Depleted Uranium is not waste from nuclear reactors, it’s waste from nuclear fuel production through uranium enrichment. It’s very pure U238, the uranium isotope you end up with after you extract all the easily fissionable U235 from natural uranium, which is a mixture of different isotopes, with U238 being the most abundant.
A good part of the waste from reactors can’t be used for manufacturing anything useful, if it could, it would be. Nuclear fuel reprocessing does extract the materials useful for further use from spent fuel, but that’s small amounts, and creates a fair bit of extra waste itself, because the processes involve a whole lot of complicated and interesting physics and chemistry. The majority of the spent fuel assemblies (materials turned radioactive from Neutron flux, Fission products) are good for nothing (unless you want to make spicy paper weights which remotely* taste like metal) and will be anything from mildly to highly radioactive, some of them will be for tens of thousands of years.
Might be, but I personally don’t feel comfortable it being stored. What if it leaks. Not my problem, as I will be dead by then, but still we will leave it for future generations.
I have seen the chaos building the Hinkley reactor and the costs, so my personal opinion there are cheaper ways of producing energy.
Might be, but I personally don’t feel comfortable it being stored. What if it leaks. Not my problem, as I will be dead by then, but still we will leave it for future generations.
The long term storage of the long lived highly radioactive components of spent reactor fuel is not solvable IMO, because the time needed to store until safe (tens of thousands of years) exceeds the life span of all known human civilisations and will take much longer than the age of the oldest known writing systems, so there is no known way of preserving the knowledge of a storage site and its associated dangers.
At the required time scale, even picking the medium to preserve the record on is a challenge, the only half way safe bet is carving it into granite or any similarly hard rock, but even that can erode significantly if exposed to the wrong conditions during that time frame.
Writing itself, as we know it, is only roughly 5500 years old.
One famous example of an early writing system that left extensive records are ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. After the knowledge of this writing system had been lost in the aftermath of the christianisation of the Roman empire and the resulting closure of the remaining ancient Egyptian temples, it took humanity hundreds of years to decipher them again, despite great interest and effort, and was finally only possible thanks to sheer luck: The discovery of the proverbial Rosetta Stone, which carries inscriptions of the same text in Hieroglyphs, another ancient Egyptian writing system, and ancient Greek, of which only the ancient Greek could be understood at the time.
There are many other old writing systems we have records of, but are unable to read, because nobody knows how. This is how any record of a nuclear waste dump site and its dangers will most likely eventually end up. Millennia before the waste has become harmless.
Isn’t it basically a non-issue?
Afaik so little of it is generated that we can comfortably store it for thousands of years.
It can also be used in manufacturing later, like in making depleted uranium APFSDS penetrators (for your mom - sorry)
Also, I believe it’s literally harmless, isn’t it? If properly sealed of course. Afaik it just produces heat for a very, very long time…
Depleted Uranium is not waste from nuclear reactors, it’s waste from nuclear fuel production through uranium enrichment. It’s very pure U238, the uranium isotope you end up with after you extract all the easily fissionable U235 from natural uranium, which is a mixture of different isotopes, with U238 being the most abundant.
A good part of the waste from reactors can’t be used for manufacturing anything useful, if it could, it would be. Nuclear fuel reprocessing does extract the materials useful for further use from spent fuel, but that’s small amounts, and creates a fair bit of extra waste itself, because the processes involve a whole lot of complicated and interesting physics and chemistry. The majority of the spent fuel assemblies (materials turned radioactive from Neutron flux, Fission products) are good for nothing (unless you want to make spicy paper weights which remotely* taste like metal) and will be anything from mildly to highly radioactive, some of them will be for tens of thousands of years.
* remotely as in “from a distance”
Might be, but I personally don’t feel comfortable it being stored. What if it leaks. Not my problem, as I will be dead by then, but still we will leave it for future generations.
I have seen the chaos building the Hinkley reactor and the costs, so my personal opinion there are cheaper ways of producing energy.
The long term storage of the long lived highly radioactive components of spent reactor fuel is not solvable IMO, because the time needed to store until safe (tens of thousands of years) exceeds the life span of all known human civilisations and will take much longer than the age of the oldest known writing systems, so there is no known way of preserving the knowledge of a storage site and its associated dangers.
At the required time scale, even picking the medium to preserve the record on is a challenge, the only half way safe bet is carving it into granite or any similarly hard rock, but even that can erode significantly if exposed to the wrong conditions during that time frame.
Writing itself, as we know it, is only roughly 5500 years old.
One famous example of an early writing system that left extensive records are ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. After the knowledge of this writing system had been lost in the aftermath of the christianisation of the Roman empire and the resulting closure of the remaining ancient Egyptian temples, it took humanity hundreds of years to decipher them again, despite great interest and effort, and was finally only possible thanks to sheer luck: The discovery of the proverbial Rosetta Stone, which carries inscriptions of the same text in Hieroglyphs, another ancient Egyptian writing system, and ancient Greek, of which only the ancient Greek could be understood at the time.
There are many other old writing systems we have records of, but are unable to read, because nobody knows how. This is how any record of a nuclear waste dump site and its dangers will most likely eventually end up. Millennia before the waste has become harmless.