Bill Gates urges U.S. to take the lead in nuclear power
geekwire.com
geekwire.com
For about two decades now I have been reading nuclear boosters talk about new advanced tech that would soon overcome all of nuclear's disadvantages. But nothing has ever become ready for real, mass adoption.
And so I am assuming that by the time in the future when something is finally ready, solar and wind will be doing so well there will be no point in putting any major effort into nuclear.
The design that Bill Gates advocates would use this exact waste as fuel [1], or more precisely the long-lived isotopes in the waste. The remaining isotopes decay by themselves in relatively short time (years, decades, at most a few centuries).
> There was a incident where a employee thought it would be a cool picture if they put the rods next to each other. They were literally lucky that it didn't cause an uncontrolled reaction.
I remember reading about some incident like this. I don't believe the stuff though. If it was that easy to create an "uncontrolled chain reaction" it would be very easy to build a bomb. You wouldn't need an entire Manhattan project to do that.
They can still release substantial amounts of radiation though, and one such event caused the death of Louis Slotin during the project.
> They were literally lucky that it didn't cause an uncontrolled reaction.
Well, they were literally lucky in this case and not so lucky in some other cases. Not the end of the world either way.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident#Recorded_...
If only it could disappear into the atmosphere like coal waste does, right?
Storing the waste in solid form is a good thing