Why can’t we dump it into a volcano or yeet it into space? Or for that matter, if it’s still radioactive, doesn’t that mean there is still more juice we could squeeze out of it?
In: 0
Volcanos have this nasty habit of spewing OUT their contents. Bad news if you’re trying to safely store/get rid of the stuff.
Radioactive waste isn’t destroyed by heat, because it’s the base elements themselves that are radioactive. Short of transmuting it via fission or fusion into something less dangerous, you can’t just destroy it.
It’s really expensive to launch mass into space, and most radioactive waste is pretty heavy stuff. Also, it’s too risky to strap a bunch of dangerous waste to a tube full of explosives. What happens if a rocket with a radioactive payload blows up during its ascent? All that waste gets spread around and contaminates god knows how much territory.
We CAN squeeze more juice out of *some* of it. That’s the idea with breeder reactors and reprocessors – they turn some of the spent nuclear fuel into a form that can still be used for fission or other useful stuff (like medical isotopes for radiology). But that only takes care of a fraction of it. ETA: Modern breeder reactors *can* be set up to use up almost all of their fuel to the point where the resulting waste is hardly dangerous at all… but we don’t really have many of those in operation – most of the active nuclear plants in the US are 50+ years old.
A lot of the waste we have is left over from nuclear weapons production, which can be a really messy process.[https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel)
Latest Answers