Ideas on the disposable of Nuclear Waste?

Question

Its green. Its a way forward agreed by America and Great Britain however, how can we dispose of the waste is a huge question, if we bury it, the stock will soon overload, tons of waste just piling up?

What could we do?

Answer 1

Launch into space directed to the sun. It will evaporate long before it actually gets there and the minute amount compared to the sun won't have an effect on it at all.

Answer 2

The only safe way to get rid on nuclear waste is to bury it deep underground like you said.

The is no known way around this, this is the main drawback or nuclear power.

Answer 3

First seal it in seamless thick glass containers to prevent deterioration and seepage, then bury them deep and keep track of all locations until science develops a way to break down the radio active material.

Answer 4

well i think maybe finding a cheap way to send it into space, or land it on another deserted planet we probably wont need in the far future...

i think burying till we come up with a cheap way to do what i said above

Answer 5

i dont know. no matter what its going to hurt part of the enviroment.

Answer 6

When you have a by product that will either contaminate the atmosphere or the water depending on where you put it,

It cannot be considered green no matter what the governments say about it.

The best Idea is to stop creating the waste.

Answer 7

They found a bacteria in a toxic/radioactive mine-lake that they think can eat nuclear waste. The problem is, what does the bacteria give off as waste?

Answer 8

Use it, fuel that has been through an ordinary reactor only once still has most of the energy unused so with reprocessing you can then use the fuel again to run another reactor thereby reducing the amount of waste you have to do deal with.

Even then there would still be a lot of transuranics and fertile U-238 left which could be used in a breeder reactor so breeder reactors could then use that waste instead of new Uranium again reducing the waste produced.

To make things even better the long half-life part of nuclear waste is mostly made up of the transuranics which means that waste that comes out of a breeder won't last as long (only about 100 years for the activity to drop below that of the ore it came from).

Some other materials in nuclear waste might also be useful and could be separated out (Sr90 in particular comes to mind).

Ultimately we're going to have to store the waste, both when it is between reactors and when it has finally been all used up, burying it in a geologically stable location would work although I think it important to make sure you can get to it in the future without too much trouble and above ground storage has worked well enough up to now that we don't really have a pressing need to abandon it (if we did need to deal with the waste problem you wouldn't see the kind of NIMBYism that tends to accompany nuclear waste disposal tolerated).

The good thing about nuclear power is that it doesn't generate much waste so we're not going to have a problem storing it away from the environment for ten times the time it takes for the activity level to go below the ore it came from.

Answer 9

Launch it toward the Sun. Of course this will only work once there is a much cheaper and reliable way of launching thing into space.

Answer 10

THe best answer i can give you is,: we can try our best to reduce nuclear weapons as much as possible and find a SAFE place to dump them, just not in the ocean on land.

Answer 11

The United States is the only country in the world that buries and stores nuclear waste.  For reasons which I can only attribute to lobbying and superstition, this has gone on for years.  Other countries recycle spent fuel rods, this is what we should do.   So instead of worrying about whether storage pits are going to breach or spending billions on launching waste toward the sun, we could instead, be reusing it as a sustainable and powerful energy source.  

Answer 12

The idea of dispose it by burring it is actually is not a green idea..

If there is a leakage or puncture on the drum ,the radioactive content will seep into underground water,, and eventually drink by the population staying nearby.