Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Tim Streater wrote:
Media-fuelled ignorance doesn't help. Yesterday morning (I think
it was) there was a piece about waste storage on the Today
programme. Even they repeated the old canard about "some of this
waste has a half-life of millions of years" without apparently
understanding that this means that it's *less*, not *more*,
radioactive.
What is the half life of the Universe?

well yes.

essntially if its hot enough to be dangerous, its worth reprocessing
and burning.

That's as far as fuel rods go.

The more contentious issues are what to do with a mildly radioactive
reactor housing that is full of strange isotopes of reinforced
concrete, due to radiation absorption, that's probably pretty safe,
but is not something you would want to live inside for the next 500
years.

really, if politics and paranoia didn't get in the way, you would
simply fill them up with concrete cover with soil.. and leave
them..for 500 years. A sort of modern Stonehenge to be puzzled over by
archaeologists in 2500 years..but that doesn't satisfy the greenies,
so no one has really come up with a solution.

If you cut them up, you have to them move them somewhere else, and do
the same. Which in itself releases far more radiation than is needful.
And introduces unnecessary risks in transportation and dismantling.

Dump it in a deep ocean trench. It will then be subducted into the mantle.


Oh indeed, but the greenies wont have that either.

In short the green position on old nuclear reactors is

1/. You can't leave that there
2/. You can't put that anywhere else,. either.
3/. Nuclear energy is unlimitedly expesnsive because no one has yet come
up with a decomissioning solution that satisfies 1/. and 2/.
4/. Ergo all nuclear power must be stopped, because of the 'waste problem'

All other lines of attack having failed.