclear fallout is the distribution of radioactive contamination by the 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions that took place from the 1950s to the 1980s. In nuclear accidents, a measure of the type and amount of radioactivity released, such as from a reactor containment failure, is known as the source term.
The high short-term radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel is primarily from fission products with short half-life.The radioactivity in the fission product mixture is mostly due to short-lived isotopes such as 131 I and 140 Ba, after about four months 141 Ce, 95 Zr/ 95 Nb and 89 Sr constitute the largest contributors, while after about two or three years the largest share is taken by 144 Ce/ 144 ...
There have been proposals for reactors that consume nuclear waste and transmute it to other, less-harmful or shorter-lived, nuclear waste. In particular, the integral fast reactor was a proposed nuclear reactor with a nuclear fuel cycle that produced no transuranic waste and, in fact, could consume transuranic waste. It proceeded as far as ...
129 I is one of seven long-lived fission products.It is primarily formed from the fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear reactors.Significant amounts were released into the atmosphere by nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and 1960s, by nuclear reactor accidents and by both military and civil reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.
Uranium's radioactivity can present health and environmental issues in the case of nuclear waste produced by nuclear power plants or weapons manufacturing. Uranium is weakly radioactive and remains so because of its long physical half-life (4.468 billion years for uranium-238).
Nuclear power plants in normal operation emit less radioactivity than coal power plants. [ 69 ] [ 70 ] Unlike coal-fired or oil-fired power generation, nuclear power generation does not directly produce any sulfur dioxide , nitrogen oxides , or mercury (pollution from fossil fuels is blamed for 24,000 early deaths each year in the U.S. alone ...
The 1986 nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl was categorized as a Level 7 accident, which is the highest possible ranking on the INES scale, due to widespread environmental and health effects and "external release of a significant fraction of reactor core inventory". [57]