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
Its not like acidic or caustic liquid that can be “neutralized”. Nuclear waste has products that are radioactive by nature and the only way to fix that is to allow them to decay until they are stable. Which usually involves several steps and each one releases some form of radiation. The only way to bypass this would be to somehow manipulate the nuclei of the atoms and change the atoms into something else. We’ve only come as far as splitting atoms for bombs and destructive means. The “strong force” that holds a nucleas together is fundamentally unknown, so we are unable to manipulate an element at this level and cannot stabilize the waste by any means besides allowing it to naturally decay.
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