6 ms·

Something I just realized I don’t know—are there no radioactive waste materials from using recycled materials? It makes sense to a degree that if the usage is

• acidburnNSA 3y ago
  There are lots of radioactive waste materials when using nuclear recycling. Basically, all recycling allows you to do is to split ~90% of the uranium atoms into fission products rather than the more typical 5% that we do in our current fleet. The leftover fission products are still radioactive, but they decay a bit faster than the material in non-recycled spent fuel (actinides like Np, Pu, Am, Cm). While there may be less total solid waste per kWh when you recycle, you do add the complexity of having lots of more diluted liquified radioactive waste streams from the processing. Liquified waste management has proved challenging from our weapons programs, e.g. at Hanford, though it could certainly be handled better than that. I wrote up a small primer on nuclear recycling with more details here: https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html https://whatisnuclear.com/recycling.html