Better Nuclear Waste Storage Plans than Yucca Mountain

NuclearRampage writes "Technology Review has an in-depth article about A New Vision for Nuclear Waste based on the premise that 'storing nuclear waste underground at Yucca Mountain for 100,000 years is a terrible idea.' The article looks at the current DOE plans for Yucca, its shortcomings and what temporary solutions we have to use while a better permanent plan is formulated."

Comments

What happens in Yucca mountain stays in Yucca Mtn

[Astrorunner]

A Slashdot / The Onion Tagteam Special

No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[coupland]

>"But here's the twist: with nuclear waste, procrastination may actually pay ... ... technological advances over the next century might yield better long-term storage methods.

Sorry, but this kind of stupidity really irks me. If the Yucca plan is flawed, then we should be working constructively to fix it, not criticizing it and offering no solutions. Certainly not assuming that in a hundred years we'll have genetically engineered winged monkeys who will fly all our nuclear waste into outer space. The problem is here now, so we've got to face it now, with today's technology. It's the height of irresponsibility to assume that our children will be smart enough to solve a problem a hundred years from now whose solution has completely eluded us.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[grub]

we'll have genetically engineered winged monkeys who will fly all our nuclear waste into outer space.

Those won't work, the wings are useless in space. We have to wait for the genetically engineered monkeys with liquid oxygen and fuel tanks. That'll be another few hundred years.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[lawpoop]

"It's the height of irresponsibility to assume that our children will be smart enough to solve a problem a hundred years from now whose solution has completely eluded us."

Yeah, because history shows that the past two centuries have been nothing but *stagnation* in terms of technological development.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[iezhy]

do you have any idea how much does it cost to lift a single pound of cargo into the orbit, not speaking about sending it to the sun? and how much nuclear power will cost, if this solution would be used?

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[david.given]

Couldn't that be the solution? (no, not the part about winged monkeys). Why can't we simply send the damn crap into the sun? Isn't the sun a huge nuclear reactor already anyway?

Because orbital mechanics mean that it's harder to send stuff into the sun than it is to send it into interstellar space. Plus, the heavy-lift rockets you'd need to get it into orbit (let alone to cancel Earth's orbital velocity) are not designed to be reliable, which means they blow up now and again. Uh... no.

(Yes, you can build boxes designed to remain intact while rockets blow up around them; they're used for RTGs. There was an RTG that was in an exploding rocket. Once they found it, it got dusted off and used again for another satellite. I believe it's still out there somewhere... But they're bloody expensive and very heavy, and there's an awful lot of stuff to get rid of.)

Better, cheaper, simpler solutions:

• Vitrify it in glass to make it biologically inert. Pile it in a big heap in the middle of some desert somewhere. Post guards to make sure nobody walks off with it.
• Bore some very deep holes somewhere in a subduction zone. Put the stuff at the bottom. Forget about it. Over geological time it'll get sucked into the mantle and disperse.

Basically, radioactive waste is not a problem. It's just the politics around the waste that's the problem. Yucca Mountain is a really, really bad solution and everybody knew that from the start, but the project has now entered that strange, necromantic state where it'll suck up money until someone finally cuts its heart out and it will never, ever achieve anything worthwhile. Except lining someone's pockets.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[rnws]

Actually grinding it into fine particulates and releasing it into the atmosphere would be a very bad thing as inhaling fine radioactive dusts (or gases) is, apart from extreme rad exposure, one of the fastest ways to get killed by radiation.

Not to mention the fact that the stuff would settle on cropping regions and build up in the surface soil and the oceans, thus contaminating food sources (living cells have a tendancy to accumulate heavy metals). Essentially what you would create is fallout.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[Thagg]

Saven,

It's an appealing idea, but suffers from the slight problem of being completely wrong.

