4 ms·

Yeah I'm not a chemist but it always strikes me as odd that "hazardous nuclear waste" cannot be recycled. Even now there are ways to capture carbon waste (eg, g

Yeah I'm not a chemist but it always strikes me as odd that "hazardous nuclear waste" cannot be recycled. Even now there are ways to capture carbon waste (eg, genetically-engineered carbon-eating bacteria et al). I find it hard to believe that we won't have a way to capture radiation in the future, or (even better) utilize the radiation-producing materials in subsequent reactions.

bsder 10y ago
> I find it hard to believe that we won't have a way to capture radiation in the future The problem is the energy density. Nuclear reactions are soooo much more energetic than chemical that it's ridiculous. "Capturing" a gamma ray is really hard. Beta particles are "easier", but you still have to handle a LOT of them. And cracking the nucleus apart is what you were doing in the first place generating energy from it. The best bet is to use reactor technology that actually burns up the waste almost completely rather than leaving 95% of it intact. The problem is that the superpowers like their reactors that can give Plutonium. Until the a country decides it wants power rather than weapons and designs a reactor for that, we're going to continue all this political dancing.
gh02t 10y ago
It can be, quite effectively. Nuclear waste is more or less a solved issue from a technical standpoint, with the caveat that there are a lot of gotchas but the general concept is well understood and several other countries do it to some degree. With regard to the USA, we don't do it for two reasons. First is political, which that the recycling process is highly susceptible to weapons proliferation. While that's not a problem in the US per se (since we're a treaty nuclear weapons state), there was a ban put on reprocessing in the US because we didn't want it to become widespread due to the proliferation risk. Remember that pretty much all policy regarding nuclear energy was totally subservient to policy regarding nuclear weapons up until like the 1990's. Second is economic. Uranium is cheap as chips and it'd require a big investment to move to reprocessing. We will probably do it some day though, the general sentiment in the nuclear community is that reprocessing is a much better route than ultra long-term geological repositories.

bsder 10y ago

> I find it hard to believe that we won't have a way to capture radiation in the future The problem is the energy density. Nuclear reactions are soooo much more energetic than chemical that it's ridiculous. "Capturing" a gamma ray is really hard. Beta particles are "easier", but you still have to handle a LOT of them. And cracking the nucleus apart is what you were doing in the first place generating energy from it. The best bet is to use reactor technology that actually burns up the waste almost completely rather than leaving 95% of it intact. The problem is that the superpowers like their reactors that can give Plutonium. Until the a country decides it wants power rather than weapons and designs a reactor for that, we're going to continue all this political dancing.

gh02t 10y ago

It can be, quite effectively. Nuclear waste is more or less a solved issue from a technical standpoint, with the caveat that there are a lot of gotchas but the general concept is well understood and several other countries do it to some degree. With regard to the USA, we don't do it for two reasons. First is political, which that the recycling process is highly susceptible to weapons proliferation. While that's not a problem in the US per se (since we're a treaty nuclear weapons state), there was a ban put on reprocessing in the US because we didn't want it to become widespread due to the proliferation risk. Remember that pretty much all policy regarding nuclear energy was totally subservient to policy regarding nuclear weapons up until like the 1990's. Second is economic. Uranium is cheap as chips and it'd require a big investment to move to reprocessing. We will probably do it some day though, the general sentiment in the nuclear community is that reprocessing is a much better route than ultra long-term geological repositories.