6 ms·

I still don't understand why nuclear waste needs long terms storage. With Burner reactors you can produce waste that only needs storage for 100s of years, not 1

by nickik 6y ago

I still don't understand why nuclear waste needs long terms storage. With Burner reactors you can produce waste that only needs storage for 100s of years, not 1000s. Its easy to store and manage, basically it can just stand in a field, doing nothing for 100 years. The 'waste' is not waste, its material we might want to use in the future and putting it into some 10000 years storage is idiotic.

p_l 6y ago
The reason why you don't see much of fast-neutron "burners" is that NPT is essentially an empty shell, and you have to be lucky to survive putting up so-called plutonium economy - and the "survive" part might be literal. It all goes back to Indian nuclear program, AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. Now that climate crisis pushes for more solutions to power, you get absurd proposals from USA like reactors with remote disable on them controlled from USA.
- opo 6y ago
  >...AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. No, India appears to ave gotten plutonium from a small research reactor, not a CANDU reactor (though it was provided by Canada): >...The test used plutonium produced in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor, and raised concerns that nuclear technology supplied for peaceful purposes could be diverted to weapons purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest... >...CIRUS (Canada India Reactor Utility Services)[1][2][3] was a research reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay near Mumbai, India. CIRUS was supplied by Canada in 1954, but used heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States. It was the second nuclear reactor to be built in India. It was modeled on the Canadian Chalk River National Research X-perimental (NRX) reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor

by nickik 6y ago

p_l 6y ago

The reason why you don't see much of fast-neutron "burners" is that NPT is essentially an empty shell, and you have to be lucky to survive putting up so-called plutonium economy - and the "survive" part might be literal. It all goes back to Indian nuclear program, AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. Now that climate crisis pushes for more solutions to power, you get absurd proposals from USA like reactors with remote disable on them controlled from USA.

opo 6y ago
>...AFAIK, where reprocessing of plutonium from CANDU reactors was used to bootstrap nuclear warhead production. No, India appears to ave gotten plutonium from a small research reactor, not a CANDU reactor (though it was provided by Canada): >...The test used plutonium produced in the Canadian-supplied CIRUS reactor, and raised concerns that nuclear technology supplied for peaceful purposes could be diverted to weapons purposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest... >...CIRUS (Canada India Reactor Utility Services)[1][2][3] was a research reactor at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay near Mumbai, India. CIRUS was supplied by Canada in 1954, but used heavy water (deuterium oxide) supplied by the United States. It was the second nuclear reactor to be built in India. It was modeled on the Canadian Chalk River National Research X-perimental (NRX) reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIRUS_reactor