"The only credible way forward is deep burial." - really?
That's not entirely true. Nor is it the case that "The scientific community does in fact agree on how to dispose of these materials safely: deep underground."
Carlo Rubbia's got a Nobel prize in physics and he's not in favour of deep storage.
http://www.oecd-nea.org/trw/docs/saturne8/sat15.pdf
Rubbia's energy amplifier proposal has this in favour of it - I'm citing a student essay because it's an nicely accessible summary:
"The Energy Amplifier has very attractive waste characteristics, assuming the fuel is reprocessed. When reprocessing, fission products are separated from the rest of the fuel, then the remains are reformed with some extra thorium to create new fuel rods. The small amount of actinides created would therefore be recycled and always kept in the reactor."
Admittedly: "The chemical processes to reprocess fuel from the Energy Amplifier have not yet been fully developed."
But the fact remains that if you're willing to spend many billions and many years developing some new technology, you can turn nuclear fuel waste into electricity without having to dispose of any of it outside your melt-down proof accelerator-driven fancy new power plant. And this isn't a crack-pot scheme from some loony: it's a sound idea from one of the world's most eminent physicists.
- expensive it would be, but so is deep storage of nuclear waste.
As for politically acceptable and so on: if you told the good citizens of (say) Hartlepool that they could have a shiny new technology inherently safe accelerator driven nuclear power plant designed to "burn" nuclear fuel waste instead of the conventional nuclear power plant currently intended to replace their existing aging AGR power station, I reckon you'd be on to a winner. If you then told them that it'd be a long term project involving many stages of construction and maybe a couple of decades of continuous high investment, any remaining objections would probably dry up very quickly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
