Reclassify waste to shift the nuclear landscape
nature.com
nature.com
The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2 millicuries per kilogram: http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895?code=rrs-si...
Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196800...), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms/kg for the LD50. Gram for gram, strontium 90 is about 1000 times as acutely deadly as arsenic, or 40 times as acutely deadly as the chemical warfare agent sarin. If you look at plants built to dispose of sarin, they take something a lot closer to "spent nuclear fuel" levels of precaution than "dump it in a pit" precaution.
I agree with you that safety precautions should be by the numbers instead of by psychological reaction, but in a numbers-based regulatory scheme I'd say that we are in much more dire need of increased caution for "mundane" poisons than in need of decreased caution for exotic ones like chemical warfare agents or nuclear fission products.
It can be, though not without some problems. Mauroni describes a
process used in Iraq in 1991. "We'd come across a bunch of
rockets, and you suspect there might be some chemicals in them,"
he says. "The field expedient way, if you're in a hurry, is to
blow it up in place." Army Explosive Ordinance Demolition teams
would use a 10-to-1 ratio of explosives to suspected chemical
weapons.
And yes, there are radiologicals that need to be dealt with more carefully than others. I'm not denying that. 90Sr is about the worst I can think of - its half-life is just short enough for it to be immediately dangerous but also just long enough that you can't stuff it in a box and come back in a year. And I agree that you'd have to treat it with the same immediate care that you would dimethylmercury or VX.
The thing is, 90Sr is the worst radiological I can think of. US regulations partition radioactive waste into either low-level or high-level, low-level being things like the gloves the doctor wears when handling the radiotherapy drugs and everything else being high-level. And guess how you have to handle high-level waste? That's right, you have to treat every single kilogram of marginally neutron-activated steel like it's made of 90Sr. That's insane.
(that and, well, if you had a lump of 90Sr, burying it in a hole for a million years is a stupid way to deal with it. 30-year half-life; throw it in a shed on a military base, if the US government collapses mail it to another government to stick on their military base. repeat for 300 years and done. if there're no stable governments to mail it to, you have bigger problems.)
High-level radioactive waste or HLW means: (1) Irradiated reactor fuel, (2) liquid wastes resulting from the operation of the first cycle solvent extraction system, or equivalent, and the concentrated wastes from subsequent extraction cycles, or equivalent, in a facility for reprocessing irradiated reactor fuel, and (3) solids into which such liquid wastes have been converted.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part060/p...
Given that all American irradiated reactor fuel is still young enough to retain substantial portions of its original strontium 90 (and other medium-lived fission product) content, it doesn't seem like an overly broad definition to me. Maybe in practice things like slightly radioactive steel ends up lumped in with spent fuel? If so, yes, that's bad.
I agree that we don't need to bury spent nuclear fuel in permanent geological repositories. Don't try to chemically reprocess the waste, bury it beyond observation, or otherwise convert a simple, compact, inexpensive problem into a more diffuse, complicated, expensive one. Monitored/guarded sheds is fine.
The less we leave to our children, the better.
Well, it's not child slavery, but lots of mining happens in regions with indigenous people, it's not exactly healthy for surrounding people and e.g. in Niger there have been scandals about worker treatment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_debate).