Correct. Three were killed in the SL-1 accident in Idaho (1961). There is some debate on whether it was an accident or deliberate act (one operator manually pulled out one of the control rods, triggering the event.
As for the rest, the sooner they get Yucca Mountain online, the faster they can put high level waste in proper very-long term storage. GAO should mention all the people who have done everything in their power to block Yucca Mountain.
Why don’t we reprocess the waste like France does?
I read an interesting proposal a while back that made a lot of sense to me (I think it was in Scientific American)
They proposed filling large, durable containers (that look like 16” shells from a battleship) with radioactive waste, hauling them out the abyssal plains that are scattered throughout the oceans of the world, and dumping them in.
If they are 10-12,000 feet at that point, the “shell” would reach up to 200 mph and plow into the gunk at the bottom. It would penetrate hundreds of feet into the gooey, mucky clay that is found there. These areas are geologically stable (extremely so) and the clay there has been found to have electrostatic properties that would cause it to completely encapsulate the waste.
Of course, we could just continue to let these vats of stuff just sit there in places like Hanford.
We should be researching and investing in modular, mass-built, scalable pebble bed reactor technology. The Chinese are going to do it. We should do it faster and better, make money and become more energy independent.
Of course, there is this incident as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin
I recall reading somewhere that this guy would demonstrate to other personnel working on the Manhattan project how separating the top of the beryllium sphere with screwdrivers would cause the fissile reaction to accelerate, and he would demonstrate it with a GM counter by the side. He would pry the thing up ever so slightly, and the GM counter would begin to go wild. I think Feynman talked about this in one of his books, and thought the guy was crazy to do it.
But my memory is a bit hazy on this...