[grepfru_it]

Solve the waste problem and you solve nuclear. Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!)

I used to have a neighbor who worked for the DOE, all of the viable solutions are blocked by people who don’t want it in their backyard. Can’t really move forward until that is solved..

[cyberax]

> Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!)

The correct solution: put it into dry casks and do nothing right now. Store it simple underground storage facilities or on the grounds of active nuclear power plants.

The casks are fine for the next 300 years, and during that time we can either:

1. Perfect the nuclear fusion, it will provide plenty of neutrons to transmute the waste.

2. Perfect fast fission reactors. See above.

3. Use some of the excess of too-cheap-to-meter green energy for accelerator-driven subcritical fission reactors.

4. Yep, use rockets to slowly launch the waste into space. We can already design a storage capsule that can survive re-entry.

In any case, we have literally hundreds of years to come up with a solution and there are many viable paths.

[qnleigh]

> use rockets to slowly launch the waste into space. We can already design a storage capsule that can survive re-entry.

Do you have a source in mind for this claim? Even if a capsule could survive reentry, surely it wouldn't survive impact.

[cyberax]

Yes. We're _already_ launching nuclear waste into space, in the form of RTGs with Pu-238. So there's been a lot of work towards making them passively safe, although the weight constraints for deep-space craft necessarily limit the amount of achievable safety.

> Even if a capsule could survive reentry, surely it wouldn't survive impact.

It'll be moving at a terminal velocity, and can be engineered to not fragment on impact.

For example, I remember reading about a proposal to alloy the nuclear waste elements with a carrier metal like iron or nickel, and then cover them in an ablative graphite shell.

[maxerickson]

The Pu-238 in Rtgs is produced for the purpose, it isn't isolated from waste.

Of course it is more or less equivalent when it comes to handling.

[Ylpertnodi]

>Waste is still the giant elephant in the room and a lot of people have a fifth grade solution to the problem (we will bury it under ground! We will fly it to the sun! We will resuse it until it is no longer radioactive!)

Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though.

[rsynnott]

This was one of the Soviet Union’s proposed use for Energia (a super-heavy launcher which flew precisely twice before the Soviet Union collapsed). In practice, there would be, ah, challenges; no launcher ever built is reliable enough that anyone would be particularly comfortable with _launching large amounts of high-level nuclear waste_ with it.

[mschuster91]

> Could the waste be 'sent' into space? Bonus points for sending a certain human with it. Serious question, though.

Would you want a RUD of nuclear waste in the atmosphere? That's the key thing with sending stuff to space, we are nowhere near close enough in terms of reliability and cost to what would be needed to send the stuff away.

[bell-cot]

By "space" do you mean low earth orbit - where the stuff will reenter the atmosphere within (say) a century? Or geosync orbit - where it'll stay up there forever-ish...but ain't actually gone? Or actually gone, like (say) Mars?

IIR, the current rock-bottom (Falcon 9) launch prices are something like $1,000/lbs. to low earth orbit, $2,500/lbs. to geosync, and $6,500/lbs. to Venus.

A quick Google says the US has about 88,000 tons of radioactive waste. So - 88,000 tons = 176,000,000 lbs. = $176,000,000,000 just to put it in low earth orbit. And something like 4,600 Falcon 9 launches. (Some fraction of which would doubtless go badly wrong, spreading radioactive stuff all over the landscape.)

In short - it's a cool-sounding idea. But neither the numbers nor the politics are remotely near viable.

[AtlasBarfed]

Lftr! Breeds burns almost all the fuel.i think the waste products it does make are shorter term.

[grepfru_it]

300-700 years is still many many generations. Remember waste will continue to be produced, during this time.

It’s not a simple fix :)

[AtlasBarfed]

Lftr is supposed to be in the high nineties allegedly of fuel consumption %.

And the gas/liquid nature means separation and processing is a lot more viable

Contrast that with solid fuel rods using like 20% of its fuel, and that only of the fissile uranium isotopes. The the waste is locked in a solid form of the spent fuel rods

I'll take lftr which (theoretically) is so much cleaner.

Fusion isnt without waste, the high speed neutrons irradiate/transmute the reactor

[grepfru_it]

Reducing waste without a long term (multigenerational) plan does not solve the waste problem ;)

[walleeee]

Some MSRs can consume spent nuclear fuel, that's a 7th grade solution at least

[fallingknife]

Burying the waste is an excellent solution. We are currently dealing with the much more dangerous problem of hydrocarbon combustion waste by releasing it into the atmosphere.

[grepfru_it]

It’s an equally bad solution. Let’s learn from our mistakes yeah? :D

[kjkjadksj]

What problem with the waste? Reactors are working and generating power today for many thousands of americans. Whatever is being done with waste today seems to work well enough to continue reactor operations without any major headlines. Just seems to be a bit of cognitive dissonance here between what is claimed online and what we see today out in the field generating power.

[grepfru_it]

Current waste takes tens of thousands of years to stop being radioactive. Until then we need to hide it from all living life. In the meantime we continue to create waste.

We are getting better shrinking from thousands to a single thousand.. but we still create waste while we argue where to store the new waste.

It doesn’t scale.