How can we dispose of Nuclear waste?

Question

Realistically, Nuclear Energy is a key factor of becoming green, Great Britain itself has planned to use Nuclear Energy for its huge population however their prime minister and members of Parliament have a worry that I can relate to, what can we do with the waste?

Do you have any ideas?

Answer 1

Let's throw it out in the space far far away~

Answer 2

The problem we most fear with spent nuclear fuel is not that some radiation may escape from it, nor that its toxicity will escape, important as those are, we can engineer around those problems.

Rather we are concerned that scavengers will go get it, and reprocess it, making of it nuclear weapons... or horrors they might use it to make electrical power.

Well, they do not have to be sophisticated enough to do those things. They can distribute it like medicine in someone's water system, or dust it over the streets of some city.

This means we have to post guards on it, forever. And we have to post enough guards to be sure that large squads of enemies could not overpower those guards.

Clearly deep ocean trenches or shallow beds under salt do not deal with the biggest concern.

Answer 3

many ideas have been thought up, such as the permanant storage facility in Nevada, personally though, i think the sun can help us. we jsut build a cheap rocket with sufficient payload capacity, and cart it all into the sun, where it vaporizes...

however, theres other things we can do... depleted uranium can be used to make bullets and other hard metal objects. theres a lot of study going into how much it would take to make the nuclear waste harmless.

Answer 4

feed it to poor people?

Answer 5

It is true that, Electric power from nuclear energy can prevent many of the environmental consequences arising out of the use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas. Nuclear energy does not produce smoke or carbon dioxide, so it does not contribute to the greenhouse effect. Thus ‘global warming’ process can be minimized - changing the earth's climate, acid rain, which is destroying forests and killing fish; air pollution etc. Nuclear power checks degrading our quality of life; i.e., the destructive effects of massive mining for coal; and oil spills which do great harm to ecological systems can be prevented.

Waste disposal issues:

(i) Nuclear power produces small amounts of radio-active waste. As the quantity of waste generated by nuclear power plant is very small, the disposal of radio-active waste can be easily contained so they can be buried deep underground. This is the process, most of the nuclear power projects follow for disposal of radio-active waste.

(ii) The quality of radio-active waste improved if we go for reprocessing of spent fuel and reuse of plutonium is incorporated.

(iii) Reprocessing and reuse of plutonium from spent fuel (as discussed above) makes the process even cheaper than coal based power plant.

(iv) The concern about proliferation should be taken out of mind as there are much easier, faster, and cheaper ways for a nation to develop nuclear weapons than through a nuclear power programm.

(v) More effective ways of radio-active waste disposal can be found out as our technology is improving at a very fast pace.

(vi) As technology advances, we hope to switchover to more environment-friendly nuclear reactor – ‘breeder reactor’ – soon; reducing radio-active waste disposal problem.

For further on the subject and other environmental issues you may refer my blogs: http://www.environmentengineering.blogsp... and http://www.coalandfuel.blogspot.com

Answer 6

Ideas I know of:

deep in the see (like 11000 meters deep in the Mariana Trench)

under layers of salt in the ground (the salt is supposed to absorb the radiation)

Shoot it into space.

You get the picture, anything far enough from humans would do the trick.

the problem with the mariana trench is that the container the waste is stored in could collapse under the huge pressure down there, a thousand times higher than normal.

The problem with shooting it into space would be it could easilly not work, like you've just shot a nuke in the air and it's coming right back to you :P  And if it does work we might destroy any possible life in space, or at least give them our problem to solve. not a very nice welcoming present!

I did not look into the salt layer thing enough yet to know what's wrong with the idea, so maybe you could look that up.

Answer 7

put it in oceans?

Answer 8

It must be buried as safely as possible.

It cannot be launched into space for 2 reasons.

1.  It is extremely dense material which would take many expensive launches to get a large quantity in space.

2.  If one of those launches exploded before it left the upper atmosphere, the resulting contamination could be spread over the entire earth.

Answer 9

take it out to space

Answer 10

I suggest we put it under Britney Spears' bed.  

Answer 11

You need to reprocess the spent fuel to get as much as use out of it as possible along with building breeder reactors so as to be able to use all of the Uranium dug out of the ground.

Until the 'waste' has been through breeder reactors and had essentially all the transuranics along with the original uranium fissioned it should not be buried but stored and monitored so as to ensure that it will be at hand for when it'll be needed.

Once that's all done the end product will only take about a hundred years to decay to less than the activity of the ore it came from which given a factor of 10 safety would mean storing it for a thousand years which is quite doable.

There are also other things we could get out of nuclear waste, Sr90 which is a large part of nuclear waste releases a lot of heat making it pretty good for RTGs (not as good as Pu238 but a lot cheaper).

Answer 12

Send it to outer space. To some insignificant planet like pluto or something.

Answer 13

flush it down the toilet  

Answer 14

Easiest method is just put it in a repository.  If you want to cut down on the waste, you can do recycling which will cut back on the volume of waste, but then you have non-proliferation issues with people stealing the plutonium.  Recycling also adds a lot of cost to the overall operation.  Just putting it in a repository is best.  People worry about the waste, but the repositories are designed so that it is not a real issue.  It should also be noted that the nuclear waste is far far less in volume than that of a common fossil fuel power plant.  Nuclear is the way to go.

Answer 15

You put it in barrels and bury it deep in the ground where there are no fault lines for earthquakes.  

Answer 16

Send it to 3rd world countries.

Answer 17

make glowing kids toys out of it