How can radioactive waste be prevented?

Answer 1

Short of stopping to use nuclear power, and any other handling and refining of nuclear material - you can't.

Nuclear waste is an unavoidable by product of using fission power. It just has to be stored and treated carefully.

You can't if nuclear fission is used. Nuclear fusion would not produce the highly active fission products that are the main problem, but it's not a practical proposition yet.

Answer 2

Radioactive waste is an inevitable consequence of nuclear fission reactors, but it is contained in the used fuel assemblies and these can be kept in a safe place so that the waste will not enter the environment

Answer 3

This question was given an answer, which seems to be a popular misconception, so in providing a new answer, I am keeping it for the record:

"nuclear waste is highly radioactive material and it is very harmfull so we cant do nothing with nuclear waste."

While the beginning of that answer is true - nuclear wast is harmful - there are things that can be economically and safely done about it.

To understand this, it is necessary to understand something about the nature of neutrons. They have very short half lives when they are not bound into atoms - not quite fifteen minutes. During that time, they bounce around from one atom to the next.

Usually, they impart some of their energy, warming the atom a bit, and bounce off.

Sometimes, especially with radioactive atoms, they get incorporated into the nucleus, increasing the atom's isotope by one. When this happens they might render the atom radiologically inert, but much more likely, increasing the isotope reduces the atom's half life dramatically. Radioactive atoms that sit around have long half lives - that is what they are changed from.

Sometimes, the collision causes the atom to decay.

Sometimes, the collision causes the atom to divide, or undergo fission, and this produces a lot of heat and atoms that are called fission fragments.

The reason a nuclear reactor or nuclear bomb works is that it contains a sufficient quantity of fissile material such as uranium-235. Such material naturally undergoes fission, and neutrons are released in the process. Most of these neutrons cause further fission, and do their work, producing fission fragments, but a few do the other things neutrons do. Lots of neutrons cascade through the fuel, with fission producing lots of heat, and lots of neutrons.

So the reaction goes faster and faster, unless it is controlled by moderating the neutrons, as it is in a reactor. But eventually, the percentage of fissile material is reduced to the point that the reaction does not produce enough neutrons to keep going at full speed.

What is left is highly radioactive waste. It could be reprocessed and reused, but this does not reduce the amount of waste we get per unit of original fuel - what it does for us is get more energy per unit. So we have radioactive waste that cannot be used in a conventional power plant for fuel.

You will notice that this all depends on neutrons and runs down when the number of neutrons is reduced. So the question is, what if we could get the neutrons to reduce the waste from somewhere else? And part of the answer is, if we have enough neutrons, we could force the waste through a bunch of isotope changes, a fission now and again, a bunch of decays, and a whole lot of neutron to atom bounces, to prodece radiologically inert material.

Now the question is, where do we get a bunch of neutrons, especially since the neutrons have to start out being rather powerful to do all this?

Neutrons are hard to accelerate, which is how they get powerful. But it turns out that if you accelerate protons, which is comparatively easy, and crash them into certain types of heavy metal atoms, such as lead, the metal atoms have neutrons knocked off, and these are sufficiently energetic. This process is called "nuclear spallation."

So, we can build a proton accelerator, crash the protons into lead, and use the neutrons is a bath of molten lead into which the waste has been dissolved, to destroy the waste, ultimately rendering the waste radiologically inert. A lot of energy is released in the process, which can be converted into electricity and sold. Waste from a plant of this type seems to be more than 99.9% radiologically inert, and is estimated to be as radioactive as coal ash after 500 years.

And it turns out a device that does precisely this was invented by Nobel Prize winner Carlo Rubbia, in the 1980's. A series of tests were done at CERN in the 1990's, which confirmed that the device would work. This device is called an "Energy Amplifier" or an "Accelerator Driven System."

Work on such a system is currently being done in a number of places around the world, but the projects are always considered secret, so there is not much information about them. One was tried in Spain, but went bankrupt because investors were unwilling to wait through a twenty year period to begin to see profits. Another was designed in Italy, and brought to the point that estimates as to cost could be done - a 650 mW plant would cost about 650 million US dollars, about one tenth of what a conventional nuclear plant of the same power would cost. Norway is building one. So, it seems, is China. There is interest in such a plant in Brazil and Belarus, and possibly India and Australia. The US seems to be ignoring it altogether.

There is one more benefit to the Energy Amplifier, aside from the reduction of radioactive waste. This is that it can also generate electric power from thorium, which is very common. There is enough easily available thorium around to provide the world with its current demand for electricity for several thousand years.

Nothing in this world is certain until it is certain, and sometimes things do not happen as promised, but... We have hope this will work.

Answer 4

Put Them in Pb. armor boxes and hide them deep underground for a long time ( abaut 1-2 billion years)

Answer 5

Instead of using your car you could go on a train, bus, or a bike. Don't use your microwave that much radiation can kill you if you stand by it to long.

Answer 6

you can always convince others to stopthrowing trash, oil, chemicals, etc. into the waters. you can also stop connecting sewig pipes to the ocean.

Answer 7

The only way to reduce nuclear waste is to stop produceing it.