Why can’t nuclear waste either be neutralized or recycled in some way? I know the US is sitting on a rediculous amount of waste, so why haven’t they devised a way to make it less toxic to the environment and safer to either store or dispose of?
In: Technology
There is no single way to neutralize every radioactive isotope. It might be possible to excite some isotopes to make them fission faster to reduce their half time from centuries to minutes but this process would make other isotopes more radioactive. The process of separating the elements in spent nuclear fuel so that you can at least reduce the amount of nuclear waste by only throwing away the actually radioactive isotopes and nothing else and also hopefully reusing unspent fuel is a very costly process. It is even more costly then separating nuclear fuel from ore. So most nuclear reactors just dump the waste materials in a big hole or more commonly just stores it next to the reactor hoping that future generations will solve the issue. There are processing plants that does process spent nuclear fuel, but they are mostly research labs.
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