Faff and fallout

AFTER the baking heat of a Virginia summer, the spent fuel pool at Surry Nuclear Power station, which sits on the James river in the south-east of the state, looks almost worth jumping into. That would be unwise. Some 25 feet below the surface of the clear blue water, the tops of radioactive fuel assemblies glisten. Every 18 months a new load of spent fuel—uranium pellets encased in zirconium—is removed from the power station’s two reactors and put into the pool, which absorbs the excess heat and some of the most dangerous (and short-lived) radiation. There it sits for five years, before being moved outside into concrete containers which look like huge washing machines.