Page 280 - Challenges in Corrosion Costs Causes Consequences and Control(2015)

258 CORROSION CONTROL AND PREVENTION

permanent underground storage. The most common materials of construction of stor-
age containers are steel and concrete. The wall thickness of the packaging is generally
thick in comparison to the contained volume.
Corrosion is a form of material degradation that results when moisture or water
comes into contact with the packaging materials. A corrosion failure may not result
in a large release of nuclear waste and radiation; however, a leak would be considered
potentially hazardous and therefore unacceptable. At present, nuclear waste is stored
at temporary locations, including water basins in nuclear power plants and at dry
locations aboveground. Deep underground storage in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, has
been proposed as a permanent storage solution.
The vast majority of nuclear shipments are very small in size (0.45 kg or 1 lb) and
total 2.8 million shipments per year. Spent fuel shipments weigh 0.5–1.0 metric tons
for truck shipments and up to 10 metric tons for rail shipments. In addition, protective
lead shipping casks for containment of the spent fuel weigh many more additional
tons. Corrosion is not a problem in the transportation of nuclear waste because of the
stringent package requirements and short duration of transport. However, corrosion
is an important problem in the design of casks used for permanent storage.
Table 4.26 indicates the volume of low-level waste received in US disposal facil-
ities.
In 2000, interim storage facilities for nuclear waste were numerous. Low-level
waste can be solid or liquid. It is stored “dry” aboveground or relatively shallow
3
underground. At present, there are a total of 250,000 m of buried low-level waste and
3
106,000 m stored aboveground in the US Department of Energy (DOE) facilities.
The cost of dry storage is reported to be $1.2 million per cask.
High-level waste consisting of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants is
generally stored in water basins at the location of the nuclear plants. Nearly 30,000
metric tons of nuclear waste is stored at the reactor sites. Both dry and wet basin
storage are meant to be temporary solutions. A long-term storage repository is being
considered.
Two concrete basins were built in 1951 for the temporary storage of nuclear fuel
produced at DOE’s Hanford site. Storage of the nuclear waste at this site was planned

TABLE 4.26 Volume of Low-Level Waste Received in the US Disposal Facilities
Year Volume of Waste (Cubic Meters) × 1000

1985 75.4
1986 51.1
1987 52.2
1988 40.4
1989 46.1
1990 32.4
1991 38.8
1992 49.4
1993 22.1
1994 24.3