UO22+ is the product of high-level radioactive waste or other wastes (i.e., low or intermediate level radioactive waste)? What the usual product of high-level radioactive waste?
The radioactive waste generated in mining and milling activities, especially those involving uranium and thorium (U, Th) ores, differs from that generated at nuclear power plants and most other industrial operations and medical facilities. Waste from mining and milling activities contains only low concentrations of radioactive material but it is generated in large volumes in comparison with waste from other facilities. The management methods to be employed are therefore different and will usually involve waste disposition on or near the surface, in the vicinity of the mine and/or mill sites. Furthermore, the waste will contain long lived radionuclides, and this has important implications for its management because of the long time periods for which control will be necessary.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1134_scr.pdf
Its low level radioactive waste popularly called tailing. Agrees with Glodeanu.
So-called High-Level-Waste (HLW) usually refers to spent nuclear fuel and the reprocessing solutions from the treatment of spent fuel from nuclear reactors, both power and Pu-production. Spent nuclear fuel from power reactors is kept for years in cooling pools to allow the short-lived isotopes to decay and permit the fuel to cool (become much less thermally hot). These fuel assemblies contain fission products, plutonium, and uranium in quantities that depend on the type of reactor and the cooling time. Initially the elements decay rapidly, because the majority of the radiation and heat comes from very short half-life fission products. The longest lived of these fission products is Cs-137 with a half-life of about 30 years. Of course, the transuranic isotopes, e.g. of Pu and Am, stay around for very long times.
Yucca Mountain was originally planned as the repository of spent fuel from US power reactors; I believe it would've serve this purpose well. However, as you know, over $15 billion has been spent developing and studying it, and its use is still a question of political debate.
There are over 300 enormous underground storage tanks on the Hanford Reservation that hold waste liquids from the decades of reprocessing spent fuel for plutonium production. There are both single- and double-walled tanks, more than a few of which are leaking and maybe moving dangerous chemical and radiological materials through the ground into the Columbia River. At present the solution is to include these materials in vitrified (glass) logs that would be stored in some underground repository. The original purpose of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, was to store these logs along with the very low activity wastes from decades of weapons production (gloves, Anti-C clothing, tools, etc.).
The 2014 incident at WIPP, when a drum of waste exploded in one of the storage panels, was a very minor event that I call "a molehill blown into a Mountain." It could have been cleaned up without closing the site and for very little cost. Unfortunately, the media, watchdog orgs. and other political forces forced the expenditure of over $500 million and three years to 'clean it up and reopen the facility.'
...the precise number of tanks located at the tank farms at Hanford in Richland, WA is 177 tanks at 54 million gallons located underground. Some of these tanks have leaked into the annulus and suspected beyond that point. Large numbers of the population in the Tri-cities area are experiencing below normal vitamin D levels; even though, our sun exposure here is said to be at least 300 days of sunshine. Could there be any correlation to the vitamin D deficiencies and the nuclear waste?
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