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Send it to the Fed I'm sure Hank Paulson and Ben Bernake will figure out what to do with it.

Nice to see someone is working on this.

The invention could help combat global warming by making nuclear power cleaner and thus a more viable replacement of carbon-heavy energy sources, such as coal.

"We have created a way to use fusion to relatively inexpensively destroy the waste from nuclear fission," says Mike Kotschenreuther, senior research scientist with the Institute for Fusion Studies (IFS) and Department of Physics. "Our waste destruction system, we believe, will allow nuclear power-a low carbon source of energy-to take its place in helping us combat global warming."

Toxic nuclear waste is stored at sites around the U.S. Debate surrounds the construction of a large-scale geological storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which many maintain is costly and dangerous. The storage capacity of Yucca Mountain, which is not expected to open until 2020, is set at 77,000 tons. The amount of nuclear waste generated by the U.S. will exceed this amount by 2010.

If it's using fast neutrons, it sounds very similar to using a fast fission reactor to help burn down waste products. In that case, it could just be another way of overdoing the plumbing when a simpler, more demonstrable technology already exists.

I also wonder how people define nuclear waste. One person's waste is another's breeder fuel.

The problem isn't the waste. The problem is that we live in a country full of science illiterate citizens that get scared by scientifical wordz n such. They think the earth is 5000 years old and the sun gets eaten whenever there's an eclipse. A good illustration of this uphill battle was a commerical. I saw an infocommerical recently that described some oven or similar contraption. It said it uses "conduction, convection, and heat waves" to do its miraculous job. As we know, the three modes of heat transfer are conduction, convection, and radiation. However, you can't mention the R-word to people or they think they'll end up with superpowers or mutated children from their cell phones or light bulbs. What would the comic book world be without radiation, anyway? We'd lose almost every superhero except Batman.

The best way to deal with spent fuel is called a parking lot. If you really want it out of sight you can bury it under the billions of tonnes of chemical waste that dont get any attention at all.

What ever you nuke nuts what to do with nuclear power just stop dumping it here in Nevada we don't want it,, we are already trying to close the Nevada test site and now we have to deal with other peoples nuke waste soon.... I know send it to AZ since John Cain wanted more nuke plants...

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... refer=home

This could be a big setback for ramping up nuclear energy, as a alternative to fossil fuels, in the future.
Some of the reasoning against it:

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/yucca/nuctome2.htm

Not really a set-back, because Yucca Mountain wasn't going to be large enough for all the waste we already have.

So folks can keep building nuke plants if they want to, hoping someone will come up with something to do with the waste.

A bigger set-back is no funds or willingness to build new nuke plants.

it was a cash cow for defense contractors like Northrop Grumman.

when i worked there, i was offered the Opportunity to work at their Yucca mountain site. they would have paid me to do some form of engineering analysis & to do "powerpoint engineering".

Wow ! so the US government spent $9 billion on Yucca-related powerpoint engineering.

Not a set back at all. In the near term we will continue putting spent fuel in Dry Cask Storage on-site; once they finish the MOX facility at Savannah River (~2016) we can ship the casks there for reprocessing the spent fuel. Then, the DOE has to figure out what to do with the leftover waste from that. They already have the defense waste process facility, which captures waste products from weapons production in glass logs, those could be stored in Yucca Mountain.

Not a set back at all. In the near term we will continue putting spent fuel in Dry Cask Storage on-site;

Those places were getting filled up, which is why Yucca mountain was needed.


Honestly I can't believe he did that, he says he plans to look at better ways to deal with it.....like what? That stuff has to be put somewhere, and Yucca mountain seems to me like the best choice (isolated, dry, and no active fault lines in the area).

outcast wrote:Those places were getting filled up, which is why Yucca mountain was needed.

You're probably thinking of the spent fuel pools, a lot of sites have filled those up and had to load fuel in dry casks.

I've been in the exploratory tunnel at Yucca Mountain and I agree with your comment, if there is any place in North America suitable for storing nuclear waste, that has to be it. After all, it the same site where they tested nuclear weapons....

I say reprocess nuclear waste back into fuel. Extract usable elements, then bury the rest.

No No NO! We need radiation in order to speed up the evolutionary process. Irradiate the entire population and let the natural course occur...messed up mutations die and the good ones reproduce and will eventually create Homo Superior. We don't have million of years to evolve into something that will be able to live post PO.

I knew a guy who is studying to be a nuclear engineer in university. He was running a calibration test on the external radiation sensor and noticed there was some radiation that couldn't be accounted for by background radiation. A thorough sweep of the university reactor's containment vessel revealed there were no leaks, but the source of the extra radiation was a bottle of water someone left in the sun outside.

outcast wrote:I knew a guy who is studying to be a nuclear engineer in university. He was running a calibration test on the external radiation sensor and noticed there was some radiation that couldn't be accounted for by background radiation. A thorough sweep of the university reactor's containment vessel revealed there were no leaks, but the source of the extra radiation was a bottle of water someone left in the sun outside.

Are you joking with that? That's crazy.

No I'm not joking, there's more radiation in a bottle of water left in the sun than is released by a reactors containment vessel.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/21/nuclear-waste-energy-technology-breakthroughs-nuclear.html
Argonne National Laboratory has developed a method called pyroprocessing that uses molten salt to separate the materials instead of a water-based approach, like the methods used abroad and at Oak Ridge. Some so-called Generation IV nuclear reactors being researched eliminate the need for reprocessing or include pyroprocessing. And some suggest using nuclear fission to help transform nuclear waste into fuel. (See "Reinventing Nuclear Power.")

Nuclear waste is a giant potential energy source, not only for reprocessing and reuse in nuclear power plants, but also as a power source for electric generation directly from solid state electric cells, similar to solar radiation cells.

Plantagenet wrote:Nuclear waste is a giant potential energy source, not only for reprocessing and reuse in nuclear power plants, but also as a power source for electric generation directly from solid state electric cells, similar to solar radiation cells.

Given that NASA is starting to run out of plutonium I'd say that would be a good use.