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by fbender
2349 days ago
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Take a look at history if you need more evidence. At some point, someone always said „now we know better and we can build XXXX to be perfect“, and now we are laughing about them (to give a bad but simple example: Titanic). You are naïve if you think today is any different than yesterday, even with all that superior technology and knowledge that we have – but that was also true for any other point in time. And your „waste solution“ will not help one bit with the waste we already have. Hence my argument remains. |
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Why not? Breeder reactors can use spent fuel as (part of) their power source, and that spent fuel is the cause of our 10-100k year problem. From wikipedia [1]:
Since breeder reactors on a closed fuel cycle would use nearly all of the actinides fed into them as fuel, their fuel requirements would be reduced by a factor of about 100. The volume of waste they generate would be reduced by a factor of about 100 as well [..] In principle, breeder fuel cycles can recycle and consume all actinides, leaving only fission products [having] a peculiar 'gap' in their aggregate half-lives, such that no fission products have a half-life between 91 years and two hundred thousand years. As a result of this physical oddity, after several hundred years in storage, the activity of the radioactive waste from a Fast Breeder Reactor would quickly drop to the low level of the long-lived fission products
So, not only would fast breeder reactors reduce our waste volume by 99%, they would also reduce our waste storage lifetime from 10k-100k years to a few hundred years (a more than 99% reduction).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio...