Nuclear waste: the radioactive material left over from numerous medical, industrial and military applications can persist for millions of years before its atomic structure decays into a more stable element. Although the long-term storage of toxic byproducts can mostly keep them out of harm’s way for hundreds of thousands ofread more
An abandoned repository of over 3.1 million cubic feet (87,782 cubic meters) of radioactive debris left over from nuclear testing in the South Pacific is in danger of being cracked open by rising ocean levels, threatening to spill large amounts of the nuclear waste contained within—including highly-toxic plutonium—into the surroundingread more
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has announced that they plan dump 777,000 tons of tritium-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean, as part of their multi-billion dollar recovery efforts at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The total amount of radioactive material involved would be approximately 115 times the annual safety limit for this type of discharge. The move has yet to be approved by the Japanese government, although TEPCO says that they still plan to go ahead with the decision.
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