we use the existing nuclear waste to create long duration atomic batteries, from already proven safe designs...

of bomb grade materials. Uranium technology was the preferred technology back in those "atoms for peace" days because uranium produced bomb grade material much more quickly.

Still, even thorium reactors have to be seen as a stop gap technology since they present many of the same environmental risks as any other nuclear technology, albeit more slowly and in lesser quantity.

It will be interesting to see whether or not it can be made viable where it is being intensively researched, India and China.

Still, yes, it has been oversold as "safe" nuclear power on every single level. No nuclear power is safe. Fukushima showed us it can't be.

The person who maintains the Nuclear Weapon Archive website explained it clearly:

... not to mention very lightly used fuel from existing power plants.

That ought to be burned up first.

wikipedia



Or maybe we should just bury it all and forget about it.

I wonder how many of these cylinders exist

The former Sovet Union, 460,000 tonnes and France 190,000 tonnes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium

It could be used as fuel for various sorts of breeder reactors.

A major problem is that most of it is stored as uranium hexafluoride, which "is highly toxic, reacts violently with water and is corrosive to most metals..." It's not the kind of stuff we want to leave to our grandchildren. Even if it's never used as fuel, it needs to be turned into something else, usually uranium oxide.

Your "solution" just makes the problem worse.

We'll have to start a lot of wars and at some point we'll run out of poor kids to fight these wars.
Come to think of it that might be the plan right there.

which were a by-product of Uranium enrichment. Bad stuff since UF6 reacts with water to produce HF- a very dangerous gas. I don't think I would want to be that close to those rusted cannisters.

They probably can't be disposed of in the form of UF6. They would probably have to be processed into a more stable form and that would be really expensive. That's probably why they are still sitting there.

I'm surprised these areas aren't getting more publicity. Definitely a ticking time bomb and as time goes on will be even more expensive to get rid of.

This is because there is 5 billion tons of uranium in the ocean, and that the constant cycling of uranium through crustal rocks would make it impossible to remove it: Uranium, unlike the lanthanides that all of our anti-nukes are trying to dig up to run their expensive and long failing wind power scam is essentially renewable.

The intersting thing about the scientifically illiterate anti-nuke squad is that their fucking expensive and failed wind scam that takes money out of the hands of the poor, the unfed, the unsheltered actually results in the dumping of huge quantities of thorium.

Anti-nukes know no science and whatever science they hear about they hate, but practically every lanthanide mine on earth cotnains thorium, huge amounts of it.

I always like to hear these dumbells with their radiation paranoia harp on their wind fantasy, which requires the dumping of huge amounts of thorium tailinjgs.

If humanity survives the fear, ignorance and superstition of anti-nuke rheotric - not a likely bet becuase anti-nuke stupidity is very, very, very popular - one way to clean up the mess left by the wind industry, would, of course be to fission the thorium wastes by transmuting it into U-233 using advanced plutonium.

But anti-nukes, just as they couldn't give a rat's ass for the 3.3 million people killed each year by their ignorance (half of whom are under the age of 5) don't give a fuck about their wind scam waste.

It's a Chinese problem in their minds: In China, the true cost of Britain's clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale

Thorium is an excellent fuel, but it is not a nuclear panacea. It would be useful for breeding plutonium from the million ton quantities of depleted uranium that have already been mined. But it is not very soluble in seawater and thus is not as sustainable as uranium, the supplies of which could probably never be exahusted. It we were to use this uranium and thorium in defiiance of the scientific and moral idiots that make up the anti-nuke movement, throwing their garbage on the intellectual waste heap that we now reserve for their brother creationists, we would not be required to operate a single energy mine for many centuries, the millions who die each year from air pollution would be saved and our atmosphere might even be stabilized.

But that won't happen.

Fear, ignorance and superstition have won the day.

Heckuva job anti-nukes. You must be very proud.