Five S&T Policy Fellows or alumni took the stage at the Story Collider and Resource Fair to share their stories.

The crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear electricity generating facility, touched off when a tsunami hit northern Japan, has achieved the “key milestone” of cold shutdown where the temperature within the damaged reactors is below the boiling point of water, said Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Despite a general consensus that highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel should be stored in underground repositories, finding appropriate sites for such repositories has been so politically fraught that none exist worldwide, panelists at a AAAS-organized Capitol Hill briefing explained.

With about 240,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel in storage at the end of 2009 and approximately 10,500 tons of spent fuel generated annually, the need for a long-term solution for spent fuel storage is growing quickly.