Tom
@Tallish_Tom@mastodon.scot  ·  activity timestamp last week

China is aiming for a full actinide recycling + fission product removal approach to nuclear fuel.

You can see that this would be a big win for energy security (moving from three 3 1/3s to just incountry resources would be very possible.

I am more interested in the switch from 100,000 year waste to 500 year waste. Building a management organisation to last 500 years is a much more tractable problem than all the stuff for 10-100,000 years.

So, good luck!

#nuclear
Svante
@Ardubal@mastodon.xyz  ·  activity timestamp last week
@Tallish_Tom Fission products have half lives of either 90 years or less, or 200000 years or more; there is a big gap. Half-life and radiation intensity are inversely proportional (rather obviously), so those isotopes with long half lives do not emit very much, rather comparable to natural ores.

So, we already have only a few hundred years to really worry about, and we already know how to do that. No luck required.

But of course, better recycling is a win regardless.
Tom
@Tallish_Tom@mastodon.scot  ·  activity timestamp last week
@Ardubal

I expect you know this better than me. I was going by:

"If, for example, reprocessing of spent fuel is modified to remove some of the minor actinides, such as neptunium and americium, then the remaining waste will decay to a radioactivity level similar to uranium ore in 1,000 years.
If the process is further refined to also remove certain long-lived fission products, the waste will decay to a radioactivity level similar to uranium ore in about 500 years."

https://www.dfat.gov.au/about-us/publications/corporate/annual-reports/asno-annual-report-1999-2000/Pages/nuclear-waste-management-partitioning-and-transmutation