Despite long-standing public concern about the safety of nuclear energy, more and more people are realizing that it may be the most environmentally friendly way to generate large amounts of electricity. Several nations, including Brazil, China, Egypt, Finland, India, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea and Vietnam, are building or planning nuclear plants. But this global trend has not as yet extended to the U.S., where work on the last such facility began some 30 years ago.

If developed sensibly, nuclear power could be truly sustainable and essentially inexhaustible and could operate without contributing to climate change. In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods--;namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium. This nuclear fuel cycle would combine two innovations: pyrometallurgical processing (a high-temperature method of recycling reactor waste into fuel) and advanced fast-neutron reactors capable of burning that fuel. With this approach, the radioactivity from the generated waste could drop to safe levels in a few hundred years, thereby eliminating the need to segregate waste for tens of thousands of years.

This article was originally published with the title Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste.

4 Comments

1. 1. Tatiana 02:54 PM 3/27/08

   I really think that Scientific American should make their articles available online for free after a couple of years or something. If they did, they could become a much bigger force in forging opinion among public policymakers and the general intelligent public. As it is, SciAm always has the definitive article on every topic, but it's impossible to spread the word about it.

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2. 2. mrjohnh 12:02 PM 7/2/08

   Pay... to read your article.... are you crazy?

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3. 3. mark.felton 05:23 AM 12/17/09

   I think this is one of the most important articles about nuclear power and I am finding it very difficult to get people to look at the approach and technology. There is not enough on the free bit to persuade; the diagram showing the overall efficiency of the nuclear fuel cycle would help significantly. Shame, as we are now moving into a new era of nuclear power which will generate more waste and use only a fraction of the potential energy in nuclear fuel, leading to a shortage of uranium.

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4. 4. mark.felton 05:26 AM 12/17/09

   It is a shame that this article is not more widely available. The matters are vital to the decisions about the emerging nuclear industry: we seem to ignore the issues outlined here and are moving to a conventional approach that will challenge the supply of uranium and add to the waste whilst not addressing the proliferation risks.

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