Should nuclear waste go to Antarctica, or the sun?

[dArKeR]

THE GUARDIAN , LONDON
Friday, Apr 16, 2004,Page 7

Firing nuclear waste into the sun, placing it in Antarctic ice sheets so it sinks by its own heat to the bedrock, or putting it under Earth's crust so it is sucked to the molten core. These are three of the 14 options the government's advisers are considering to get rid of the UK's troublesome nuclear waste legacy.

All options are technically possible and many are potentially hazardous -- either to current generations or those yet unborn. Most also have political drawbacks and are expensive, around ?50 billion and counting, yet it is a problem the government has decided it must solve.

Last year it appointed a committee on radioactive waste management to re-examine all possibilities to find a publicly acceptable solution to the nuclear waste problem -- something that successive governments have failed to do for 50 years.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2004/04/16/2003136883

I've got a moral and just solution. Let aWol finish up his Texas Air Guard duty as one of the pilots to the Sun; Mission Accomplished.

[xray s]

1. I think it should go to

Kennebunkport ME and Crawford TX

[Kool Kitty]

2. My sentiments exactly.

[wtmusic]

3. 3 problems

1. Firing waste to the sun

The inherent problem with this approach is a significant probability that the rocket could explode on the launch pad or crash back to earth.

2. Antarctic ice sheets?

This one seems obvious. There is nothing to prevent radioactive waste from leaching into the ocean.

3. Putting it under earth's crust

No one has drilled through the earth's crust. Technically possible? Maybe someday but not now.

All these possibilities have been examined and the best solution is still to deposit it in Yucca Mountain, one of the most geologically stable areas in the country, pending discovery of ways to safely recycle it.

[lapfog_1]

4. Yeah, that's probably correct.

but Yucca may not be as stable as first thought. Even worse, by
digging into the mountain, we have now changed some of the water
hydrology of the underground environment. Still... it's the best
"near term" (like 100 years maybe 200) storage facility. Hopefully
in that amount of time, we will have a safe reliable way to either
process it (at the sub-atomic level) or transport it off planet.

I don't know what is planned as far as containers, but the French
process of embedding grains of waste in glass marbles and then
placing the marbles in rust proof containers before entombment would
be highly desirable (unless there is something even better). If
I lived in Las Vegas, I would be insisting on this part of the
process, no matter what the expense.

[NNadir]

5. There are lots of threads on this subject.

Nuclear "waste" should be recycled. The Uranium (now 97% of the material removed from the reactor) should be 100% converted into energy. Of the other 3% which are fission products and actinides should be separated by elements and recovered. I don't have time right now to discuss each and every element, but it is safe to say that each of them has a value.

This is not a pie in the sky scenario. In the next few years that Japanese will begin to recover the precious metals such as Ruthenium, Rhodium, and Palladium from their fission products.

There are a few elements commonly derived from nuclear reactors that I think have use in space: One is already used extensively, plutonium-238 (obtained from Neptunium-237), which has provided power on the Apollo missions, the Pioneer missions, the Voyager missions, the Galileo mission, the Cassini mission and other less famous projects. It is impossible to build space craft that go beyond the orbit of Mars without the use of a nuclear material such as Plutonium-238. Curium-244 might be slightly better for some applications, as might Strontium-90 for others.

Cesium-135 is potentially the best possible fuel for ion propulsion engines for operations in deep space. Gram for gram, joule for joule, it is possible to propel an object in a vacuum farther with Cesium-135 than it is with any other substance. Cesium-135 is radioactive, but has an very low specific activity. This application is unlikely to ever become a major commercial activity however and will not account for all of Cesium-135 made in nuclear reactors. Some of that material will probably be transmuted into Barium-136 where it will end up as acid resistant concrete.

It is economically wasteful and dangerous to launch most of the nuclear materials found on earth into space simply to make them go away. Such an approach is not viable merely when one considers the cost of launching materials. The idea is pretty much science fiction.