Radiation!

Grrrr.

I often find myself telling the radio that it's wrong. And today was a case in point.

There was a "not-in-my-back-yard" environmentalist complaining about plans to store nuclear waste. You see, he's wrong. badly wrong. We shouldn't be trying to get rid of it. We should be getting more.

There are two ways to deal with very highly radioactive waste - we're talking fuel rods and the like. The easy one is store it. You find somewhere quiet and isolated (say, Scotland? In a Welsh mountain?) and store it for the next age or two. This does work, yes. You build a big enough facility and tell countries who want to get rid of the stuff "Pay us xxx, deliver it safely to [point] and we'll take it off your hands".

Charge enough and you cover costs - so a good approach to start with. It's stored in a high tech country away from nasty terrorists and freedom fighters and the like. (And no, I don't count the Scottish as freedom fighters. Other words spring to mind.)

But the other one is better - that is, after having acquired as much of the worlds really radioactive waste as we can, we change the plan.

We build a new reactor and use the damned stuff as fuel. It's so dangerous and radioactive BECAUSE IT CONTAINS ENERGY. You set up an environment where the neutrons it emits are recaptured by other material - this causes more fission and more and more. This generates more radiation for a short time - along with shed loads of heat.

End product - low carbon energy and your high level waste is suddenly not so dangerous.

Get rid of it? Buy it!