As a rule, geological disposal is considered a safe method for final disposal of high-level radioactive waste. However, some long-lived fission products like 99Tc and 129I contained in spent nuclear fuel are highly mobile as less sorbing anionic species in the subsurface environment and can mainly cause exposure dose to the ecosystem by emission of beta rays in the hundreds of keV range. Therefore, if these two nuclides can be separated and converted with high efficiency into radioactively unharmful nuclides, this would have a positive effect on disposal safety. One candidate method is to transmute these two nuclides in nuclear reactors into short-lived nuclides or into stable nuclides. For this purpose, it is necessary to evaluate which reactor type is more efficient in burning these two nuclides. In this study, the simulation results of nuclear transmutation of 99Tc and 129I in light water reactor (PWR), heavy water reactor (CANDU) and fast neutron reactor (SFR, MET-1000) are compared and discussed.

The freshwater algae were collected at reservoirs and small ponds in Gyeonggi-do and Jeju-do on June 2016. Four species of Korean previously unrecorded algae were collected in domestic fresh waters: Coelastrum rugosum, Cosmarium baccatum, Cosmarium norimbergense and Staurastrum connatum var. pseudoamericanum. The morphological characteristics of the four taxa identified in this study were showed mostly similar to the characteristics of the previously reported characteristics. However, Cosmarium baccatum was larger than the previously recorded species and Staurastrum connatum var. pseudoamericanum was wider than the previously recorded species.

We have revisited the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey (ACSVCS), a Hubble Space Telescope program to obtain ACS/WFC g and z bands imaging for a sample of 100 early-type galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. In this study, we examine 51 nucleated early-type galaxies in the ACSVCS in order to look into the relationship between the photometric and structural properties of stellar nuclei and their host galaxies. We morphologically dissect galaxies into five classes. We note that (1) the stellar nuclei of dwarf early-type galaxies (dS0, dE, and dE,N) are generally fainter and bluer with g > 18.95 and (g-z) < 1.40 compared to some brighter and redder counterparts of the ellipticals (E) and lenticular galaxies (S0), (2) the g-band half-light radii of stellar nuclei of all dwarf early-type galaxies (dS0, dE, and dE,N) are smaller than 20 pc and their average is about 4 pc, and (3) the colors of red stellar nuclei with (g - z) > 1.40 in bright ellipticals and lenticular galaxies are bluer than their host galaxies colors. We also show that most of the unusually "red" stellar nuclei with (g-z) > 1.54 in the ACSVCS are the central parts of bright ellipticals and lenticular galaxies. Furthermore, we present multi photometric band color - color plots that can be used to break the age-metallicity degeneracy particularly by inclusion of the thermally pulsing-asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) phases of stellar evolution in the stellar population models.