No Time to (Nuclear) Waste!

In today's post I'd like to discuss nuclear waste and its properties. Nuclear waste is often imagined as a sort of cartoony toxic green goo in large yellow barrels, but this is really not the case! In fact nuclear waste can exist in many forms and varieties. A quick screenshot of what turns up when I search 'nuclear waste' on Google Images The world loosely agrees on the three definitions for nuclear waste: Low level waste (LLW) Intermediate level waste (ILW) High level waste (HLW) LLW consists of of the least dangerous waste; things like paper, plastic and metal that has been used in hospitals, research establishments and certain aspects of the nuclear industry. Fun fact: in the UK LLW makes up 90% of the volume of nuclear waste but only <10% of the radioactivity ( UK White Paper on Nuclear Waste Disposal , 2014). ILW is defined as waste that exceeds the radioactivity boundaries of LLW, but is not so radioactive that heat is an iss...

In the late 19th to early 20th century, following a period of belief in the scientific community that very few fundamental principles of physics remained to be discovered came a series of (surprise surprise) discoveries of fundamental principles of physics. One of these was the famous equivalence of mass and energy: E=∆mc 2 . This finding led to another monumental discovery: nuclear fission . By which I mean the idea that a nucleus of certain heavy elements could be split in to two fragments through its capture of a neutron, a process which would then produce another 2-3 neutrons. This meant that in stocks of heavy elements large enough, a chain reaction could be sustained that importantly resulted in an end product lighter  than the original. This mass difference was accounted for in the form of nuclear energy . So what? The use of nuclear energy as a power source has some very important benefits. It's more economically viable than other forms of renewable energy becaus...