After Yucca Mountain: How to store US nuclear waste | Hacker News Reader

After Yucca Mountain: How to store US nuclear waste

arstechnica.com

12 pointsterpua11 comments

How to store it: don't.

Instead, reprocess it to new fuel and burn it in nuclear reactors again. Sticking "nuclear waste" into Yucca Mountain is like refusing to burn logs in a fireplace because they've been slightly charred on the edges.

From the article:

"The authors of the policy forum also cite a study by the National Academies of Science that concluded reprocessing will be extremely expensive. The final concern with reprocessing is its ability to foster the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities. This isn't simply a hypothetical; the US had been reprocessing until some plutonium it had assisted in the purification of wound up being used for a nuclear test in the 1970s."

Still, reprocessing seems a cheaper alternative than storing it forever or, at least, until the great garbage avalanche of 2505...

Doesn't that excuse sound fishy to you? I assume (thought I don't know for a fact) that every gram of weapons-grade fissionable material in this country is accounted for. How did it end up in a nuclear test? (Other than through bureaucratic incompetence, the likely culprit.) If we all agree that recycled nuclear fuel shall not be used for any purpose other than powering reactors, why can't we put systems in place to ensure this? How is this any harder than keeping _unrecycled_ nuclear fuel from becoming weapons? Finally, as with so much of the rationale for American public policy, the most glaring question is: France is doing it with no apparent ill effect. Why can't we?

If thorium reactors are developed, it will not be nearly as expensive to reprocess.

Thorium reactor article: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348/

Why are we still talking about proliferation? Proliferation has already happened: Pakistan has the bomb, North Korea has the bomb, Iran is probably building one. We were only ever going to delay the inevitable, once you prove that it can be done, it's only a matter of time before technology brings the price of doing it down to a level that less wealthy nations can afford. There may be other reasons why we shouldn't reprocess fuel, but proliferation isn't one of them.

"The authors of the policy forum also cite a study by the National Academies of Science that concluded reprocessing will be extremely expensive."

Won't storing it be extremely expensive for a lot longer? Is this a case of costs now versus 10, 100, or 1000 years from now?

Reprocessing also offsets some of its costs, by producing things like highly sought-after medical isotopes.

The Science article is only about 40% longer than this summary, and just as readable: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/325/5937/151

The link your provided requires registration.

The real puzzle is why we don't do what the Frenchdo. France gets 85% of its electricity from nukes and, IIRC, stores all of its waste under a single building. Not sure exactly what they are doing to reduce the spent material, but they are clearly doing something that's feasible and they've been doing it for a long time.

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