Alan,

I got my first BS in Nuclear Engineering in 1980. A typical nuclear power plant produces only 3 m³ of waste per year. Reference http://www.uic.com.au/nip09.htm. That's a miniscule volume compared to the amount of waste created by a coal fired power plant. I was part of a research study to measure the radiation levels of coal flyash. In some of the samples the levels were high enough that it should have been treated as hazardous materials. Coal does contain measureable amounts of thorium, so burning it actually concentrates its radioactivity. Reference http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html (although this is not the study I was involved in).

I think it's also pertinent to note in a graph not quite 1/2 way through the first article, that at around 800 years the spent nuclear fuel is actually less radioactive than the raw ore from which it is mined.

Jimmy Carter did a great disservice to this country when he shutdown spent fuel recycling programs. It's foolish to not recover the fissionable material and put it back into new fuel.

You should also consider the biological half-life of the carcenogenic materials from coal/oil production.

Are solar cells are the answer? Not really when you consider the volume of heavy metals put into the environment during their production.

TANSTASFL

>I agree with the article that it'a huge political problem, but at the same time, the article makes it sound like the technical problems are minimal. Maybe even all but solved. I think that's a very long way from the truth. We have no good way to store anything at all for over 20,000 years, never mind something as potentially dangerous as radioactive waste.
>
>Complete destruction of the material is the only way, and nobody has that little problem quite figured out yet.