Why is Uranium hard to dispose of?

Answer 1

Uranium can be difficult to dispose of for several reasons:

1) It is radioactive. As such it is hazardous unless it is shielded - which makes the disposal more complicated.

2) Most of the isotopes of uranium have a fairly long half-life, which means they remain hazardous for a long time - meaning that however it is disposed of, it needs to be such that it continues to protect it for a long, long time

3) Uranium also has some of the toxic properties of heavy metals and its decay products are mostly heavy metals, so even after it decays it will still be toxic from a heavy-metal standpoint.

4)To dispose of it, uranium usually must be transported to a separte disposal site. Inherent in the transporation is the risk that somehow a container might be breached in an accident and release radiation or contamination that would remain a problem for hundreds of years. Proper preparation and procedures can reduce the risk of such an event to a miniscule prossiblity, but cannot eliminate it altogether.

5)The single biggest reason uranium is hard to dispose of is that the politics of uranium disposal are, to say the least, complicated and emotionally charged. Besides all the above mentioned issues, many people associate uranium with nuclear weapons and thus are inherently scared of it. Some are irrationally worried that somehow the uranium will spontaneously go up in a big mushroom cloud/atomic explosion (irrational because creating an atomic explosion requires considerable deliberate and carefully engineered effort to create the conditions necessary to allow an explosion - and the conditions simply cannot occur in any conceivable disposal scenario). People opposed to nuclear power and nuclear weapons fight their use through political means by making it as difficult as possible get funding or appoval for any disposal sites for uranium under the theory that if they make it hard to dispose of, it will inhibit the weapons from being built or the power plants from being operated.

Answer 2

There is nothing you can do with waste rock, other than to pile it to one side. If it was economical to do, the waste rock could be crushed to make road stone, gravels and chippings, but transporting the aggregate by road could prove too expensive. Waste rock from a gold mine could, with modern techniques, prove worth reworking to extract what little gold previous miners were unable to get at. In other words, it all boils down to cost.

Answer 3

The half-life for many isotopes is extremely long.