“The basic problem with nuclear waste is that no one knows what to do with it. There’s no way to destroy or detoxify it like you can with some chemical waste.”
-Center for Health, Environment and Justice
Yes, there is; it’s called a fast-spectrum nuclear reactor.
Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Fuel Cycle, Waste
Posted on December 27, 2006 by Stewart Peterson |
Or just vitrify the waste (not the uranium/plutonium - use that for power generation) and throw it in the deep ocean. It will do absolutely nothing and be harmless in 500 years even if retrieved.
OK, people may think this concept is a Bad Thing, but that is a scale error. Spent fuel is such a relatively tiny quantity and the oceans are so deep and huge that we cannot harm them in this manner. Of course we can and have harmed the oceans in lots of other ways, for example fertilizer runoff. That is why people even have the concern that this waste disposal route may not be sensible, and I applaud that concern. Once the risk is properly assessed, however, it is emphatically a viable option.
Well, obviously, it would just use the actinides.
And it’s not like there aren’t useful fission products, either, but they wouldn’t be used in the reactor, just extracted.