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Comment by TGJ | Hacker News Reader

While the safest, the waste will be with the Earth for a long time to come. Longer than any corporation will be around, or government agency. There has to be a clear cut plan to deal with the waste of nuclear power that accounts for it's life span, and possible natural disasters. Currently all waste is stored at the power plants and the only current plan is to encase the waste in concrete. But where to go with that concrete? How to label the concrete to make sure future generations know that it is dangerous? How to ensure constant security and safety of the waste? We cannot move forward with nuclear energy until the problem of its waste is dealt with.

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that waste can be burned in another types of reactors. Unfortunately, because of extremely high entry barrier, there isn't much chances for these or some other new types of reactors to be developed and put into production. Ie. we stuck with almost 60 year old technology [pretty much the first generation with some slight modifications] of nuclear energy production.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor

Doesn't burning nuclear waste just turn it into a gas or a pile of ash with the same radioactive elements? Burning is a chemical reaction, so the actual nuclei of the atoms shouldn't be changed at all.

it is nuclear "burning". The point is to have designs which produce less dangerous waste [ideally the chain of nuclear reactions should end with non-radioactive elements, yet the reality is far from ideal] or use the existing waste to produce energy from it - the "waste" of existing reactors is still extremely potent nuclear fuel as the existing, very primitive and dating back to Manhattan Project, designs are just skimming the top, easiest, portion of energy.

My favorite is mixed design - nuclear fusion core which itself may be even a bit net energy negative (and thus much more realistic in the near future) and which main purpose is to generate neutrons to burn pretty much anything "heavy" and cheap. Turn the power to the core off - the thing just stops.

The current storage facilities for nuclear waste proposed or otherwise are quite unreal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_re...

Yukka mountain, anyone? Oh that's right, the shrill keep blocking it out of shear, willful ignorance of the either the local or global realities.

That consideration is the biggest.

Nuclear power is safe, intrinsically. Nuclear waste is devastation waiting to happen (if not now, in the future).

It's a bit much to say that a system that requires multiple elaborate systems of safeguards is "intrinsically" safe.

"Intrinsically safer" was probably the better term.

Not really.

If you take the waste out of a thorium cycle reactor (ie. no fission products with half lifes > 100 hears), burn it down until there is basically nothing left then turn it into glass and stick it underneath solid granite in the middle of the worlds most geologically stable tectonic plate then no. It's not exactly devistation.

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