Reactor waste remains hot as waste so why do we not pile it in a massive dump and cirulate water through it to raise steam or at least preheat water for heat generation?
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Thanks everyone for an informative and interesting discussion.
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If you are talking about using spent fuel that’s sitting in fuel pools, basically they’re not hot enough for energy generation from them to be profitable. And they’re cooling off all the time, so the power you could extract would constantly be dropping.
They got the bulk of the useful power out of the fuel when it was in the reactor.
You need enough heat to create high pressure team and drive a turbine, which then generates electricity, and, bad news? Nuclear power already is the most expensive type of electricty generation, by far. Without government subsidies, commercial nuclear power [would not exist](https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-power-still-not-viable-without-subsidies).
Use reactor waste to boil water? You know that’s literally what a nuclear power plant does right? The reason it’s waste is because it stopped being hot enough to boil water.
This is possible, and is done. Thorium reactors are currently seeing a resurgence, and may make it more of something we do if they reach mainstream.
Using ether waste to make more energy also makes materials used in nuclear weapons. It is generally banned by international treaties. If there was a way to use it and not make those materials most other countries would probably be very suspicious and require a lot of registration.
The very simple answer is its nowhere near hot enough.
The real answer is it would be WAYYYY too expensive to use nuclear waste for anything. There’s some real nasty shit mixed in there.
All I gotta say is this whole post has been super-informative.
Great question and civilized responses!
If you mean just take this hot material, and extract the heat, the benefits would be minimal, plus now you are double or triple handling material that is still radioactive which isn’t ideal
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