If nuclear is one of ways to obtain green energy, what are the byproducts of the experience and how do we sustainably rid ourselves of said byproducts safely?
In: Engineering
When spent fuel is taken out of the reactor, it’s generating quite a bit of heat, so to keep it from melting it needs to be stored in a pool of water for a few years. But after that it’s cooled down enough that, left to itself, there isn’t much that will happen to it. I mean, it’s a ceramic material.
The medium-term solution is to store in large steel & concrete canisters; that’s good enough for decades. And the volume isn’t that big. If the USA got all its electricity from nuclear, at the density of this storage area,
https://www.connyankee.com/html/about_cy.html
one square mile would suffice for the next 40 years. The US has many square miles of desert.
The long-term solution is some variation of ‘dig a deep hole in the ground, put it in, fill the hole’. We know this will work because it worked in the distant past. Natural reactors ran, immersed in moving ground water *with no containment at all* for the fission products. And the result was … nothing much.
> Most of the non-volatile fission products and actinides have only moved centimeters in the veins during the last 2 billion years.[4] Studies have suggested this as a useful natural analogue for nuclear waste disposal.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
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