Concentration, Concentration Now Begins

What happens when your standard operating procedure takes 100 tons of trash, including plastics, and turns them into 99 tons of water and carbon dioxide and 1 ton of ash, with the latter to be either buried or recycled as paving and building material?

A recipe for a magnificent nuclear mess.

Kashiwa stops operation of incinerator again as radioactive ash fills up storage
Mainichi Online

KASHIWA, Chiba -- The municipal government here suspended the operation of one of its main incinerators again on Jan. 5 as a storage facility at the waste disposal factory was filled up with incinerated ash contaminated with radioactive substances emitted from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant.

The operation of the city's Nambu (south) Clean Center had previously been suspended for about two months from last September. It is not clear when the city can resume operation of the incinerator this time because it has not been able to secure new space to store incinerated radioactive ash.

According to the Kashiwa Municipal Government, the Nambu Clean Center is storing about 200 metric tons (about 1,049 waste drums) of incinerated ash whose radiation levels are higher than the national limit of 8,000 becquerels per kilogram for landfill. The storage space there is now filled with drums, and there is also about 30 tons of incinerated ash left in the incinerator. (Link)

Funny, this reduction in volume thing, which worked so well at solving the nation's landfill limitation problem (and heats so many municipal swimming pools) seems to create, post-3/11, a staggering radioactive waste problem.

You have to admit, the affected incinerator has a reassuring, chirpy name.