Indeed, natural uranium in the ground is really not very hazardous -- U235 is the most radioactive isotope, but is only a very small percentage of natural uranium and has a half-life of many millions of years. It's so benign that it was used as a pigment in early Fiesta Ware dishes and blue-blocker optical components (admittedly, it is not quite benign enough for these purposes...these have been recalled, but it's close.)

But, nuclear fission creates a spectacular kaleidescope of new isotopes. These are hundreds of thousands of times more radioactive than the natural uranium that was in the ground. It's true that they will only be extremely dangerous for a limited time, but that limited time is still in the many thousands of years.

While just reburying nuclear waste has some naive (although as show above, wrong) appeal, releasing them to the atmosphere is completely insane. This has been done already, in Chernobyl, on a relatively small scale. The area around the plant will be uninhabitable for a few thousand years.

Some kind of waste treatment plan is necessary.

Thad Beier

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[Bodrius]

Agreed.

After reading the article, I found it sorely lacking in the "New Vision" part, but filled with a pletorah of maybes, could bes, perhaps, and hopefullys.

It's great that they're suggesting a decent Plan B if Yucca fails, but to state that failure of Plan A is the best outcome because some hypothetical future invention will make it obsolete is not very scientific.

To those with boundless faith in the progress of technology: it's not whether science advances at the same rate in the future, it's whether its direction can be predictable.

As of now, by early 20th century speculation, we were supposed to have safe nuclear reactors powering our flying cars, and spaceships moving tourists to the moon.

This article does not even substantiate the speculation with specific current developments in an avenue of research or two. It just makes the assumption someone will come up with something new, soon, that may have something to do with the problem.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[John Harrison]

The main fallacy that I see with the article is that it keeps repeating that "in 100 years the waste won't be as hot!"

That assumes that we won't be making any waste during the next 100 years, which strikes me as incredibly unlikely. I would expect better thinking from the MIT Technology Review than, "Of course we'll be able to solve today's problems in 100 years!" And this without considering that in those 100 years the problem will grow.

I also don't understand why if casks are so great, why not store them at Yucca Mountain instead of the Skull Valley site, which is open air and closer to Salt Lake than Yucca Mountain is to Las Vegas.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[Thagg]

Read the article. It's remarkably good, and makes a good case for temporary "cask" storage for a hundred years or so. There is little that you can say for certain about the future, but the one thing you can say is that it will be very different than the present, and different in unforseeable ways.

If you're really ambitious, read the Yucca Mountain reports from the goverment, available at John Young's indispensible cryptome.org among other places. The documents are amazingly detailed and well researched, and describe the truly monumental efforts proposed to make the best of the sadly misguided site that is Yucca Mountain. Radical alloys, glass matrices to bind the material, titanium drip shields, it just goes on and on and on. (The word "monumental" is actually literal, not just figurative. Part of the proposal describes the need for monuments to warn people away from the site for the next 10,000 years.)

The engineers and scientists working on Yucca Mountain were given the task to keep the amount of radiation leaking out of the site to low levels for 10,000 years. If everything goes exactly right, if there are no unforseen events, and the experimental materials they are using perform exactly as predicted under high radiation and hydrological stress for that time, the site will meet that mission. Astonishingly, the radiation release graphs go off the chart after 10,000 years -- there's still enough radiation there after that time to be terribly dangerous, and all protective measures will hae failed by that point.

Yucca Mountain was chosen and designed based on the assumption that it was dry. It's wet. That's such a huge difference that the original decision was simply wrong.

Thad Beier

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[tho 1234]

Subduction zones are typically under the ocean, and you still have to dig over a kilometer down from the bottom of the ocean to reach the mantle

This is so far beyond our current technology that making a winged monkey sounds easy in comparason.

And anyways, if you learned your basic geology, you'd know that above every subduction zone is a large range of volcanoes that eject a large amount of the melted magma that goes down in the subduction zone- can you imagine a mount st. helen's type eruption, except with radioactive dust spewing out?

