nuclear waste

S

swatiraohnlu

Swati Rao
The question of where and how to store the radioactive waste that follows nuclear energy production has been at the heart of concerns with the energy source. In the United States, Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, was the most prominent underground facility ever proposed, where virtually all of the nation's spent nuclear fuel rods would have been permanently buried over 300 meters beneath the ground. Citing concerns regarding the possibility of leakage over thousands of years, and local discomfort over the plan, the 20-year multi-billion dollar project was halted by the Obama administration in 2009.

Is storing nuclear waste in underground repositories a good idea?
 
Low adoption doesn't make underground storage bad idea. It is true that no major deep underground nuclear waste storage has existed in the world as of 2010, but this does not mean that the idea is, overall, a bad idea. Many great ideas were, at one point, non-existent and un-deployed throughout the world. The same applies to underground nuclear waste storage.
 
If nuclear waster was reprocessed by removing the U and Pu to be put back in a reactor would be much smaller. Would take millions of years to be safe, though some isotopes of U and Pu are the longest lived.

There are advanced fuel cycles being studied that use special reactors that could run on or burn the other fission products to further reduce the waste to medium to shorter half life fission products and would only take centuries for it to be non-radioactive.

Really nothing wrong about storing unprocessed waste, but that would wasteful (no pun intended). It would be like burying soda cans and stuff and going out and mining more Aluminum.
 
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