9 ms·

Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast. The problem is: safe storage is difficult to realize and extremely expensive.

by _ph_ 4y ago

Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast. The problem is: safe storage is difficult to realize and extremely expensive. It needs to be kept safe for many millenia.

mlyle 4y ago
> Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast. Wellll.. we have really good technology to reprocess the worst and reuse it as fuel. The problem is, we don't do it, because this is a whole lot like what you'd do to make nuclear weapons and there are proliferation and security concerns. > It needs to be kept safe for many millenia. The vast majority of the risk disappears in a few hundred years. Very radioactive also means "decaying quickly". Compare to other industrial byproducts that stay equivalently nasty for tens of thousands of years and more readily dissolve in groundwater.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  No, we don't have a "good technology". Yes, breeder reactors exist, but e.g. France has given up the technology, the UK has one? The problem is, that this technology is no where economic and breeder reactors are really challenging technology.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    I didn't say anything about breeder reactors. In many jurisdictions, PUREX is routinely used to extract remaining fuel and chemically segregate the worst daughter products. A lot of the actinides can be burnt up in a normal reactor, like 239Pu. Of course, in the long term, transmutation of LLFPs into precious metals is interesting, as is burning up more of the waste in e.g. fast reactors.
concordDance 4y ago
How safe do you actually need it to be? Glass it and chuck it onto the abyssal plain. Watch as the ecological damage is less than a millionth (literally, not hyperbolicly) as damaging as ocean acidification caused by CO2. It really isn't hard, just unintuitive thanks to movies like Godzilla and shouted against by environmentalists who refuse to quantify the damage.

by _ph_ 4y ago

mlyle 4y ago

> Well, lacking any reasonable technology to process it, we have to store the wast. Wellll.. we have really good technology to reprocess the worst and reuse it as fuel. The problem is, we don't do it, because this is a whole lot like what you'd do to make nuclear weapons and there are proliferation and security concerns. > It needs to be kept safe for many millenia. The vast majority of the risk disappears in a few hundred years. Very radioactive also means "decaying quickly". Compare to other industrial byproducts that stay equivalently nasty for tens of thousands of years and more readily dissolve in groundwater.

_ph_ 4y ago
No, we don't have a "good technology". Yes, breeder reactors exist, but e.g. France has given up the technology, the UK has one? The problem is, that this technology is no where economic and breeder reactors are really challenging technology.
- mlyle 4y ago
  I didn't say anything about breeder reactors. In many jurisdictions, PUREX is routinely used to extract remaining fuel and chemically segregate the worst daughter products. A lot of the actinides can be burnt up in a normal reactor, like 239Pu. Of course, in the long term, transmutation of LLFPs into precious metals is interesting, as is burning up more of the waste in e.g. fast reactors.

concordDance 4y ago

How safe do you actually need it to be? Glass it and chuck it onto the abyssal plain. Watch as the ecological damage is less than a millionth (literally, not hyperbolicly) as damaging as ocean acidification caused by CO2. It really isn't hard, just unintuitive thanks to movies like Godzilla and shouted against by environmentalists who refuse to quantify the damage.