Re: [Phys-l] Darwin, Republican, Democrats

[Rick Tarara <rtarara@saintmarys.edu>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kilmer, Skip" <kilmers@greenhill.org>

> I seem to remember a few years ago reading a proposal to "burn" nuclear 
> waste, both rendering it relatively harmless and yielding some energy in 
> the process. Does anyone else have such a memory, and has it gotten 
> anywhere? I'm skeptical of any government's ability to keep tons of stuff 
> secure for thousands of years.
> Skip

It is this last part that I believe to be the fallacy in the arguments 
against current plans.  Who here doesn't believe that we will have much 
better ways to deal with nuclear waste a century from now or even think a 
millennium from now?  That is, we don't necessarily have to store the stuff 
for tens of thousands of years.  The obvious solution is to shoot it all 
into the sun (the volume of high level waste is not really very large). 
When our transports to space are as reliable as our trucks, this becomes 
feasible (after all, we do ship the fuel rods to the plants, and have 
shipped nuclear weapons all around for decades).  We might actually find 
economical means for recycling and extracting more energy from the spent 
fuel, or who knows what other ideas and technologies might develop over the 
next few centuries.  My view is that if it is 99% safe for the next few 
hundred years, that's just fine.

Rick