Amec Working on Long-Term Nuclear Waste Solution

Ckwop writes "The Daily Telegraph is reporting that Amec, the company that cleaned up Ground Zero, have developed a new process for storing nuclear waste that lasts two hundred thousand years - far longer than any radioactivity will last. The process works by mixing eighty percent soil with twenty percent waste and then heating the mixture to three thousand degrees centigrade. When the mixture cools it forms into a glass harder than concrete. While this is not the first waste process of this type it is the first to be cost effective and produces a glass much harder than previous methods. " We'll see if we still need a ten mile field of spikes I guess. A pilot facility is being built in Washington State.

Comments

Re:Not all waste is really 'waste'

[LaCosaNostradamus]

I don't know many of the details; I just knew that "spent" nuclear fuel has simply fallen below a certain threshhold for the reactor it was used in ... and as you pointed out, that's far from "waste".

As for theft, we have to handle the possibilities of suicides and robots. The people stealing the material to "strike a blow against the Great Satan" could easily sacrifice their lives to enact the theft. A robotic theft is certainly higher tech, but may be the only practical way to fetch material from an ocean bottom. Of course, anyone with a real urge for fissile uranium could have mounted their own search for that bomb dropped off America's eastern coast (which was recently perhaps found).