After about 5 years in a cooling pond, the spent fuel is radioactively and thermally cool enough to handle, and it can be moved to dry storage casks or reprocessed.

And many nuclear power plants still operating have expanding fields of storage casks and no place to ship them.

Will you have to build storage casks?

His eyes fixed sorrowfully upon the remains of the cracked-open storage casks.

The wastes would stay where they now are, in scores of spent-fuel pools and hundreds of storage casks, and the department would pay the storage costs, in exchange for the utilities' dropping their suits.

The common amber colour and some of the flavour of the matured whisky are acquired from the storage cask.

The system was designed by the now-defunct Duke Engineering of the United States, with the storage casks being manufactured locally.

A study last year by the commission suggested that breaching the storage cask of a spent fuel tank could create a radiation leak larger than the release from a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon.

But it becomes awkward and costly to guard and maintain the storage casks after the reactors themselves have been retired from service.

The Yucca project is now so far behind that some of the reactors have been retired and torn down, leaving nothing but a field of storage casks.