
Reclassify waste to shift the nuclear landscape - okket
http://www.nature.com/news/reclassify-waste-to-shift-the-nuclear-landscape-1.22880
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saulrh
I'd be really happy if we could handle radioactive waste with the same level
of concern we assign to things like arsenic, cadmium, mercury, or any of the
other poisons we dump into open pits that'll kill you horribly and won't go
away _ever_.

~~~
philipkglass
The LD50 for arsenic in rats is 15 mg/kg:
[http://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Tabl...](http://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Table.pdf)

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...](http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895?code=rrs-site)

Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram
([https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196800...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19680020487.pdf)),
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.

~~~
saulrh
I believe that nerve agent disposal sites you can find pictures of are all on-
site setups at the depots where the weapons were manufactured and stored. In
many cases they were disposing of stockpiles of deployment-ready munitions.
Care there was not a matter of safety and surety, it was a matter of arms
control and international treaty. Field-expedient disposal in an ongoing
military situation, on the other hand:

    
    
        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.
        

[https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-09/fyi-
chemic...](https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-09/fyi-chemical-
weapons-and-disposal#page-2)

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.)

~~~
philipkglass
Per US NRC definitions,

 _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...](https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-
collections/cfr/part060/part060-0002.html)

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.

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timthelion
Is it possible to transform this stuff into something not more dangerous than
the original uranium ore that was mined. And then put it back in the ground
where we found it? Surely it was radio-active before humans got to it in the
first place...

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mschuster91
Another solution would be to invest in research on how to make the really
nasty stuff with half-life times > 100 years be less dangerous.

The less we leave to our children, the better.

~~~
nn3
A fast breeder reactor can do that.

------
jswizzy
I just wish people would realize how much waste producing solar cells causes.
At least nuclear waste is largely stored on site and uranium isn't mostly
supplied by child slavery. It really was our only chance at clean energy.

~~~
mschuster91
> uranium isn't mostly supplied by child slavery.

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_debate)).

