3 ms·

What a waste of good waste.

• ctdonath 7y ago
  Indeed. What is "waste" now may be quite usable in the not-far future. Analogy: every time I cook using aluminum foil, I cringe at throwing out a usable wad of the metal solely because there's some charred food waste on it, when I presume near-future tech will easily reclaim this useful element. Would be nice to have something between "trash" and "recycling" - pre-sorting junk so that future people have a not-unmanageable repository of materials they can work with even though we can't. Likewise nuclear "waste" - it's still active material, generating energy, just needing a few more years/decades before we can use it. Even today we have (or soon will) reactors which "eat" waste from older designs. Put what we have in stable long-term containers, and making odds on when it can be used.
  • m4rtink 7y ago
    I'm not sure aluminium is a good example - while your foil is high purity aluminium, large part of Earth is aluminium bound with other elements. Traditionally the main issue was separating it from those. It's questionable storing all this for later would be more efficient, even with higher purity, than just raffine it from rocks at industrial scale.
  • perilunar 7y ago
    Why are you throwing out aluminium foil? Wrap it into a ball, and when the ball gets large enough, put it in the recycling bin.
    • ctdonath 7y ago
      They don't want it with burned/crusted/rotting food on it.
• m4rtink 7y ago
  Indeed, most of the regular nuclear was can still be used as fissile material, if someone bothered to reprocess it. It also contans a lot of various useful (even valuable) elements, created by permutation during fission. The amount of realy useless & dangerous is very small. Separating it from the rest is the issue, both economical & political. Still seems like a better option to solve than trying to find a mythical ideal permanent storage place.