[mitchty]

What is the rest of the forseeable future exactly?

If we use breeder reactors we can get the half life down to 500 years which is easily dealt with via stuff like glass entombment.

The current nuclear waste solution is ignoring a lot of advances from the 90's.

[specialist]

I support traveling wave reactors, explicitly to reduce our stockpiles. If we get some other benefits, like some electricity, bonus.

[beat]

Breeder reactors are ridiculously dangerous. There's a good reason nobody uses them except for weapons-grade material generation.

They're also a major weapon proliferation problem, since it's easy to use them to generate weapons-grade material. Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?

[acidburnNSA]

The Experimental Breeder Reactor 2 on what is now the Idaho National Lab was the first reactor to demonstrate full passive safety in 2 related tests in 1986. In the first, they turned off all primary pumps and did not insert the control rods. The reactor shut itself down and established natural circulation decay-heat removal. This class of event (unprotected loss of flow) would melt the core of almost any other kind of reactor. Then they did a unprotected loss of heat sink to the same result. My dissertation advisor was there, and said that it was glorious. They knew that they had finally achieved truly safe, socially acceptable nuclear energy. Less than a month later Chernobyl happened and the advanced breeder reactors with their inherent safety have still not been developed commercially.

Breeders use low-pressure coolants with very high heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and boiling points so they can go to natural circulation easily at decay heat levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...

[mitchty]

Breeder reactors are as noted by acidburnNSA extremely safe.

And yes they're a weapons grade problem, thats the point, if we want to store nuclear "waste", which to be honest is just unused nuclear fuel. The way to do that is to make it more radioactive so that its half life is lower.

It is a tradeoff, if we wish to complain about storing unspent nuclear fuel for 10 000 years, we have to accept that we are willingly ignoring other options that can solve that problem of long term storage.

> Are you planning to build one in Libya anytime soon?

Is there a specific insinuation here? Why do you consider this a constructive way of arguing your point whatever it may be?