Just read again of India’s impressive ability with nuclear fuel, from mining to disposal. I think I’ve read that France doesn’t have significant disposal problems. Why do we?
Politics.
You may think that njtt’s comment was too flip or dismissive. You’d be wrong.
Politics.
Exactly. Given that the entire US disposal amount could be dealt with easily, politics and paranoia are the only reasons we have a “problem.”
After refining and reprocessing, the waste just needs to be cast into glass bricks, shipped to White Sands, and piled (carefully) out in the desert. Put up a chain link fence around the dump with a sign that says “If you pass this point, you will die.” Then just leave it. We might just need the stuff in the future, and it’s not like it’s going to walk off.
I agree with the answers upthread, especially the glass (or ceramic) vitrification of the fuel.
But, I am not a nuclear engineer, though I do pretend to be one occasionally at bars to strike up conversations with otherwise unattainable young women.
It is interesting that France has a plan that involves this method. The US has a serious case of nimbyism when it comes to waste disposal of any kind, and nuclear waste is the worst kind in the minds of many. The US could do well by watching what other nations do to handle their own nuclear wastes. Sometimes, it is as if our leaders believe we live on a planet with only one civilized people. That is distressing at times.
the waste disposal “problem” is an effective method of shutting down the nuclear industry. That is the goal of a segment of the US population. So far, it is working, sort of. They can’t shut it down, but they can stall it. Eventually the powers that be in the country will decide it is in the nation’s interest to have a nuclear industry and the “problem” will be solved. Until then, it is a convenient excuse to stall nuclear power.
I know this is GQ, but all I said was a long-winded way of what others said: politics.
Politics based on (largely) irrational fear.
OK, so assuming politics is the root of the problem in the US…how are these other countries getting around it?
And you can guarantee that those glass bricks will lie untouched for 100,000 years? Much better would be to bite bullet and develop a traveling wave reactor whose wastes have half lives measured in decades. But that would cost money.
Generally speaking, one state versus fifty.
In other words, the technical problems are not what’s keeping this from happening? I thought the main “problem” with nuclear waste was the difficulty of maintaining a safe, isolated place for the waste to decay, away from geologic faults, etc. No?
Make that the demand that it be a (near-)perfectly safe, isolated, stable, inaccessible dump; or a (near-)perfectly safe, reliable, secure, economically viable reprocessing reactor; AND built and located so as to be (near-)invulnerable to natural disaster or manmade mischief and with a (near-)perfectly secure custody/transport chain.
Add an intense and historically not-unjustified distrust of government and industry telling you a particular solution is “good enough” or that they’ve got an issue well under control - surely you’ll see how that becomes a political issue.
AND yeah, sure, nobody loses an election on the “I’ll keep those truckloads of Essence of Death from Satan’s Own Sphincter away from our county” platform.
As a gross generalization, US politics is generally more responsive to local interests than other countries’ systems, because power is so widely distributed. More specific to this case, of course, is that the state that would be the designated site for US nuclear waste is represented in the Senate by the Majority Leader.
(This can cut both ways, I suppose. If there is a Republican president and a Republican Congress soon, Yucca Mountain might be activated simply out of spite toward Reid, for all of the enemies and animosities that one inevitably accrues while in charge.)
Politics indeed but a good size segment of the population wants no nuclear power and this point of view is greatly increased by the stupidity of building and renewing reactors that are on fault lines and the major nuclear accidents that have already occurred. Japan’s recent proof of the dangers of nuclear power is a big hit to an industry that was just beginning to improve its image in the US.
Why didn’t Japan’s recent proof of the dangers of fossil fuel power, or their recent proof of the dangers of hydroelectric power, do similar damage to those industries?
Politics?
Point out any story that came close to being as dramatic and glaring as Fukushima. It showed the plant was not well designed. It has left hundreds of thousand without their homes as I recall. This reinforced the negative opinion on nuclear power. It came as the nuclear industry was slowly improving their PR picture in the US as a non-greenhouse contributing power source. It was a huge story. So that is why.
ETA: Actually it looks like 50,000-60,000 are not likely to return to their homes. So I misremembered.
How exactly do India and France dispose of their nuclear waste?
France force-feeds it to geese.
Glow in the dark pate’.
