Maybe I dreamed it up but weren't the Japanese testing some sort of Plasma incinerator a few years ago that you could probably put nuclear waste in and the plasma reaction would have it come out the otherside as a relatively harmless substance. You could even use it for building materials they were saying....
Overly optimistic tests that never panned out?
Call or not, he directly wasted 9 BILLION DOLLARS we cant affoard!
If what Inquisitor is saying is right then its likely that the gains in geology and hydrology research are worth quite a bit on its own.
Plus to put into context 9 billion over 20 years is a drop in the bucket. More is spent in a month on Afganistan and Iraq.
The only problem with shutting it down is that there doesn't appear to be a new plan and they desperately need a new plan for dealing with nuclear waste. My bet is on some sort of technology to reuse or eliminate it instead of holding it around...holding it somewhere seems unsustainable to me.
Incineration is
NOT an option. You'd have to transmute ("perform alchemy") on the elements themselves to make them non-radioactive.
Another couple of things to consider:
America right now uses a really wasteful nuclear (power plant) doctrine. You use the fuel in a single fuel-cycle, then bury it forever. Used nuclear fuel cartridges still contain a high (you could say, majority) of still viable fuel. The fuel in this case is fissionable material.
The problem is, that this fuel was dirtied by short half-life highly radioactive fission by products in the reactor. To use it again, you have to separate these elements. This procedure is called Reprocessing and is a sound technique with established methods.
The reason why the US was so against it, is that the process also involves separating the plutonium from the fuel, therefore automatically creating material for atomic weapons. (Though frankly you
could use plutonium in a nuclear reactor just the same as you do with enriched uranium).
This increases the chance of nuclear proliferation and makes the reprocessing plants highly sensitive areas as far as national security is concerned.
On the plus side, if reprocessing
was used, the amount of nuclear waste to be stored could be lessened multi-fold. Instead storing the whole nuclear load of the reactors a tiny fraction - only the transmuted nuclear waste - would have to be safely "disposed of".
