Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
The latest generations of nuclear plants are designed to recycle and thereby use up more of the energy in fuel, resulting in less radioactive waste, and less of a half-life of the waste it creates. So far, none of these latest generation plants have been built in the U.S.
|
You're talking, I think, about "Fast Breeder Reactors" such as the experimental one built at Dounraey in Scotland. The engineering problems are horrendous; because the plant operates at a much higher temperature than a conventional nuclear reactor it has to be cooled by liquid sodium rather than water, and the technology for that essentially had to be "invented" from scratch.
Given the plentiful supply of Uranium in the world, it's difficult to make an economic case for FBRs, so it's doubtful that anyone's going to build a commercial one in the forseeable future.
Quote:
|
I hadn't heard about the glass-encasement method Xenophon described (and wouldn't mind sources or details), but I could see something like that as an effective way to store less-active wastes (though I'm pretty sure no one will let you use those things for a school foundation!).
|
It's called "vitrification"; there's a vitrification plant at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria, England, and it's now a standard method used to dispose of high and medium-level waste.