Letter: What a waste

From Ian McKinley

A “reactor that eats nuclear waste” indeed
(21 October, p 24)! The proposed
reactor splits “atoms of plutonium and other radionuclides that last (sic)
hundreds of thousands of years into isotopes that only last hundreds of years.
After 30 years of operation, more than 96 per cent of the radioactivity would
vanish.”

This is certainly a wonderful machine. The basic mathematics of decay assure
us that the activity of a certain number of atoms of radionuclide is inversely
proportional to their half-life. Transmutation to isotopes with three orders of
magnitude shorter half-life increases the activity by a similar factor.

This is the fundamental problem with all current transmutation proposals
(apart from absurd economics and doses to workers). Small quantities of
technically unproblematic but PR-sensitive high-level waste would be converted
into low or intermediate-level waste of large quantities and increased activity,
which is much more difficult to dispose of.

Schemes have been proposed to use parks of reactors, accelerators and
reprocessing facilities which could theoretically decrease the inventory of
long-lived radionuclides by 96 per cent (see, for example, Scientific Basis
for Nuclear Waste Management, XXI, 3-10 1998). Not only do the high
activities of shorter-lived nuclides need geological disposal, but so does the
waste with the remaining 4 per cent of long-lived isotopes plus all of the waste
from decommissioning the transmutation facilities.

It is often said that fusion is the power of tomorrow— and always will
be. Attempts to drum up support by touting it as the ideal way to dispose of
nuclear waste must be seen as nonsense.

Villigen, Switzerland