And about putting it in the middle of the desert, how is that any different from yucca mountain? At least the mountain will be sheltered from the elements, be much easier to guard against, and can be permanantly sealed off if the government doesn't want to pay for armed guards.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[shotfeel]

I found it lacking in the consistency part.

There's no guarantee that Yucca Mt. will work for hundreds of thousands of years, so we'll settle for 100 years when some of the radioactivity will have decayed and we may have better ways of managing it.

That's better than putting it in Yucca Mt. for a thousand years when much more of the radioactivity would have decayed and we may have exponetially better ways of handling it?

AFAIK the only reason Yucca Mt. is a "failure" is because of the lawsuits arguing that it can't be guaranteed to last forever.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[ajs]

So the concerns are as follows:

• After 10,000 years, Yucca becomes unpredictable
• The multiply redundant materials involved need to remain safe

Ok, part 1 I'm willing to blow off. For those who think 10,000 years is "coming up sooner than you think," consider this: If one significant scientific discovery is made in terms of engineering such containment every lifetime (about 80 years, not every generation which would be about 20 years), then 125 such discoveries separate us from the time where we'd better have a decent solution. It's also 5 times the length of time since the fall of the Roman Empire. I'm sure I'm incapable of imagining what we'll be capable of by then.

That said, the second problem is a serious one, but the poster I'm replying to is over-stating. If ALL of the materials used fail to perform exactly as expected, we still have a decent chance of containment. But that's not going to happen. What's going to happen is that some of those materials will do something unexpected and failsafe materials will stand between us and a rather difficult national emergency. How can I know this? I can't, of course, any more than I can know that the next launch of the space shuttle won't start some strange chain reaction that will ignite the atmosphere. I am, however, satisfactorilly encouraged that our current state of materials engineering, combined with redundancy in planning is capable of measuring up to the job.

If you don't think that's the case, then you should never step into a building made of concrete and steel again. I can assure you that the tolerances employed in designing such structures (even when accounting for the difference in planning horizon) are much less strict than those employed in planning Yucca Mountain.

I, for one, would happily live near the site, as it's probably the area least likely to suffer any sort of man-made disaster in the US.

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[Soulslayer]

The real problem with Yucca Mountain is the water table issue and the fact that most of these waste materials are extremely toxic. Nuclear reactors do not produce large amounts of isotopes "hundreds of thousands of times more radioactive" than "natural" uranium. And if they did, the half-life for them would be extremely short. The reason it takes millions of years for these waste materials to become functionally inert is because they are alpha emitters with very long half-lives. In other words, they do not produce large amounts of dangerous radiation. As they decay they will hit stages of greater radiation, but remember, alpha particles cannot even penetrate the layer of dead skin cells covering our bodies. A sheet of paper is strong enough shielding. Beta emmiters are somewhat more dangerous, but not significantly so. Additionally, while alpha particle radiation can still cause mutagenic aberrations if it can get passed your clothes and skin; the real danger is application to an open wound, inhalation, or ingestion of the radioactive materials. Not only does this allow the alpha particles to damage sensitive internal organ tissue, but the materials themselves are highly toxic. This is one of the reasons that radon (the end product of the uranium in the earth naturally decaying) in our basements is such a concern. Radon being gaseous enters our lungs where the alpha particles can actually do damage.

Chernobyl's problem was not the release of radiation into the atmosphere. That is disapated very rapidly by prevailing winds and does not affect the surrounding area significantly (not from a single event such as that). The problem with Chernobyl was that when the top blew chunks of radioactive debris like pieces of the graphite cooling system rained down over the surrounding countryside and got into the ground and the water supply.

Most of the deaths in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were caused by the shockwave and the subsequent fires, not the radiation. This is not to say that there weren't many people killed by radiation, there were. But those individuals dying of cancer caused by those blasts are the individuals that were present at the time of the attacks. Both areas are still thickly settled and do not have higher than normal cancer rates outside of the population of the bomb drop survivors.

