Nuclear energy is a clean fuel and a great way to curb air pollution, yet nuclear energy does come with radioactive waste, which must be dealt with. One way to get rid of nuclear waste would be to shoot it into the Sun, which would not even notice it. Yet if your rocket misfires you have just created a horrific dirty bomb on a missile head full of nuclear waste. Another way which we have been dealing with our nuclear waste is to put it underground for storage of course in doing so we have buried a problem which will take tens of thousands of years to decay into a material which is benign. Currently in the United States we have nuclear waste storage underground where it will be safe and it is stored in containers, which will decay much faster than the material inside of them. Some ideas have been to find uranium-eating bacteria to eat the radioactive waste, which works out well for the bacteria and for us too. We need to go one step further, as we need to figure out how to take radioactive material and make it into lead. That is to say a way to cause the decaying of 1000 years in a matter of minutes or 10,000 years in 10 minutes or 100,000 years in just over an hour and a half. We must spend money to accomplish this scientific breakthrough in the next decade in order to use more nuclear energy, safer, as it is a clean way to make our energy and curtail air-pollution. Think on this in 2006. |
