The student voice of the Ohio State University | Tuesday, February 11, 2020
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Year 140, Issue No. 8
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Freshman Lyle Yost capitalizes on potential, strives for Olympics ON PAGE 12
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US nuclear waste storage model incomplete, Ohio State researchers suggest
Professor’s use of racial slur in class prompts student letter, university review
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Winner of Best Picture has potential to inspire reflection on worldwide policies and diplomacy ON PAGE 6
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A nuclear waste canister, made from copper, will be used at Finland’s nuclear waste repository at the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant.
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Incoming defensive coordinator learned lessons from NFL, ready for Buckeye return ON PAGE 12
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JACK LONG Special Projects Director long.1684@osu.edu Over the next several decades, the amount of United States nuclear waste is expected to be more than 150,000 tons, and the proposed containers to hold some of the waste might corrode. Ohio State researchers suggest the canisters proposed to be used to store nuclear waste will corrode faster than originally thought, releasing highly toxic radioactive material into the environment, according to a study published Jan. 27 in Nature Materials. Xiaolei Guo, a research asso-
ciate in the materials science and engineering department, said previous models for predicting corrosion were incomplete because they didn’t take into account how the rusting canisters would interact with high-level nuclear waste. “None of the previous studies considered this kind of corrosion interactions,” Guo said. “They have not considered the waste package as an entire system.” High-level waste is the most toxic radioactive waste and the byproduct of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, according to the websites of the U.S. Government Accountability Office and the Department of Energy.
The U.S. has more than 100,000 tons of nuclear waste that need to be disposed of safely, and about 15,000 tons are high level. Most of the waste — including spent nuclear fuel used at power plants — is stored where it was generated, according to the GAO website. In 1987, the U.S. began looking at a mountain 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as a place to store the country’s nuclear waste, but a facility has not been completed. Stainless steel canisters containing the waste would be mined
into tunnels 1,000 feet below the Yucca Mountain top, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website. The nuclear waste would be processed and mixed with glass or ceramics to make “waste forms” before being placed into the canisters, Guo said. The corrosion-resistant glass and ceramic materials would prevent the release of radioactive elements into the environment. When the packages go into the ground, heat from the waste NUCLEAR WASTE CONTINUES ON 4