ANSWERS: 7
  • I cannot.
  • Put it onto a rocket and send it to the sun, and the sun will do it for you. Just make sure the rocket does not explode on launch !
  • Yes you can. This happens alot in nuclear power states (england at Sellafield for example). It's often called re-processing. What they do is they extract the spent fuel from the fuel that hasn't been burn't (the ratio has got too small for a reaction to be sustainable). This can then be repackaged into fuel rods and sent back again. The spent fuel is then sent to be stored until it is safe to get rid of. They also often when they reprocess they extract plutonium from U-238 that has absorbed a stray neutron and decayed to this element. This can then be packaged as fuel for reactors designed to run on this fuel or can be used in the production of nuclear weapons. I should state the occurence of plutonium in normal reactor designs is small otherwise they would absorb too many neutrons to keep the reaction going (you do get purpose built "breeder" reactors that produce no useable power but are just there to give you large amounts of plutonium as the output).
  • No but I hope someone can.
  • Carnivalius' answer is very good. However, let me add something to it. There are a number of advantages and a significant disadvantage to reprocessing nuclear waste. The disadvantage is that the waste products of nuclear fission are really, really nasty. They are highly radioactive and toxic. When you reprocess spent nuclear fuel you are separating these waste products out and concentrating them, making them all that much more dangerous. It is because of this danger that the US does not reprocess spent nuclear fuel. On the other hand, reprocessing the fuel means that you do get more energy out of the it than you would get if you didn't. This means a greater return on the investment to obtain the uranium in the first place. Another advantage of reprocessing is that the waist products have much, much shorter half lives than the uranium does. Spent nuclear fuel still continues to decay. So, as long as uranium is present, it will continue to produce these rather nasty waste products. If we separate these products out and continue to use up the uranium, then all we have to store is the waist products themselves. These will cease to be dangerous much, much faster than if we store the spent fuel without reprocessing. One of the complaints against nuclear energy is the precautions that must be taken to safely store the spent fuel. Allowing the spent fuel to be reprocess would greatly reduce this problem.
  • nope im not a scientist
  • We can recycle nuclear waste through Partitioning and Transmuting the waste. Special kinds of nuclear reactors called Transmuters have been designed but not yet funded and built that can fully burn nuclear waste while producing huge amounts of useful electricity and in the process generating much less long lasting fission products as a final waste product. You might be interested in knowing that typical spent nuclear fuel which comes from current generation Light Water Reactors in the USA still contains huge amount of valuable fuel. Light Water Reactors only burn about 3% of the Uranium fuel in their fuel rods. When the fuel rods are removed from current generation reactors after around 3 years or so they still contain about 95% perfectly useful Uranium and Plutonium which could be perfectly good fuel in the right style of reactor. Each year America’s current 104 LWR reactors produce 2000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. The energy value left in 2000 tons of spent fuel rods after they are considered expended and are removed from operation in America’s LWRs is approximately 7.0 x 10^12 KW hours of additional energy [1] if all fissile and fertile uranium in the spent fuel is completely burned in an appropriately designed molten salt reactor. The value of the electricity that would result from fully burning all of the 2000 tons of spent nuclear fuel is $685 billion dollars a year presuming a 2009 average cost of commercial electricity of 9.79 cents per KW-hour. The fission products that remain from fully burning all of the uranium and minor actinide components in spent nuclear fuel decay to benign levels within 400 years. Fission products that result from burning the plutonium-239 and minor actinides are actually more radioactive when they are first removed from the Transmuter reactor but they quickly decay to safe levels. 83% of fission products decay to benign levels of radioactivity in 10 years. The remaining 17% decay to safe levels within ~400 years. Today nuclear engineering is somewhat out of favor and the Country appears to want to explore how to produce the energy it needs from wind and solar power generators. Our current nuclear reactors work well and are safe. They just produce more waste than they would have to if they used Thorium as fuel and Molten Salts to supply the fuel instead of solid fuel rods. There are about 6.5 billion people in the world. About 1 billion of that 6.5 billion people in the world have no regular access to electricity. We know how to build less waste generating nuclear energy and perhaps a future generation of young men and women who apply themselves today to their math assignments in school will one day actually build cleaner nuclear reactors that will power a better world. Thorium Molten Salt Reactors are good science. Dr. Edward Teller, the founding director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote his final paper a month before his death on the subject of the advantages of Thorium Molten Salt Reactors. www.geocities.com/rmoir2003/moir_teller.pdf AMSTER (Actinides Molten Salt Transmuter) Reactor proposed by J. Vergnes, D. Lecarpentier of Le Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie de Grenoble (LPSC) www.nea.fr/html/pt/docs/iem/madrid00/Proceedings/Paper17.pdf Ignatiev, V., Feynberg, O., Mjasnikov, A., Zakirov, R. (2003), Reactor physics and fuel cycle analysis of a molten salt advanced reactor transmuter, 2003 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP ’03). www.inspi.ufl.edu/icapp03/program/abstracts/3030.pdf Online Nuclear Comic Book www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=1971-nuclear-comic-book&photo_id=191D679B-E047-DFFB-6D77C9216A3F6B8D Spent Nuclear Fuel is too valuable to be Nuclear Waste

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