What is the
problem
?
What would you do?
If the key is to isolate the waste from current and future generations what are the options?
Send it into space?
- But what happens if the rocket explodes?
Burn it?
- Where do the gaseous combustion products go? What are they?
- What do you do with the solid ash residue?
- What has happened to the radioactivity in the material?
Dump it in the sea?
BELIEVE IT OR NOT this used to happen with low level waste!It was banned by the London Dumping Convention in 1972.
- But where does the waste go when it drops over the side of the ship?
Bury it?
Isolation over long timescales means depth.
- How deep?
- What happens to the waste over long periods?
- How might it be packaged?
- Where would it be buried?
- Who would want it?
Transmute it?
A recently suggested option is to use nuclear processes to convert the more dangerous types of waste into less dangerous forms.
- If the process converts one radioactive element into another often far more radioactive though shorter lived, what is the balance between toxicity and length of time over which the hazard exists?
- Would more waste be produced than we started with?
- What about the additional doses received by workers undertaking the processing?
Leave it where it is?
One option for high level waste produced in power generation is to store it at the reactor site or at a centralised storage site.
- How long would it need to be stored?
- Where would it be stored?
- How long can it be guaranteed that monitoring and guarding the waste will be carried out?
- What happens when institutional
controls fail?
The US Department of Energy has investigated this option.
- See http://www.ymp.gov/documents/deis/index.htm for details.
Accidents do happen.
Source: Galson Sciences Limited