How is telling Greg that he can’t proffer the idea of nationalising the fossil fuel industry NOT “leaving the FF industry alone”, Zebra?

You DO know that the products can also be dangerous, even radioactive, right?

So the highly radioactive elements in spent fuel rods don’t need long-term sequestration, since they decay quickly, typically while the rods cool down in nearby storage pools. By the time the rods are ready for reprocessing, most of these (but not all!) are gone.

And the “unburned” (unfissioned) heavy elements also don’t need sequestration. They can either be reprocessed into new fuel rods, or they often can serve other purposes. (Example: This is how NASA gets a particular short-lived plutonium isotope that provides the heat source for their RTG power supplies for deep space spacecraft.)

It’s the “elements in the middle”, the fission products that can’t be further “burned”, aren’t low-level radioactive, yet aren’t short-lived either, that are the greatest danger. These also tend to be chemically or biologically active as well (e.g., iodine-131 will be readily absorbed and then accumulate in the thyroid gland and lead to cancer; radioactive strontium will be taken up into bones).

This last category is mainly what needs to be sequestered after being separated from spent fuel (after useful fission products are extracted, too). That’s the part that’s not useful, and is too radioactive for too long, requiring it to be kept out of the ecosystem for very long periods of time.

But that’s actually easy to achieve. Deep salt mines are known to have remarkably stable formations that are essentially impermeable to ground water and can be sealed off almost indefinitely. In fact, they can keep radioactive elements sequestered much better than nature does with naturally-occurring radioactive substances.

Of all the positive things that nuclear power has going for it, waste disposal is one of the best characteristics. So it’s all the more ironic that disposal is usually targeted for discrediting nuclear power. It’s only a political problem, not a technical one.

In the next paragraph, you posit that some components of the spent fuel become more unstable when irradiated in the reactor, and therefore must be sequestered This sounds contradictory.

How is imposing a price on CO2 with a carbon tax or other form of regulation “leaving the FF industry alone”?

You are beginning to sound irrational.

“why constrict the least damaging element and let the other run rampant”

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I’m not letting anything run rampant”

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Yes you are.

Leaving the fossil fuel industry alone will let it run rampant.

You DO know we’re doing just that and the proof is there out the window.

“Unburned” reactor fuel, meaning “trans-uranic elements that have not fissioned” fall into two categories: Those which have not absorbed neutrons or have absorbed them to arrive at another almost stable isotope, and those which have absorbed neutrons to create very unstable isotopes, yet have not fissioned as a result.

The first category are only mildly radioactive, and can be reprocessed into fuel, rather than sequestered. The second category transmutate rapidly into either fairly stable isotopes of another element, or into similarly unstable isotopes that continue decaying. The more radioactive intermediaries, by virtue of being more unstable, don’t last long (in appreciable amounts), so not much need for sequestration there.

It’s the fission products that tend to be radioactive for a considerable time, are chemically reactive, and which pose a threat to health and need sequestration. However, these elements cannot be “burned”. The have unstable nuclei, and adding neutrons in a reactor core only tends to make them more unstable and more “hot” — rather than stable and less radioactive and in need of less sequestration.

The thing to do is process the spent fuel rods to remove unfissioned elements and recycle them (fulfilling #2, 3, & 5), and concentrate the fission products (creating high-level waste), mix it with glass frit, melt it, and pour it into stainless steel casks and bury them in deep salt mines. The amount of such waste is a pittance compared to the radioactive, mutagenic waste from coal plants, which also contain heavy metals and produce sulfur & nitrogen oxides as well as CO2.