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.
In: 77
In a nuclear fission reaction, we take a bunch of one or more unstable elements (e.g. uranium) and turn it into slightly less of one or more other more stable elements (e.g. barium and krypton) + a bunch of energy. The barium and krypton can’t be nuclear fissioned (at least, not easily), so we’re stuck with them.
Additionally, the nuclear waste still has a lot of the original uranium, just not in high enough concentrations to do more fission. That’s why you sometimes hear about [nuclear reprocessing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing) where the waste is chemically/physically processed to re-concentrate the uranium for use as fuel again.
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