Linda Gunter is an international specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a Washington-based environmental group . "The nuclear waste problem has never been solved and there is a strong possibility that it will never be solved
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Nuclear waste is a solved technical problem - recycle all the long-lived actinides
like plutonium and burn them down to short-lived fission products.
See the following from nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till of Argonne National Lab,
courtesy of PBS's Frontline:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Q: The fission products.
A: Fission products. But none of the long-lived toxic elements like plutonium and americium or curium, the so-called manmade elements. They're the long-lived toxic ones. And they're recycled back into the reactor ... and work every bit as well as plutonium.
Q: So they go in, and then those are broken into fission products, or some of it is. Right?
A: Yes.
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.
PamW