Comments on: Nuclear Waste News Where Are We Headed? Sat, 15 Dec 2012 08:57:56 +0000 hourly 1 By: Anonymous Sun, 05 Aug 2007 06:19:00 +0000 The annual production of nuclear “ash” from even a current generation nuclear power plant is a tiny fraction of the ash produced by a coal-fired plant. If you add in the CO2, water vapor, and other gaseous products even natural gas-fired plants produce many, many more tons of waste than nuclear reactors.

France, which is considered the “Gold Standard” of the nuclear power industry stores its nuclear wastes in polycarbonate blocks that it buries miles underground in abandoned salt mines. They have enough storage capacity for at least 200 years even w/o reprocessing.

If we ever start reproceesing the actual amount of unusable and hazardous nuclear “ash” will be a tiny fraction of the current waste we produce. In time, if we don’t nuke ourselves first, we’ll develop our heavy lift capacity to the point that it will be safe to raise this stuff into space and shoot it into the Sun.

(If we do blow ourselves up a few thousand tons of radioactive debris safely buried at the bottom of sealed mine shafts will be the least of our descendents’ worries.)