It's far from solved, but there are partial solutions, including reprocessing.
My appeal to dabblers was to think through the entire life cycle of an experiment before beginning. If I were to crack open a smoke detector in order to play around with the Americium source, I'd think hard first about whether I actually knew what I was doing, making sure I worked in a clean/orderly environment, that the entire experiment was nicely contained, and that I had a viable plan for how to safely manage the waste I'd created.
Just as with the bathtub ring in "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" [1], once contamination leaves containment, it can wander everywhere, generating lots of low-level waste. You'd rather not eat or aspirate an alpha-emitter.
Nobody wants an unsafe nuclear experiment in the garage next door; it's irresponsible. It's one thing to hurt yourself, but quite another to harm someone unaware of a risk. It's also irresponsible to dispose of a hot source in your garbage can. That source may no longer be able to hurt you, but it's able to harm everyone who comes into contact with it in the future.
Our lab's standard for whether or not something has been cleaned up: any residual activity is comparable to/indistinguishable from background, and any activated waste has been disposed of with someone licensed to handle it.
here in australia, decades of research and policy development have hit upon a world-class solution to the nuclear waste challenge.
We're building a road in a semi-arid remote ___location, on the traditional lands of a small, disemowered, remote indigenous community. At the end of the road, we plan to build a shed with a barbed wire fence. In return for this inconvenience, the local community will see employment opportunities (2 security guards) and compensation (scholarships for their children).
this standard of excellence is possible when you have a society that tolerates institutionalised inequity and cultural genocide, and apartheid style laws that target particular races. None of this should surprise, as this is the same spirit in which a large portion of the world's uranium is mined on traditional lands in Australia.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/08/calls-ranger-u...
This is just garbage. It doesn't matter where you want to put our nuclear waste disposal facility, some group will invent a story about how they're being exploited to have what they'll paint as "landfill" being put on their land.
Clearly a much better solution is what we do now, where we store all our low and medium grade nuclear waste in random sheds and basements at universities and hospitals all over the country!
not an invention: the people whose land is scheduled to store nuclear waste in australia are subject to laws that target them by race, and deny them basic social services (roads, health, housing, community safety) that others take for granted. the people on whose land uranium is mined (or was until this week's accident!) are subject to a specific federal law that compels them to abide the presence of this dirty industry on land they own.
it must be nice for you to live in this imaginary world where institutionalised racism, racialist legislation and the exploitation of indigenous land owners is 'garbage', but unfortunately for the rest of us, its your story that is mere invention.
(pete- throw away acct cos I'm away from my creds)
In France, they simply used low activity nuclear waste for road beds in the countryside, as supposedly nobody stays long enough on these roads to get any harm from it.
Therefore in the center of France, many, many roads are significantly radioactive. Is it dangerous? Is radioactive matter washed away? What happens to workers doing road repairs? What happens to the rivers, crops and cattle downhill from these roads? Nobody knows and (mostly) nobody cares.
some 30 years ago, land rights in that region were made conditional on the nuclear ambitions of the time. which is why the locals have had to bear the indignity of a uranium operation on the world heritage listed lands they own.
it's called radioactive racism.
http://bit.ly/1d73XYz
If we want sustainable nuclear energy, the only solution would be fast reactor that can burn nuclear waste. Politically, it is near impossible to find a place to build nuclear waste storage. Nobody know how safe is such a storage. If we can burn nuclear waste, we will have sufficient clean energy for several hundred years. By then, nuclear fusion will be harnessed, and we will have enough energy for next many million years, and they have much less environmental impact.
