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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So, imagine we are talking about a different type of fuel, like gasoline. When you burn gasoline to make a motor work, it puts out actual gas emissions – the waste. You can definitely capture that, it also has mass, but the question becomes how are you going to use that gas waste for more energy? You’d have a hard time burning it.
Same thing with nuclear waste. When you use nuclear fuel, you are taking something that you can “burn” to heat up water that turns into steam that turns turbines that make electricity. The nuclear waste is not as easy to “burn”, sort of like how you would have a hard time taking the ash from charcoal and setting in fire to make another fire.
There is a difference here in that it is possible to process that waste into more fuel, but it costs money and additional resources and some energy, and then you sometimes need a special reactor to use it in. this is something called a “closed-fuel cycle”, where you just recycle the waste into new fuel that you can burn again. Some countries have actually been exploring this. I don’t remember the status of their programs but I know it’s been discussed in France, Russia and India, and several countries have plans to store nuclear waste in a way that they could recycle it in the future if they adopt similar programs and technologies.
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