My knowledge about school level physics is admittedly not that fleshed out, but we were told that it is possible to convert mass to energy. My google-fu has sadly left me for my question here 🙁
So why can’t we just take e.g. nuclear waste and convert it to energy? After that so is my understanding it wouldn’t simply exist as matter anymore and wouldn’t require to store dangerous trash if you can convert it all to energy.
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Mass can be converted into energy in principle, but we don’t have any technology that does that yet. Nuclear reactors use the other half of the mass-energy equivalence, which says energy has a tiny bit of mass. Uranium has so much energy in the unstable arrangement of its protons and neutrons that you could weigh the energy on a scale.
Once you take most of the energy out of uranium by rearranging its protons and neutrons, you have more than 99% of its mass left. That’s nuclear waste. It’s still extremely radioactive for the next few decades because of the remaining energy that we can’t extract yet.
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