How to deal with nuclear waste? Spent fuel, etc.

[test_recordings]

Found this article about one country in particular and it`s problems with storing nuclear waste from reactors.

As plutonium hoard grows, so do Japan's headaches

By MARI YAMAGUCHI
AP

ROKKASHO, Aomori Pref. — How is an atomic-powered island nation riddled with fault lines supposed to handle its nuclear waste? Part of the answer was supposed to come from this windswept village along the country's northern coast.

By hosting a high-tech facility to convert spent fuel into a plutonium-uranium mix designed for the next generation of reactors, Rokkasho was supposed to provide fuel while minimizing nuclear waste storage problems. Those ambitions are falling apart because years of attempts to build a "fast breeder" reactor, which would use the reprocessed fuel, appear to be ending in failure.

But Japan still intends to reprocess spent fuel at Rokkasho. It sees few other options, even though it will mean extracting plutonium that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

If the reprocessing plant is closed down, some 3,000 tons of spent waste piling up there will have to go back to the nuclear plants that made it, and those already are running low on storage space. There is scant prospect for building a long-term nuclear waste disposal site in a country where no one wants one in their backyard.

Original article: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20130107a3.html

Can`t we just fire it in to space? That would get rid of it for good...

Any viable alternatives that aren`t polluting? Or dangerous? This is a global problem, after all.

[knell]

you could fire it into space, but that's not really cost effective or practical... so far wrapping it in steel/concrete caskets and sticking it deep underground in repositories or in pools of water at the plant is the best we've come up with. let's hope for better recycling methods in the future. it's a problem for Japan at the moment because they don't really have as many remote locations that they can dump their waste into.

[dickman69]

shooting into space is the one imo

but ppl 2 scared to do that... imagine if the challenger wasn't filled w/ ppl but tons of nuclear waste

[test_recordings]

shooting into space is the one imo

but ppl 2 scared to do that... imagine if the challenger wasn't filled w/ ppl but tons of nuclear waste

Yeah, point. I was also thinking along the lines of other ways of generating electricity... like geothermal, apparently that`s cost-effective.

[Rappone]

I would shoot it into space

but Id be afraid it lands on an advanced alien planet unaware of our existence.

No but really, the cost of space-firing is still ridiculously expensive and would make nuclear power too expensive to maintain efficiently.

[nowaysj]

Nuclear energy as it stands is super cheap, right, just as long as you externalize most of the liabilities. Honestly though, this is one problem I think future tech can handle. Then again, our global civilization could fall apart and our neostoneage inheritors could have some serious problems to deal with.

[dickman69]

lol

when civilization collapses and the mysterious green ooze that slowly kills ppl that get near it

new #1 god IMO

make sacrifice to the green ooze, 2 virgins enough for stealing ur neighbor's cow

[Hedley King]

Feed it to Godzilla.

Or bury it beneath Greenland, it doesn't stay harmful forever (Greenpeace reckon 24,000 years half life and 10x half lives to be safe- so 240,000 years) and nothing much has happened there geologically for millions of years. Sort of like the deadly opposite of this James Bond type seed vault http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault



.....or I'm sure N Korea would take it off their hands

[Terpit]

Tell gwa its coke, itll all be gone in a few days

[Electric_Head]

Firing it into space is just so typically human.
Because we all know that these methods have no long term implications, right?

[Hedley King]

Firing it into space is just so typically human.
Because we all know that these methods have no long term implications, right?

I think it'd be fair to assume that firing it into the sun wouldn't have any long-term implications....didn't seem to bother Superman doing it anyway.

The big problem with that if we are using nuclear material to make energy and then using huge amnounts of energy to fire it into space then it's all a bit pointless. Plus I doub't many people would want rockets full of nuclear material being launched because it's too risky that it'll go wrong and leave a nice cloud of Nuclear waste or fall on someone's head.

[Electric_Head]

exactomundo

[Ash]

Send it to Africa and eradicate famine.

Two birds with one stone.

[frank grimes jr.]

Payload would be too small to be worthwhile I'd imagine.