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Originally Posted by guyinrubbersuit
And yet the waste it produces is very difficult to get rid of safely and can take thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years for it to fully decay. Still, it's probably our best option right now.
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The biggest issue with nuclear waste is separating its components. I don't mean being able to separate high level waste from low level waste so we only have a tiny amount of material to store (relative to the energy it's been used to produce), but I mean separating the actual high level waste into the various stuff it's made off. If we were able to do this, then there'd be a number of advantages: First of all, you'd be able to remove the stuff that's extremely radioactive but decays fast from the stuff that decays much more slowly. In other words, you might be able to reduce further the space you need to store your highly radioactive waste in the long term, since the stuff that decays fast could be kept for a few years until it literally disappears, and for that you wouldn't need underground storage. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there seem to be some fission by-products which are extremely dangerous, but which could actually be converted into harmless, or at least much less dangerous stuff, if it could be separated from the rest of the waste. If you can treat a large part of your waste that way, then you'll end up with very little stuff to dispose off, or you might even find actual uses for it as radiation sources, among other things. It might even be possible to completely get rid of it some day.
I remember reading about this a few years ago in a science magazine. One of the biggest problem is that research is somewhat difficult due to the fact that not too many labs are equiped to handle nuclear waste and perform experiements on it ranging from testing chemical processes to stuff involving lasers. No private industry could justify the cost, and very few government really have an interest in funding that research. I believe that the french were working on it, not so surprisingly, but they were stuck at the separation part. And since I haven't heard about this in some time, I have to idea if they've made much progress.
In the meantime, I suppose we'll have to be content with burying our waste. Unless black gold and its cousins somehow last forever, something unlikely, there isn't that much other choice since all sun-based energy sources (in which I include wind, hydro, solar, fossil fuels, ethanol, which all ultimately get their energy from the sun) have various problems in costs (which often means efficiency), scalability or simply the fact they won't last long enough. And then there's the whole pollution thing which a lot of them produce.
Jam it back in, in the dark.
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