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The Future of Renewable Energy: Tier List
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<blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 8862399" data-attributes="member: 177"><p>Hardly. We discussed this back when I was in undergrad, which is now decades ago.</p><p></p><p>You are entirely correct - a great many problems would be solved if we recycled spent nuclear fuel. There are a couple of different reaction chains you can use, and they all come down to materials that are less chemically dangerous, and have half-lives in terms of years to centuries, rather than millennia. This has been known for a long time.</p><p></p><p>Why don't we do it? It is <em>extremely illegal</em>. Back in the early days of the nuclear power industry, the US government was afraid that, in moving the fuel around from site to site for recycling, the fuel would be at great risk of falling into hands of terrorists - even if the fuel couldn't be directly used to make a fission bomb (because the ratio of fissile materials had dropped too low - which is why the fuel needs to be recycled), the threat of a "dirty bomb", which spread this stuff with half-life of 10,000 years over and American city was too scary, so reusing the fuel for anything was made illegal.</p><p></p><p>And making fission reactors was hard enough without having a legislative fight to allow you to use the fuel, too.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>So, while I was just talking about recycling fuel, and having end result waste products that weren't nearly so nasty... this doesn't actually solve the waste problem, because the <em>fuel</em> isn't the real waste problem - the reactor <em>buidlings</em> are. There's concrete and steel there that's been bombarded by stray neutrons and such for several decades - that concrete and steel itself becomes radioactive. Tons and tons of the stuff. Recycling the fuel doesn't eliminate that waste, and at this time we have no way to process it so that its half-life reduces.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Umbran, post: 8862399, member: 177"] Hardly. We discussed this back when I was in undergrad, which is now decades ago. You are entirely correct - a great many problems would be solved if we recycled spent nuclear fuel. There are a couple of different reaction chains you can use, and they all come down to materials that are less chemically dangerous, and have half-lives in terms of years to centuries, rather than millennia. This has been known for a long time. Why don't we do it? It is [I]extremely illegal[/I]. Back in the early days of the nuclear power industry, the US government was afraid that, in moving the fuel around from site to site for recycling, the fuel would be at great risk of falling into hands of terrorists - even if the fuel couldn't be directly used to make a fission bomb (because the ratio of fissile materials had dropped too low - which is why the fuel needs to be recycled), the threat of a "dirty bomb", which spread this stuff with half-life of 10,000 years over and American city was too scary, so reusing the fuel for anything was made illegal. And making fission reactors was hard enough without having a legislative fight to allow you to use the fuel, too. So, while I was just talking about recycling fuel, and having end result waste products that weren't nearly so nasty... this doesn't actually solve the waste problem, because the [I]fuel[/I] isn't the real waste problem - the reactor [I]buidlings[/I] are. There's concrete and steel there that's been bombarded by stray neutrons and such for several decades - that concrete and steel itself becomes radioactive. Tons and tons of the stuff. Recycling the fuel doesn't eliminate that waste, and at this time we have no way to process it so that its half-life reduces. [/QUOTE]
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