Additionally, far larger amounts of the same materials used and produced in nuclear power production (including uranium 235, uranium 238, and thorium among others) are pumped into our atmosphere every day by coal burning plants. In fact, if we took all the radioactive materials we send into the air every year and put them in nuclear reactors, we'd be able to make more energy that the coal plants that put them into the atmosphere did during the same timeframe.

On top of that, if breeder and pellet based plutonium reactors were actual in service we could use the waste from standard light water reactors to feed breeder reactors whose waste would feed the pellet based reactors. Drastically reducing the amount and lethality of the nuclear waste that we'd ultimately have to store.

Uranium-238 Decay Series

Nuclide Half-Life Radiation
U-238 4.468 109 years alpha
Th-234 24.1 days beta
Pa-234m 1.17 minutes beta
U-234 244,500 years alpha
Th-230 77,000 years alpha
Ra-226 1,600 years alpha
Rn-222 3.8235 days alpha
Po-218 3.05 minutes alpha
Pb-214 26.8 minutes beta
Bi-214 19.9 minutes beta
Po-214 63.7 microseconds alpha
Pb-210 22.26 years beta
Bi-210 5.013 days beta
Po-210 138.378 days alpha
Pb-206 stable

Re:No, ignoring it won't make it go away

[jadavis]

First, technological innovation doesn't always appear in the areas we expect it. Take the flying car, for example, which we've been expecting for a long time, as well as robot servants.

Also, if we are leaving a problem for generations to come, isn't it better to leave the problem in the desert under ground that may (according to some people, at some time thousands of years in the future) need attention, rather than in casks above ground that will NEED attention for SURE? Future generations are just as likely to solve the Yucca problem as invent a miracle disposal system.

And one more thing. Even if the costs of fixing Yucca 1000's of years into the future are very large, the PDV* of the cost will be practically nothing.

*PDV = Present Day Value, an economic calculation to evaluate a future cost as a present cost.

Everyone is so negative

[roman_mir]

I don't see this as such a big problem as say having thousands of coal power plants churning out millions of tons of poison into the atmosphere.

Isn't it possible that within a few hundred years there will be a method found to actually use these stored materials for further energy extraction? Not impossible. So let it lay there for a while.

Re:Everyone is so negative

[Ironsides]

We already have the technology. We shove them into a breeder reactor to get nuclear material that we can use. The problem is that Carter put a ban on breeder reactors in the US.

Re:Everyone is so negative

[Art Deco]

We have been having a heck of a time getting breeder reactors to work right. The few breeder reactors that have been built have produced electricity so expensive that their operation had to be subsidised and they are very inefficent at producing more fuel. Running a breeder reactor makes more waste disposal problems instead of fewer. Breader reactors produce more high level waste than conventional light water reactors. President Carter was knowledgable about nuclear energy having studied at the Navy nuclear school. There is the problem of pruducing plutonium but the main problem with breeder reactors are that they are too expensive and don't work well at the current state of the art. Currently there is plenty of uranium so breeder reactors remain an interesting technology for the future if uranium prices increase.

Re:Everyone is so negative

[Lumpy]

and the american government along with the sheep that are the citizens see anything with the word nuclear as the glowing green boogeyman that will come and lower their savings instrest rate, increase their heating costs and possibly force them to drive [OH THE HORROR] a compact car!

Now add the word "breeder" and "reactor" to the nuclear phycosis in america??? you have mass hysteria waiting to happen.

This is the problem with a mostly undereducated/uneducated populace. Most high school students graduate without any physics and basic chemistry no the introduction to chemistry classes you took are not BASIc chemistry.

Therefore the general public, fueled by the decisions and sensationalized events of the past solidified the fear of nuclear power in the United States. Hell there are 2 reactors within 100 miles of where I live and I am PROUD that they are there. Others in the community almost freak out if you tell them that fact.

