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by evgen
3485 days ago
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The problem with this claim is that (generally speaking) material with a short half-life is very "hot" and will kill just about anything around it. Something that decays to one tenth of a percent of original mass over a century has a half-life of ten years. You don't want that anywhere around you, and a containment leak will be ugly. |
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This description fits a huge number of chemical industrial reagents used in factories worldwide. Being able to seal it in a barrel and render it harmless by submerging it in a pool for a few decades (which is well inside the operational lifetime of the reactor) are trivial challenges both compared to the usual cleanup problems at Superfund sites and compared to the problem of storing nuclear waste with half lives in the hundreds or thousands of years.