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Still waiting for an answer what to do with the waste. Beside A) dumping in the ground and hope for the best B) some magic tech will pop which will solve the
by Bombthecat 7y ago
Still waiting for an answer what to do with the waste. Beside
A) dumping in the ground and hope for the best
B) some magic tech will pop which will solve the issue.
- adrianN 7y agoBreeder reactors reduce the waste by more than 95% and leave only isotopes that decay much faster.
- pizza234 7y agoIn 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries"
- adrianN 7y agoYou should also cite the reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion They apparently don't make economic sense since Uranium is cheap, and there is a risk of proliferation. It's not the case that the technology doesn't work.
- Luc 7y agoIt's pretty benign as waste goes. It just sits there and gets less dangerous as time goes on. You could just keep it in a bunker and pay a crew to dust it off and repackage it when needed for the next 1000 years. But no, for some reason it needs to be taken out of the environment, like in the famous Australian sketch...
- pizza234 7y agoI'll be convinced when I'll start to see people campaigning for building storage facilities in their neighbourhoods, rather than generic claims that storage facilities are as safe as it can be.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoThat's a pretty strange statement. Lots of industrial facilities meet very high standards of safety, say for instance battery and electric vehicle factories, yet we still place them out in the desert? Nobody is campaigning to build those in their neighbourhoods?
- pizza234 7y agoThat was a semi-sarcastic reference to NIMBY. Specifically, I believe that the same people who state that nuclear waste sites are Perfectly Safe™ would actually reject that idea if the potential problems would affect them personally (figuratively, if the site was in their neighbourhood).
- C14L 7y agoAnd, if technology keeps improving, at some point there will be tech to easily recycle all that "waste". Because it still contains energy.
- hef19898 7y agoThey are doing that at Sellafield in the UK. Which is in itself pretty ugly business. EDIT: The business is ugly, not the fact that it is in the UK.
- redwall_hp 7y agoIf coal emissions were a nice convenient solid that could be stashed in a box somewhere, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
- wil421 7y agoHold it underground until we can do a Futurama and blast it into the sun. /end sarcasm. Didn’t work out well for Futurama.
- ars 7y ago> Still waiting for an answer what to do with the waste. Nuclear fuel reprocessing plus breeder reactors. They burn virtually all of the usable power in uranium leaving little waste behind. It's an economic problem, and an arms control problem, not a technological one.
- imtringued 7y agoHonestly the waste problem isn't significant except in terms of economic costs. In my eyes the problem is that we try to shove all the waste into a single location. Letting 100% of the waste leak into ground water is terrifying but what if it was spread over 100 locations? Well it sucks but at least each location has 1% of the total risk.