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Where do they put the waste?
by grepfru_it 4y ago
Where do they put the waste?
- EricE 4y agoIf they are smart they will use newer designs that let them burn everyone else's "waste"
- pfdietz 4y agoYou're probably not aware that reprocessing spent fuel to recover plutonium is not economical until uranium reaches something like $700/kg. The advantage of burning waste is very minor; it's cheaper to just squirrel the stuff away in dry casks.
- rswskg 4y agoIn the ground like everyone else.
- pfdietz 4y agoActually almost everyone is putting waste in dry casks, which is cheaper than burying it and just as safe.
- rswskg 4y agoand then where does it go?
- pfdietz 4y agoIt just sits there. Later maybe something gets done with it, but by the magic of non-zero interest rates that's cheaper than doing anything with it now. In the meantime, its heat production steadily declines, which makes that future processing (or burial, or shooting off into space, or whatever) easier and easier. The only real downside of dry casks is that after about 300 years the waste is so decayed that it's no longer self-protecting from "amateur" diversion of the contained plutonium. So something needs to be done by then.