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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There’s high-level and low-level nuclear waste. Most nuclear waste is low-level nuclear waste — things like gloves, tools, protective suits, duct tape, and other things that may have some radioactive material on them.
High-level nuclear waste is stuff like nuclear fuel (heavy metals, mostly Uranium-235) that has degraded into other radioactive elements, some of which take a very long time to degrade to something harmless. Nuclear reactors don’t turn their fuel into energy. Their fuel are metals that decay (the atoms literally fall apart, which we call fission) and give off lots of heat in the process. That heat boils water to make steam, and steam turns an generator to make electricity.
We don’t turn the mass into energy. They do that in Star Trek using antimatter and some hypothetical future technology (that uses “dilithium crystals”), but we’re not there yet.
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