Don’t even look up there by Cedar City. :dubious: That’s beautiful country all around there. Even the sand has red in it. It smells so good to wake up in the morning while camping there. Thanks for the memory, Lute. 
Oh, puh-leeze. The idea of shipping the waste to some furrin country is clear pandering to peasant-superstition NIMBYism.
If he was responding to any form of “new information,” it was a poll.
Maybe other countries have offered to take it off our hands for a fee.
Or maybe he’s proposing to offer a gross of free glow-in-the-dark paperweights with membership in the League of Democracies.
I never figured out the store it on the moon option. Why not aim at the sun or shoot it to deep space if your making a rocket anyhow. No fancy landing system is needed, or workers.
Someday somebody might find a practical use for nuclear waste. If you store it on the Moon, you can get it again when you want it.
In one of Robert Heinlein’s later stories (“The Happy Days Ahead”), he suggested turning nuke waste into glass bricks and then piling them in the desert, say on a former bomb-testing site. So we can get the stuff again if we want it, see above.
Any reason that wouldn’t work?
None, other than the aforementioned peasant-superstition NIMBYism.
What kind of use would that be? And going all the way to the moon to retrieve nuclear waste seems like very expensive task.
Who knows? We just know there’s no other substance on earth like it. In the above-mentioned Heinlein story, one of the president’s advisers tells her, “You know what use the Romans had for petroleum? Medicine, that’s all.”
But going to Yucca Mountain, or a pile of bricks in the desert, isn’t.
Turning waste into glass bricks wouldn’t be any more efficient than storing them in current DOT design containers, and they’d still have to go into some type of transport/storage container in order to get past safety basis. There would be essentially no containment of the waste in that scenario, and that’s not going to happen.
This is called vitrification and it is one of the main methods of long term storage of solid high level waste (i.e. used fuel elements). The point of turning it into a ceramic is that it becomes very insoluble in water, so even if stored waste comes into contact with ground water the level of contamination will be extremely low. That works pretty well for most solid wastes (although there are still concerns about phase transitions during transmutation causing cracking or separation from the glass, which mandates a maximum density of radioactive material) but it takes a lot of energy, and for any practical purpose is now unusable. However, this doesn’t work for other high or intermediate level waste products, particularly liquid and gaseous wastes that are the result of the uranium fuel refining and enrichment processes.
The main problem I have with long term underground burial is that it is just an extension of NIMBY-ism; that if we put it in the ground we don’t have to worry about it anymore. Similar approaches to other problems with nuclear processing and design have resulted in unforeseen and undesirable consequences; when it comes to anything with radioactive material, it is best to assume that you don’t actually know everything you need to know to predict the long term consequences.
Used nuclear fuel and be processed or transmuted into usable fuel. If and when we achieve confinement (magnetic or inertial) nuclear fusion, we may use fissionable nuclear waste to thermalize (i.e. slow down and make usable) highly energetic neutron radiation (although to be fair there is no lack of suitable fissionable materials in the crust), or it could be used in subcritical reactors as a fissionable neutron amplifier. The once-through fuel cycle is cheaper right now than reprocessing, but only because there are readily available fissile materials. Depending on how much the nuclear power industry grows, they may last a few centuries or just a few decades, and you can’t grow fissile isotopes.
Putting waste on the Moon or even in space is an absurd pipe dream in terms of both cost and hazard. There is no good reason to do this, period.
Stranger
While this is a valid argument for the once-through fuel cycle, it’s worth noting that it’s not the only argument in favor of the decision to avoid reprocessing spent fuel. As you hinted in your earlier post, the solvents and techniques required for reprocessing fuel end up highly contaminated, and are often hugely difficult to handle simply for their own chemical properties*. So there are environmental concerns associated with reprocessing. And there are the security concerns as well in the wake of 9/11 and all the talk about dirty bombs: some of the ‘waste’ products from a full fledged reprocessing plant would be ideal for use in such a bomb, and be easier to handle than trying to process a section of spent fuel.
- These environmental concerns are particularly riveting to those people who read much of anything about the Hanford site. AIUI the worst messes from that facility all come from the reprocessing facilities that were in use there. IMNSHO that gives fuel reprocessing an image of being an unmitigated environmental disaster, which feeds some emotional responses to the idea of reprocessing spent fuel.
Speaking of vitrification: A pilot program exploring how it could work was done at the West Valley Site here in NYS. The second link shown goes to the DOE page on the program there.
You’re welcome, but I was referring to a certain bad movie. 
Personally, I think Crawford, TX just might be about as good as it gets. Hell, it even comes with its own groundskeeper.
Yes, but Kim Il would have to show McCain the Queen of Diamonds before the election to make that work…