Re:Nuclear Power in France
by favorited on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @04:00PM
(#28844364)
Molten salt reactor waste should have a dramatically shorter half-life than waste from a light water reactor. MSR waste only needs a few hundred years of containment, not hundreds of thousands of years.
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Explain that.
Makes no sense to me, but my physics education was decades ago
Well I'm not a physicist, so take everything I say with a grain of (molten) salt, but it has to do with the kind of fuel used, which produces different waste products.
The half life of most of the waste product from a gen-3 uranium reactor is measured in millions of years (235U's half life is ~700 million years, for example).
In some gen-4 molten salt reactor designs, most of the waste product would have a half life measured in hours, so they wouldn't need to be put into long-term containment at all. And the rest of the waste products would only require a few hundred years before they are emitting only background level radiation.
Hopefully someone with actual education on this can give a more complete answer, but that's my Reader's Digest understanding.