Re:Living with nuclear waste means remembering on a differen...
by ageofwant on Sunday June 11, 2017 @01:43PM
(#14532893)
Because that 'waste' is fuel for 4th generation breeder reactors and will be used as such. The result of that process is low grade waste that you can dump a meter of topsoil on and build a park or kindergarten on top of. Guarapari beach is more radioactive. There is no such thing as nuclear waste.
Re:Living with nuclear waste means remembering on a differen...
by AnonymousPlanet on Sunday June 11, 2017 @04:42PM
(#14533684)
Maybe you should talk to some actual nuclear engineers and not just read starry eyed proposals. The engineering tasks of building and maintainig said reactors plus digging up the waste and shipping it there is tremendous. Especially sodium cooled proposals get the most face palms from people who actually work in the field. "There's a reason psysicists don't design reactors but engineers do" is a quote I remember from the last time I met a nuclear engineer and discussed transmutation proposals.
Bottom line: Nothing is solved and it will take decades to get to a design that consumes new waste, let alone old waste that is currently rotting under ground and is ever harder to get to.
(I prefer to call it ecosystem "restructuring" rather than "destruction" because clearly under almost every possible scenario some organisms would prosper. The term "destruction" only makes sense if you suppors a selfish view that the ecosystem is designed to be congenial to humans, and anything else is "wrong". It is interesting to speculate if the sentient cockroaches of 100 megayears hence would detect any traces of us).