Nilatai wrote:
Eske Esquire wrote:
Nilatai wrote:
When we have a working fusion reactor
2050, if Sim City is to be believed.
I trust the good people at EA know their sh
it.
Never, ever, ever say "good people" and "EA" in the same sentance. These are the same ******* that killed Westwood and Origin.
Once we have a working Fusion reactor, we just shove all the nuclear waste into it and make stuff we can fission. then we shove that back in the fission reactor and make stuff we can fusion.
Seriously though, the main issue with nuclear waste is that we don't recycle or reprocess any of it. Because that process results in weapons grade materials. If we did reprocess all our nuclear waste, for one thing, the volume would be much, much smaller Right now anythign that might have possibly been in contact with a particle of radioactive material is classified as nuclear waste. Huge amounts of steel, insulation, lead, etc that aren't in their own right radioactive are put into nuclear storage because no one wants to take the time or effort to just isolate the actually radioactive parts. Other spent fuel rods that could be reprocessed into new fuel rods with only a 20%ish reduction in volume aren't.
Between that, and our outdated reactor designs in service, and we have issues. We already have working, proven designs for encapsulated pebble bed reactors that work just as well as the rod type reactors but also are impossible to melt down even without any functional coolant. Each of the pebbles is coated in a reaction limiting compound. You would literally have to break into the containment vessel, chip all the coating away from all the pebbles. stick them all back in a pile, then shut off the coolant to cause a melt down. They require less parts to operate, and when coupled with the same sort of cooling system we have on most of our reactors here (which is incidentally at least significantly more robust than the ones in japan were) the resulting reactor is literally orders of magnitude safer. And other than the U.S. navy, we haven't built any of them on a commercial scale.
nuclear energy and nuclear waste isn't the problem. it's our policies on how we play with them that are to blame.