Nuclear Waste - Heating and Diluting?

Question

Could we contain and vaporise the waste, then dilute it with salty liquids or something else that would make it pure and unharmful to the atmosphere and the Earth?

Daniel.

Answer 1

Your salty liquids strategy is basically intended to oxidize the fuel, or otherwise have its atoms combine with other elements so that it would no longer be chemically reactive before dispersing it.

Well, we almost could, but making it chemically non-reactive would not make it not be radioactive. The individual atoms combined in chemical reactions will continue to emit radiation.

If there is a way to deal with that radioactivity it is to increase the rate ar which the atoms nucleii break down and radiate energy.  Well, that is a description of the fast breeder technology. We get more energy from the fuel, much faster, reducing the remaining material to but a fraction of its former radioactivity.

Answer 2

i dont think so because you cant speed up the process of the deterioration and the half life and all that

i once answerd in class the way to get rid of it would to be to fire it into the sun

which would work

although thers hazards of the thing carrying it out ther could crash

though they tried recreating some properties of a sun on our planet but they could only get it working for a point of a second

im not a scientist myself

but i believe that if this was possible they would have done it by now

Answer 3

Actually, there is a standard called the Minimum Discernable Activity which is the purity of the water that is let out of Nuclear Reactors. And back in the 80's we use to joke that the water from the plant was purer than the water out side....mostly due to pollutants.

But to meet the standards set forth by the government, there really wouldn't be a way to dilute it enough.

Think of it this way....a Reactor is Always on...the only reason it isn't providing power all the time is due to the control rods....the rods absorb the neutrons and prevent the water from being heated, when the rods are out, the water is heated and makes steam to drive turbines. Those rods eventually need replacing, If we were to vaporize the rods, we would have atoms of the same element, still radioactive, but in the form of dust......now a hazard to anyone that would breath it in. Most materials on the periodic charts have 1/2 lives...meaning the time it takes for them to naturally decay and become un-radioactive. And some of those times are LONG. Disposal seems to be the only reasonable method for those in todays world

Answer 4

With sufficient dilution it might be possible to just dump the stuff although it's probably better to just store it in case we need it again (say because we built breeder reactors that can use what LWRs can't).

Besides, we can contain nuclear waste relatively economically (enough for nuclear to effectively compete with power sources that don't deal with their wastes) so unlike with fossil fuels we don't *need* to figure out a way to dump it into the atmosphere.

There is also the issue of what low doses of radiation actually do (answer: we don't know).  The current risk model (Linear No-Threshold) is based on the conservative assumption that radiation is harmful at all doses (and is the worst possible case) although at the low doses the predicted effect is so small that we can't actually find it (the predicted deaths from Chernobyl are statistically indistinguishable from Chernobyl having killed no one) and for all we know low level doses of radiation might even be good for you.  Unless someone gets compelling evidence for a specific low dose risk model other than LNT (e.g. Hormesis or just a Threshold theory) dumping nuclear waste in the environment will remain unacceptable.