The Nuclear Industry's Latest Dangerous Gambit

The Trouble with High Burn-Up Nuclear Fuel

by ACE HOFFMAN

Spent nuclear fuel is hot stuff.  It’s thermally hot — about 400 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s not residual heat from when the fuel was in the reactor, it’s decay heat from fission products with relatively short half-lives – from days or weeks to about 30 years for most of them (most isotopes of iodine, cesium, strontium, etc.).  The fuel will stay well above the boiling point of water for centuries or even millennia, although the temperature will keep dropping over time.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/27/the-trouble-with-high-burn-up-nuclear-fuel/?utm_source=feedly