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Books lunatics hate
Earl Colby Pottinger wrote:
I don't see what is wrong with just a big concrete structure in the middle of Death Valley, glassify the waste and store it there. Glassifying the waste just makes it harder to get at and mixes it up with a bunch of non radioactive material. Much better to keep it in compact, relatively pure form under active guard. That way when people finally figure out how to use it as a feedstock for some useful process it will be easy to get at. Even better would be transmutation into high activity short lifetime isotopes. Once the isotopes decay into something stable (which they will do in short order) you can either bury them or use them as feedstock for some industrial process. Since the resulting stable isotopes will tend to be oddball things which aren't very common there is a good chance of finding some interesting property or other that is commercially useful. Transmutation can be accomplished using the neutrons from D-D or D-T fusion, and the additional heat from the neutron capture and subsequenct decay of the isotopes gives an additional source of energy that allows you to run the fusion side at under Q=1, which is nice since nobody's exceeded Q=1 yet, and probably nobody will for quite a few years. This is also the best bet for getting fusion out from under the government funding model (which rewards slow progress towards ill-defined goals) and into the commercial funding model (which relentlessly drives towards what works). As it currently stands fusion promises to be a cash cow for universities and research institutions for the next three decades until it starts to get commercially viable, at which point someone will notice the neutrons and the resulting backlash will kill it. The best hope is to make a virtue out of a necessity (neutrons from the easy reactions) in the short term, and once we have real experience with running commercial fusion reactors develop the means to first reduce the neutron flux (D-He3) and then eliminate them entirely (p-B11). .......Andrew -- -- Andrew Case | | |
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