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Comment by EricE | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want to throw away "nuclear waste" - we should be burning it! It's only viewed as waste because of politics and ignorance. Instead of stupidly burying it we should be building the various reactors that will easily burn our existing waste - dramatically reducing the overall radioactivity and producing energy at the same time!

All the fear mongering around nuclear power is beyond hysterical at this point :(

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"Nuclear waste" is a term that is used to describe the byproduct, but also all the equipments that came in contact with radioactive material (cf [0]). So while we can indeed reuse some of the waste on other future nuclear facilities, there will still always be some kind of waste.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Low-level_wa...

100% this. Sending nuclear waste to a black hole? Now that's the epitome of stupid.

you must have missed the second bullet point.

Personally, I'm also concerned with magnitudes of "low-level" waste, which I believe is not really burnable. Not that it would be reasonable to launch entire reactors and ancillaries.

If it is still radioactive, it can almost certainly be reprocessed and shoved back into a reactor.

Parent is talking about stuff like tyvek suits. Also, steel components like reactor vessels and steam generators. Also, fission products are extremely radioactive and non-burnable. None of it is the least cause for "concern", of course.

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