Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to I hate to be such a pessimist...

Nuclear waste and fuel supply

If developed sensibly, nuclear power could be truly sustainable and essentially inexhaustible and could operate without contributing to climate change. In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods--;namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium. This nuclear fuel cycle would combine two innovations: pyrometallurgical processing (a high-temperature method of recycling reactor waste into fuel) and advanced fast-neutron reactors capable of burning that fuel. With this approach, the radioactivity from the generated waste could drop to safe levels in a few hundred years, thereby eliminating the need to segregate waste for tens of thousands of years....


Scientific American

This link just give a small part of the article, but basically it indicated that new designs and technologies could allow ten times as much energy to be extracted per unit of ore mined, compared to current plants, with a much lower level of radioactivity in the waste. Win-win.

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