Slashdot Mirror
Disposing Of Nuclear Waste As Nuclear Fuel
Saige writes "Nuclear waste has been a contentious issue, recently culminating with fights in the government over Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a proposed storage site. Well, perhaps there's a better way to deal with nuclear waste -by using it in nuclear reactors. A nuclear scientist at the University of Maryland, has come up with CAESAR, a reactor that runs not on the standard U-235, but on U-238. U-238 makes up most of the fuel rods in current reactors, but doesn't contribute to the reaction, and ends up currently as waste." The Yahoo! story linked from this article doesn't seem to open, but here's a story at The Economist.
(caveat - I haven't had time to read the article yet, so I'm spouting off without much backing to my opinions, except that I live near Rocky Flats...)
Isn't the real "nuclear waste problem" not just the fuel rods, but the kilotons of contaminated building materials, protective clothing, screwdrivers, air ducts, semi-trailer trucks, topsoil, reactor coolant, baseball caps, human remains...
I'm sure this is a great advance for many reasons, but it's barely gonna scratch the surface of how to deal with contaminated material - or am I wrong?
Perfectly Normal Industries
This is a great idea, but thanks to the morons in washington, reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to recover useful fuel like plutonium has been illegal in the U.S. since the 1970's because they're paranoid that reprocesses plutonium could fall into the wrong hands and result in nuclear proliferation. So instead, instead of reprocessing the waste and thereby getting many times more energy out of the same amount of mined uranium, they store all that stuff underground. Personally, I think if we recycled the damn stuff it would be less likely to fall into the hands of terrorists because there wouldn't be so much nuclear waste crap everywhere. Which do you think is going to be more heavily guarded: a buried nuclear waste dump or a plutonium reprocessing facility. The U.S. law against reprocessing is idiotic and terribly wasteful.
Repeal the DMCA!
I agree that it would probably be easier to detect tampering with a sealed reactor, if only because they'd need a fair amount of time & equipment to crack it, and you could build some of the detectors inside the sealed part where they'd be hard to defeat. The solution N Korea used - throw out the inspectors, shut off the cameras, ignore the griping until you've accomplished what you want to do - does, though, make me a tad nervous re the viability of any preventive measures that have to be carried out on foreign soil. Personally I'd have preferred we built the nukes in S. Korea, and ran a big power line across the DMZ.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
I don'y usually respond to a response to a response, but...
I like your idea of delivering power from SK. It's probably practical -- power in the U.S. is sold over very long distances. The problem is that NK would not accept it, not least because it would give us a big on/off switch to push them around with.