-
Asked by olirara to Daniel, Jon, Louise, Sharon on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
Question: If you could how would you get rid of Nuclear waste?
-
Jon Copley answered on 23 Jun 2010:
I’d shoot it into the Sun in rockets, because there it would burn up safely without having any effect at all. But that’s very expensive, and you’d have to make it very safe when launching the rockets.
-
-
Sharon Sneddon answered on 23 Jun 2010:
Sadly, there does not seem to be an environmentally friendly way of getting rid of nuclear waste. All the great ideas like burying it under Antartica, or under the Sea-bed have big flaws, or sending it into space, would cost millions of pounds, an a lot of rockets to send it up.
I think we need to start reducing our nucelar waste output and concentrate on making renewable energy sources, and hopefully nuclear scientists will one day come up with a better way of getting rid of the waste. -
Louise Dash answered on 24 Jun 2010:
This is a tough one – it would be much better if we didn’t produce it in the first place!
Currently there’s only a few ways that we’ve come up to get rid of it – burying it deep underground, transmuting it into something else less dangerous or reprocessing it for nuclear weapons, or launching it into space. None of these seems ideal to me!
If scientists come up with a way to generate power using nuclear fusion (fusing together small atoms) instead of the nuclear fission (splitting big atoms like uranium and plutonium) plants we have at the moment, we’d generate a lot less waste. There’s a lot of research going into this at the moment, but we haven’t figured how to get more energy out than we put in yet! It will be a while yet, I think.
Comments
spongebob commented on :
WOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!