Eli5 why can’t radioactive waste be used again? Why is it waste?
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So from what I understand IFR (Integral fast reactors) can do this. I encourage you to take a look a the wiki page, but here’s the jist.
> The primary argument for pursuing IFR-style technology today is that it provides the best solution to the existing nuclear waste problem because fast reactors can be fueled from the waste products of existing reactors as well as from the plutonium used in weapons, as is the case in the operating, as of 2014, BN-800 reactor. Depleted uranium (DU) waste can also be used as fuel in fast reactors.
It’s used mops and gloves, whose warm glow can cause cancer to any passerby, for the next eon or two. The safest, simplest thing to do is to seal it away.
Nuclear fuel can be re-enriched in a breeder reactor, if you’re in a country allowed to own one.
Radioactive waste is worth more than the source material, and yhr mafioso like DoE keeps it as such. Highly recommend listening to one Gaylon Windsor on the matter. Videos are from a couple decades ago, but the information is on point and completely relevant to this discussion.
Fundamentally, it’s the same reason that you can’t throw ashes into a fire pit and reburn them and why you can’t just eat your own shit.
To extract energy from anything you need to change it. The energy making part is removed and used up. There isn’t anything on the world which can be used for energy infinitely, that breaks the fundamental laws of physics.
Specifically, plenty of other people have given answers about *how* radioactive waste is used up, but at it’s basic level the answer is “entropy”.
This is the true ELI-5 explanation as I did explain this concept to my give year old which lead to him constantly (and correctly) complaining about entropy whenever stuff broke.
It is like coffee. The fuel was boiling hot water when it arrived. Now you have a carafe of tepid water. No quantity of tepid water will be sufficient to make a hot cop of coffee.
It takes a comically low amount of radiation to be dangerous to living organisms, it takes a comically high level of radiation to be useful for generating heat which is how we use it to power things.
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