re: #287 Kewalo

A lot of what I hear on the left concerns the nuclear waste. What would you do with it?

Several things. France has an aggressive maintenance program in place for their waste that involves, first, reprocessing it so it can be reused several times; extracting useful isotopes that can be used in other industries, particularly medical applications; and finally reducing it’s volume to roughly a few percent of it’s original space, rendering the final waste much more compact and easy to both store and transport. This also makes it more radioactive per unit volume, which makes handling somewhat more problematic, but the half-life is also reduced, so only centuries of storage need to be planned for rather than millennia.

Establishing a central repository for waste - or a small number of them - would also be an important step. Yucca Mountain has been delayed by political squabbling for decades now, and here is where the Federal government needs to assert some actual leadership and get it open.