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PamW

(1,825 posts)
8. The storage problem is answered.
Sat Mar 3, 2012, 08:14 PM
Mar 2012

The USA could do what other nations that have nuclear power are doing; reprocess and recycle. Spent fuel is 96% U-238. That U-238 is no more radioactive than the day it was dug out of the ground. Therefore, if we separate it from the rest of the waste, then we could put it right back into the ground where we got it from - no harm, no foul. That reduces the amount of "waste" by a factor of 25.

The problem, of course, is the long-lived actinides like Plutonium. However, the actinides are burnable fuel for a reactor. What would you do with unburned wood when you cleaned out your fireplace? You'd put it right back into the fireplace to be burned on the next cycle. If you kept doing that, you would only have ashes to dispose of.

That's exactly what other nations do. Read how this works in the following interview for PBS's Frontline with nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till, at the time, Associate Director of Argonne National Laboratory:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

It's the actinides like Plutonium that have the muti-thousand year lifetimes that make nuclear waste so difficult to dispose of. However, if you burn the actinides like Plutonium as Dr. Till suggests (analogous to recycling unburned wood in your fireplace), then you don't have long-lived isotopes in your waste stream. You only have short-lived isotopes as Dr. Till details.

We only have to do what the scientists originally intended, as other countries do. You don't see France digging out a mountain in the Alps for its waste, do you? Their now shorter lived waste is stored at the La Hague facility until it is no longer dangerous.

PamW

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