this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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This is the part that has always confused me. Radioactive “waste” should either be radioactive enough that it can continue to be used in some capacity, or it’s inert enough that it’s not too complicated to just bury it, given the relatively small scale. I guess I assumed that there must have been a large gap between being useful and being inert and that must have been the problem with managing waste, but if spent fuel can be refined back into new fuel and inert waste, then I don’t see the issue.
It's a matter of money and access.
If you can get nuclear fuel, it's cheaper/easier to buy new.
But it's not like we can't just not use money as the sole deciding factor on whether we recycle or bury in a mountain.
But like, say you have 100% pure fuel and use it till it's 50%, it's not like you use it from the top down, it's on an atom by atom basis throughout the fuel. So the more you use it before you refine again, the harder it is for it to be cost effective.
That's why while we sell the "used" fuel from military ships, the stuff in an civilian reactor gets thrown under a mountain. The military want to keep theirs "topped off" in case new fuel becomes inaccessible.
We could easily change the pipeline to:
Military use > civilian use > refinement > military use
And just keep adding more fissible material as needed.
It might not be "cost effective" but it completely elimates the nuclear waste issue. It just all comes down to the price our leaders put on the environment.
Quick edit:
Obviously refinement isn't as easy as popping it into a microwave for five minutes, and comes with it's own energy needs and other things that would effect if we should do this, nothing is a perfect solution.
But if we're just talking about eliminating nuclear waste, this is a valid path.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the explanation! I really believe we need to invest in refinement tech to get more use out of fuel instead of worrying about how to infinitely store (and therefore waste) still-useful fuel.
No worries.
And we already have the tech to do it. Thats how we get the fuel in the first place.
Because it decays naturally, you'll never have "pure" nuclear material out in the wild. A certain amount is going to naturally decay. And the more pure it is, the faster it decays naturally.
It's just when fuel is used to the point it's less pure than available ore for cheaper than it costs to refine the used fuel...
We chuck it under a mountain.
To get real specific, the remaining issue would be the stuff around the reactor (primarily the primary coolant loop) building up stuff like cobalt 60.
We can keep refining the fuel forever, but it's going to make non-fuel stuff also radioactive, and we can't refine that stuff into fuel. That stuff tho, yeah, throwing it under a mountain, burying it in the desert, it's not going to cause an issue any bigger than burying non radioactive steel in the same place.