Nuclear Waste Storage

Find a use for the waste.

i am no expert on this matter, but does this refer specifically to high grade waste like used uranium? or does it include contaminated clothes and such. I thought that some of the lower grade waste only took a few hundred years to lose it's radioactivity.

Build stuff out of it and sell it to poor people.

Perhaps North America would finally wise up and start reprocessing some of their spent fuel? An arseload of the stuff being stored can be re-processed and reused in a number of different reactor types, but right now the cost of virgin, raw uranium is too low to make it worthwhile apparently.

North America needs to look to France, where they are operating a highly successful, safe and efficient nuclear energy program.

This will sound a little sci-fi, but couldn't they shoot it into space and blow it up after a delay (like a year or something)? Why keep that stuff on Earth? In the magnitude of space, 15'x160'x360' is nothing. And I expect a reasonable-sized explosion would disperse the waste so that, in the unlikely event anyone or anything encounters it, the pieces would be small enough and far enough apart as to be mostly harmless.

@ linty - Living in a place where the WIPP project is. And living near one of the major roads that the waste passes by - I wanted to know what exactly was going past my house. And it was basically just barrels of contaminated clothing and the like. No biggie.

The media and hippies with "the sky is falling" attitude made it into a big case of "NUCLEAR = BAD". When in fact it was not bad like they were making it out to be.
You gotta crack a few egss to make an omelete. And maybe in a few years someone will have created a better solution to deal with it all. Like recycle it somehow.

However the waste in that article does not appear to be transuranic waste. Which is what the WIPP site stores. http://www.wipp.energy.gov/

The Other Parker, sure, that sounds all well and good, but then we'll just be giving our space-fearing enemies the tools with which to destroy us!

@the other parker,

No way. There's certainly some wrongness with the idea, (adding additional debris around low earth orbit, but that's another discussion), but the major issue is going to be getting it into orbit in the first place. Rockets still have issues and I can't think of anyone who would want to be downrange of a rocket filled with nuclear waste that may be destroyed in the atmosphere if things should go awry. The track record for rockets is really good, but you're going to have to lead the way and move your house downwind before anyone follows.

Let's not forget the kerfluffle about Cassini, when it was simply using the earth to slingshot, people get really freaked out about nuclear fuels contaminating earth from space.

Usually when you stop making a mess, the mess stops.

@mccrum: Good point about getting it into space. Not sure how that could be overcome except by breaking the lot into smaller payloads and taking them up with the shuttle.

But to address your concern about debris in low earth orbit, this is why I suggested setting the explosive timer to one year. Send the payload far away from earth, well outside of orbit. I'm no physicist but it seems like a decent answer for handling all space junk. If we're disposing of stuff up there, we need to get it as far away from Earth as possible, and then explode it (or incinerate it, or whatever) to reduce it to its smallest, most basic components so it'll cause as little trouble as possible for whoever/whatever finds it later on. Of course, the odds of it *ever* being found in the enormity of space are absurdly slim, but why not take the precaution?

Most of it should be reprocessed. The article is somewhat disingenuous about why we do not - it was a Cold War measure, extended, under the SALT agreements. And yes, Plutonium is part of some waste - but newer reactor designs can use it, it is no longer just for bombs. And a "spent" fuel rod is about as radioactive as the original mined ore - it is when you concentrate a lot of them, as these sites are doing, that they interact, resulting in side effects like increasing the radiation, temperature, etc. Oh, and as pointed out in the recent scary story about a bottle of Plutonium from 1944 being found (inside a still-locked safe, by the way) most of the radiation from it is gamma - unable to penetrate a single sheet of the paper you use in your computer's printer, or a shirt/blouse, etc and thus most dangerous when inhaled or otherwise introduced into the body.

The French are ahead on this, and others are starting to take it seriously, while we are still in the "duck-and-cover" silliness of the early 1950s.

Other Parker:

Don't be silly. We all know if we detonate anything nuclear in space, General Zod and his gang will be freed. Then we're all screwed.

@ Other Parker - two words, Sky Lab. Or is that one word? Whatever. I remember all the fuss and complaining people did when it started to "rain" down to earth. The "hippies" were all freaked out over any residual radiation. 'Oh noez! We are all gonna die from the radiation poisoning!!"...well you can see where that was going.

@ Johnny Cat - General Zod and his gang? I am more worried about Emperor Lrrr of Omicron Persei 8. What happens if we knock out a satellite broadcasting Single Female Lawyer?

There's enough crap floating around in space already.

Not to beat a dead horse, but do you guys get how BIG space is? Like Douglas Adams said, "you just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." Something the size of a football field is insanely tiny in the enormity we're talking about. Seems like if you throw this stuff way the heck out there, I mean really far, so far away that the pieces will never even come remotely close to Earth when you blow it up, there really wouldn't be a problem at all. Sure beats sticking it in the ground for millennia. Am I just crazy?

Size of North America = 9,540,000 Sq Miles.

Size of American Football field = 0.002 Sq Miles.

Why is this a big deal?

It'd be hard to keep track of the pieces if you detonated something in space. Better to just push it toward another large gravitational field so you can find/avoid it later.

"...so far away that the pieces will never even come remotely close to Earth when you blow it up..."

When we blow up Earth?

Actually, I would just push it into the sun. And yes, we could load the space shuttle with it - those hardly ever blow up.

I think putting it into space is too risky and expensive. How about dropping it in a volcano? The waste is very heavy and would swiftly sink in the lava where it would melt and diffuse in the magma layer. You might be able to put it in a streamlined ceramic shell so it does not melt until it is very deep.