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Robert’s Substack · May 3, 2026

Spent nuclear fuel sleeping safely

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Robert Hargraves · Robert’s Substack

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              From Google Earth.

Connecticut Yankee 600 MW nuclear power plant generated power for 29 years.

The spent fuel assemblies have slept 30 years in steel canisters in concrete casks.

If that 600 x 29 MW-years of energy were generated by coal and you stacked the ash on that concrete pad, the ash would be a mile high.

A pad-size stack of crumbling solar panels used to generate that much energy would also be about a mile high. Old wind turbine blades would pile up this high, too.

The heavy casks are not dangerous nor useful to terrorists. I don’t see guard towers.

As the fission product radiation decays away the fuel can be safely repacked into fewer, newer, smaller casks.

After a few centuries the remaining uranium and plutonium can be reused. All could be disposed of the same way lead, cadmium, arsenic, or other metals are.

Nuclear power is the most environmentally friendly energy source.

Read the original on hargraves.substack.com

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