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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Asklemmy
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Radioactive waste is not nearly as significant a problem as has been drilled into our heads. All that waste is dangerous precisely because it is so energetic.
"Fast" reactors reprocess and burn "spent" fuel rods and other high-level waste, leaving only low-level waste with half-lives measured in weeks and months. This low-level waste stabilizes (becomes less radioactive than a banana) in decades, not millennia.
A sufficiently large, sufficiently expensive stockpile of high level waste from low-efficiency reactors provides a hell of an incentive to build fast reactors.
Okay, but even in an efficient system there's still a waste product. My point wasn't to compare-and-contrast trade-offs, simply to acknowledge that every form of energy generation has them to some degree. Plus nuclear still requires a mined resource, and again, mining is an environmentally damaging activity. Just because something is better than alternatives that doesn't give it a free pass.