Oh and almost nobody realizes that you are at a greater risk of being killed by a chlorine gas cloud from one of the many many users of that product than from any nuclear accident.

a 1 ton cylinder of Chlorine can create a cloud that can kill and severly injure everyon in a small town. and most paper processing plants have a 25 ton train car full of it sitting outside.

until the sensationalism around nuclear anything dies down and the morons from the environmentialist groups actually learn something about it it will forever remain a boogeyman in America.

Re:Everyone is so negative

[Ohreally_factor]

I've got nothing against breeder reactors, at least if they've been properly married. It's those homosexual reactors wanting to marry that worry me. They threaten the stability of the nuclear family, our Christian values, and our Merican way of life.

Re:Everyone is so negative

[Rei]

Yeah, I really want to use a reactor that uses *Liquid Sodium* as coolant (that fact alone made them incredibly hard beasts to work with - it reaks havoc on the pumps). There's still research going on to make more economically viable and technologically realistic breeder reactors, but as for now, the tech just isn't there.

So much energy

[DrWho520]

If the waster is radioactive, it is inherently releasing energy. I have never understood why no one has tried to take advantage of this with some kind of "dirty" reactor. Alteast, I have never heard of this. It would obviously not be as efficient as the fision process, but there must be some way to capture that energy and redirect it somehow. Even if you put it in a big bunker and have a thermocouple set up, atleast that is something. Beats tossing it into space.

Re:So much energy

[Christopher Thomas]

If the waster is radioactive, it is inherently releasing energy. I have never understood why no one has tried to take advantage of this with some kind of "dirty" reactor.

The problem is that the fuel has been "poisoned" by decay products from previous reactions. Enough of these absorb neutrons that you can't sustain a critical fission reaction, and so you're left with sub-critical decay. This gives off energy, but far, far more slowly than a nuclear plant's active fuel bundles do. So you can't put them in a conventional reactor, and you can't get useful amounts of heat off them outside of one.

There are some types of reactor - actinide-burning fast-breeders - that have less trouble with these decay products than conventional slow-neutron reactors. These are widely viewed as one method of disposing of or at least reducing the amount of spent fuel waste. You can also chemically reprocess the fuel to remove the decay products (which are then disposed of as waste, but the majority of your "spent" fuel is reused). Neither of these solutions is allowed in the US, due to proliferation risks and handling concerns.

WWFD?

[ch-chuck]

France must be on the leading edge of dealing with nuclear waste - what are they doing about it? France gets a very high percentage of electric power from nukes. I for one admire their dedication to being free from dependance on foreign turmoil.

Re:WWFD?

[radixvir]

France also has a great reprocessing system, which would be a great idea for this nuclear waste problem.

what about...

[Legato895]

the whole combining radioactive material and dirt and heating it into glass thing? http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n ews/2004/09/26/nnuke26.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/26 /ixhome.html

Refine It

[dead sun]

How about we refine the waste, make it further useful, and save on the amount of waste we create?

Really, if this waste is so awful, why don't we try to create as little waste as possible by using everything we reasonably can? You'd think people would be clammoring to cut down the number of times waste (and live fuel) needs to be shipped, and cut down the quantities that need to be stored away for extended periods of time. Though it isn't like there's that much volume of waste. If I remember correctly, one of WI's biggest, Point Beach, produces something like a quarter of a phone booth's worth of waste in volume per year and provides a heck of a lot of power.

Go for Heavy Metal

[Tim the Gecko]

American Scientist magazine has an article on "heavy metal" reactors that transform some of the nastiest components of spent fuel into a more acceptable range of isotopes.

What I want to know

[Ricerocket63]

Is what are they going to do with all the Nucular waste. That's a much bigger problem than this...

reprocessing and geologic storage

[kippy]

Why not just press for reprocessing of spent fuel? All the 250,000 year stuff is from material that can be recovered back into the fuel cycle. If you remove the junk lower down on the periodic table (the real nuclear waste) it only will be dangerous for a few hundred years.

