Since the first nuclear power plant went online in the US in December of 1957, administrators have been scrambling for a solution to the inevitable and decidedly nasty waste that comes out at the end of the process. Almost seven decades have gone by, but an elegant solution has remained elusive — due to the inconvenient fact that the waste is horrendously toxic, a potential target for terrorists, and needs to be stored securely for thousands of years.

New reporting by Reuters reveals the Trump administration’s latest attempt to solve the nuclear waste dilemma. A fresh directive by the Department of Energy is asking individual US states to volunteer to host a new “permanent geological repository” for spent fuel rods.

States wouldn’t be taking on the burden without any reward. The upside would be potential economic growth in the form of vast investments and “thousands of jobs,” in an era when layoffs and austerity are taking a heavy toll.

Conventional wisdom holds that nuclear power plants — outside of ultra-rare disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima — are perfectly safe for nearby residents.

But a massive new study conducted by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has thrown a monkey wrench in that narrative by finding an alarming link between nuclear facilities and cancer. After gathering and analyzing nearly two decades worth of data, the Harvard team found higher rates of cancer mortality in communities that lived closer to nuclear power plants. And the closer that a community was to a nuclear plant, the higher the cancer mortality rates.

The findings, described in a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, are not definitive, and do not, on their own, prove that the nuclear plants caused the bump in cancer deaths. One of the study’s drawbacks was that it did not factor in direct radiation measurements for each facility, and assumed that all nuclear plants would have the same impact.

High detail 3d animations and explanations of the inner workings of Chornobyl nuclear power station. Showing why it was so vulnerable to blowing itself up and how it was different from western reactors.

Illustrated here are:
The absence a reactor pressure vessel and containment structure.
A size comparison with the Fukushima reactor and its containment layers.
The uranium fuel assemblies and graphite bricks.
The control room location.
Close up views of the explosion crater with the reactor lid nicknamed “Elena” shown flying through the air.
The temporary radiation shield “sarcophagus” and the final permanent confinement arch.

Chernobyl was a nuclear power station in Ukraine, Soviet Union. Its reactor blew up on Saturday 26 April 1986 at 1:23 am.

A public lecture on the history, physics, and lessons to be learned from the Chernobyl disaster given by a real-life nuclear engineer, me (Ethan Chaleff).

Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, or RTGs (sometimes incorrectly called Nuclear Batteries) are usually utilized in deep space exploration.
But during the 1970s and 1980s, during the height of The Cold War, The Soviet Union manufactured over 2500 terrestrial RTGs to power its unmanned Lighthouses and Radio Navigation Beacons on the Northern Arctic seaboard, or deployed in the USSR’s remotest hinterland rural regions.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, all these highly dangerous, intensely radioactive devices were simply abandoned in situ, and left to rot for the next 2 decades…. until they started to kill people in the 21st century, with Acute Radiation Exposure. This finally caused the international community to start to take the hazard they posed seriously.

This 30 min video is a documentary on the reasons the Soviet Engineers chose to use dangerous Radioisotope Thermal Generators to power equipment, the technology and nuclear physics behind them, with the help of Matt Damon in the movie ‘ The Martian’ (2015) .
We explore some Abandoned Places in the Former Soviet Union that are still home to decaying RTGS , such as Aniva Lighthouse, on Russia’s Sakhalin Island.