If radioactive waste emits heat, why can’t we use it to produce energy?
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In short, we can’t just produce energy from “heat”, we produce energy from a *difference* in EDIT – “Temperature”. Energy always flows from hot to cold, just like a waterfall drops water from high to low. You can’t just absorb energy from a river on the top of a mountain (it’s higher, right?) you need the water to be *falling* to capture the energy.
Radioactive waste *does* produce heat, but let’s make it up, if room temperature is 68 F, then the waste is at 78F. Compare this to a car engine where the temperature is around 3,000F. To make a car drive you use that heat differential of 3,000F to 78F to get useful energy. Or alternatively imagine a waterfall that’s just 2 inches, you can’t get a useful waterwheel that small to say, run a factory, off a 2 inch waterfall. That’s our problem.
The places where something like this *are* useful are applications that are both A. exposed to are really low outside temperature and B. require very, very little power. So essentially, space and the poles and we do use them for this in something called a “radioisotope thermoelectric generator”.
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