[ISL]

The waste problem from neutron activation is beginning to get the publicity it deserves in both articles and in comments like the parent's.

Fusion is advertised as a clean power-generation technology, but it will, in general, have its own radioactive-waste disposal problems.

[tigershark]

It’s still a couple of orders of magnitude or more better (in terms of half life of the byproducts). So if anyone knowingly compares fission waste and fusion waste putting them on the same plane is simply lying.

[cctt23]

Or they recognize that for a human and generations of their descendants, 30,000 or 300 years doesn’t change anything for them. Either way it’s longer than the US has been a country for one metric. Both cases require similar solutions, long-term containment, and so both run into the same political inertia fielded by NIMBYism.

To claim otherwise is, as you would have it, lying.

More importantly, both are solved issues from a purely technical standpoint, it’s just that everyone wants someone else to deal with it. As a bonus, we can actually use fission to produce energy, right now. There’s no issue of, “it will be great when...” grid storage is solved along with intermittency for renewables. There’s no, “it will be great when...” fusion is producing energy rather than heavily parasitizing from the grid. There’s no waiting until we’re completely screwed by climate change effects.

[cctt23]

And if we’re willing to deal with that waste, then we already have a viable source of atomic energy from fission! The future is whenever we decide to deal with the problem instead of leaving it pools or casks to solve itself.

@csallen: Be willing to actually dispose of it. We need to commit the money and political will to set up a single disposal site. Right now it’s a NIMBY nightmare so we get the worst outcome.

[csallen]

Curious what you mean by "deal with" it. Somehow make it non-radioactive, or improve our disposal techniques, or what?

[pasabagi]

I think the tradition is to dump it off the coast of Somalia.

[arcticbull]

My thinking is more around using thorium cycle nuclear reactors which consume almost all their input material [1].

1T of thorium produces the same amount of energy as 35T of uranium or 4166000T of coal. 83% of the waste products are inert, and 17% require only 300 years to reach background levels of radiation. Much safer than uranium cycle too.

This technology is very promising IMO, though given the general attitude people have towards nuclear, it's not surprising it is underdeveloped, more research is needed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...