Reply to post: Re: 30 year useful life; 300 year useless after-life

Come on kids, let's go play in the abandoned nuclear power station

cray74

Re: 30 year useful life; 300 year useless after-life

30 year useful life; 300 MILLION year useless after-life

FTFY

60-year useful life, 300-year useless after-life.

FTFY.

Well-maintained reactors are proving suitable for 60-year lives and new models are designed with 60 years in mind. With appropriate recycling and reprocessing of their spent fuel, waste output is 1% of a typical "once-through" light water reactor and is truly dangerous for 25-50 years, thereafter requiring about 300 years of oversight until you can chuck it in a hole as mostly non-radioactive waste.

Once-through light water reactor fuel cycles have wastes that are an issue for 80,000 years, mostly due to longer-lived actinides like plutonium and americium. However, those actinides are pretty useful as fuel on their own. If you regularly reprocess the spent fuel for such isotopes then you're left with short-lived wastes that have half-lives of a few years to tens of years. After 300 years, they'd be less radioactive than their original ores. Or you can take the cheap, non-processing route and worry about them for 80,000 years.

The thorium/uranium-233 fuel cycle avoids long-lived actinides and also produces fuel with a high risk for 25-50 years and negligible risk after 300.

300 million years? Only if you've got a pile of fresh highly enriched uranium that didn't get used in a reactor.

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