On a side note, has anyone heard of the natural reactor in Oklo? A naturally occurring nuclear reaction there produced all the same waste of a modern reactor and it all stayed in place in de-facto geologic storage.

yucca is ready to accept waste, vitrification is mature. I really don't see why Yucca is still a controversy other than NIMBY and ignorance.

Never mind about 100,000 years time!

[Viol8]

The climate is changing NOW. We need to use an alternative to fossil fuels NOW. Wind power, solar power etc arn't up to the job , only nuclear is. Theres no point worrying about what will happen in milennia if we screw up the climate in this century since if that happens there might not be anyone around in 102,004 AD to have to worry about nuclear waste!

Re:Never mind about 100,000 years time!

[DaFallus]

Um, what evidence do you have of this climate change? I have seen no drastic change in the frequency of El Nino over the past 225 million years. El Nino is largely affected by the earth's temperature, so if the temperature is rising, then the frequency of this phenomenon would increase. However, through the use of dendrochronology one can look at the rings of a modern tree and compare them to those of a 225 million year old petrified tree, showing that the frequency of El Nino 225 million years ago is practically identical to that of today. You also have to keep in mind that we are still technically coming out of an ice age.

Yucca is not PERFECT

[SirLanse]

But it is better than a bunch of casks all over creation. These are only good for 100yrs. Send them to Yucca. If a good idea for using the waste material comes up, we can pull it out of Yucca. This stuff came out of the ground. Rain water is percolating through uranium deposits all of the time. I would rather be down wind of TMI than a coal plant. Put wind mills on top of any building over 10 stories high. That would be a middle finger to the middle east.

A couple of things annoy me..

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of things about this story annoy me.

One, is storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain really a "terrible" idea? Storing nuclear waste in the middle of a major city would be a terrible idea. Storing nuclear waste in a volcano would be a terrible idea. Dumping nuclear waste in the ocean would be a terrible idea. Storing nuclear waste at Yucca mountain may not be the best idea, or a great idea, it may even be a bad idea, but is it really a "terrible" idea? Or is saying it's a "terrible" idea one of those little pieces of hyperbole designed to subconsiously sway an argument.

Second, after about a thousand years even high-level radioactive waste is only going to be about as radioactive as the ore it was mined from. Not that 1000 years is a trivial length of time, but is saying we can't protect this material for "100,000 years" really a valid argument, or is it another one of those bits of hyperbole?

But I forgot, this is Slashdot, where we're pro nuclear power, but anti nuclear waste.

I know, -1 troll, but I had to say it.

Re:A couple of things annoy me..

[texwtf]

Why is dumping nuke waste in the oceans a bad idea?

No, seriously.. if we dumped it in the middle of the pacific spread over several hundred square miles and not all piled in a single spot, what's the harm? Isn't there naturally radioactive material down there anyway?

At extreme depths there shouldn't be any noticeable radiation even if you did pile it all in one spot.

I have an idea...

[FooAtWFU]

If Yucca Mountain won't be safe for a million billion years, how about you just use *it* as the "temporary solution" before you come up with a permanent one? Say what you will about the long-term stability of Yucca Mountain, consider the pathetic short-term storage facilites and warehouses where the stuff is being stored now.

Simple solutions for simple minds...

[chaboud]

It's not that these materials are radioactive, but that these materials are composed of isotopes and elements that are *very* rarely found in nature.

Strontium-90, cesium-137, and plutonium are not materials that one can regularly dig up in anything greater than trace amounts, but we have manufactured at least several hundred thousand kilograms of each. To suggest putting these low-half-life materials into populated regions or atomizing them for atmospheric delivery is humorous folly at best.

If we can actually revert the materials in question to their originals (without costing us *more* energy than we originally received from fission; a task that, just to be clear, is impossible) before burial, then I'm all for it. In actuality, your naive suggestions merely show a lack of understanding of the fundamental problem, but this lack of understanding is not unique. That very thinking likely led to the hatching of the Yucca mountain plan in the first place.

As we depart the steel age and forge into the composite-ceramic age, we stand a very good chance of improving existing technologies that show promise in solving this problem completely.

Before we decide to package these materials as a dangerous slurry in a mountain about which we intend to forget, we should seriously consider investing in technological advances that have been before us for over a decade.

The Alchemists Had It Right

[kravlor]

Disclaimer: I am a nuclear engineering graduate student.

The main reason we're having such problems with nuclear waste repositories such as Yucca mountain is because of the rather long timescales of decay of a small class of fission byproducts. This class of elements (the 'transuranics' ; Z > 92) comprises a very small fraction of the total waste volume and has (in general) the majority of ill-effects, such as long half-lives, toxicity, excessive heat generation, etc. (Different isotopes contribute to each of these effects in some small fashion.)

A key insight to the problem is that we do not have to store the waste as it comes out of the reactor (or otherwise packaged for long-term storage). It is possible to process the spent fuel in a way to transmute the problem isotopes into others that decay away quickly (days to tens/hundreds of years vs 1x10^6 + years). Neutron bombardment is one method of 'bumping' these decay chains onto different tracks. Doing this effectively, efficiently, and economically is the challenge; many people (including some of my professors) have been working on it at Los Alamos. A good introduction to the process and its rationale are located here.

Of couse, these transmutation schemes require their own energy to run them, and we can't beat the second law of thermodynamics -- it has to come from somewhere. These days it's mostly coal, the same source we're trying to replace with nuclear power! (Don't get me wrong -- nuclear power plants are by far the best we've currently got in terms of environmental impact, reliability, and production capacity. It's not the best, but it's the least of the other evils at the moment.) A better solution would be to provide this energy from an environmentally clean source, such as fusion energy. (It's nice to see two nuclear physics articles in a day!)

Of course, providing funding for disposal solutions such as Yucca and transmutation technologies is expensive and a political hot potato. (It also requires members of Congress to be a bit more forward-sighted, instead of just looking ahead to the next election cycle. Just think: ITER is on the order of $10B [a drop in the bucket to Congress], and has been scrounging for funds from all across the world for more than 20 years -- when it has the potential to unlock safe, envirionmentally clean energy that's powered from constituents of seawater.)

Waste and burning libraries of congress.

[Christopher Thomas]

a quarter of a phone booth's worth of waste in volume

How much energy in burning Libraries of Congress could a phone booth of nuclear waste produce?

If we assume that only the books are burning, and that they weigh a couple of pounds each (say 1 kg), and that they give off the same energy from combustion that an equivalent weight of carbon would (very rough approximation), we can estimate the BLoC energy unit as about:

115M books * 1 kg/book * 390 kJ/mol CO2 / 0.012 mol C/kg ...or on the order of 4 petajoules.

Let's assume the phone booth contains about 2 cubic metres of nuclear waste. Let's assume that it has a density of about 10 g/cm^3, as it's oxides, and that virtually all of this represents the weight of the heavy nuclei. We'll take a value of 10 MeV as the total decay energy of each heavy metal nucleus as it traverses the decay chain down to lead (or some other stable isotope, if it starts off lighter than lead, though most of the fuel rod will still be U238). We'll assume an atomic weight of 250 AMU for each nucleus, to make the math easier. As 1 AMU is approximately equivalent to 1 GeV (i.e. mass of a proton or neutron), we have a rest energy of each nucleus of 250 GeV, meaning 1/25000 of its rest mass is converted to released energy.

The phone booth contains 2 m^3 * 10000 kg/m^3 = 20000 kg of material. This has a rest energy of about 1.8e+21 J, meaning we get about 70 petajoules out if we wait long enough for all of its constituent elements to decay.

So, a phone booth full of nuclear waste could produce about 18 BLoCs worth of energy.

In practice, you'll only get around 1% of this out in any reasonable timeframe (short-lived isotopes, vs. the U238 that you'll have to wait a few billion years for unless you stick it back in a reactor).