Since the heat from the radiation is what boils the water to spin the turbines, there should be less radiation in the material out of the plant than in the material into the plant. If you simply shipped it back to the location of the mine there would still be less radioactivity there than before the material was mined.
Surely the issue is concentration of radioactive material, not total radiological output. Your notion would only work if you pulverised the spent fuel rods and then carefully mixed them into the thousands of tons of mine tailings and packed them back into the mine. I'm no engineer, but I'd imagine that there would be some practical problems with that.
Obligatory train content: If you're on the Empire Builder heading west, you can see spent fuel storage at the Prairie Island Plant, between Red Wing and St. Paul, and there's a real, active missile silo visible from the left side of the train between Minot and Stanley.
Hey I'm looking to go to Minot soon.
I was but a child when I read "the strange death of Lous Slotin" in the Reader's Digest. :unsure:
I think George has the right idea - that after you take some energy out of the uranium - there's obviously less energy left.
The problems with nuclear "waste" (notice that "waste" is a relative term and that "nuclear waste" has many very green potential uses)
The main problem is -- for more than 99.9 % of citizens -- "nuclear waste" means some super-scary evil that only boffins might understand (and boffins are obviously losers)(and therefore boffins can't be trusted anymore than politicos).
And - OMG - a spider just ran across my couch -- Help Help --- A spider - oh -- might be a trantuala of a brown recluse or .
It might be a 20-mega-year alpha-emitter byproduct of fission energy.
None of you done your homework, even looking "fission products" on Wikipedia.
There has been exactly one lethal release of fission reactor core -- at Chernobyl.
Fact is --
Keeping the weak old fuel rods cooling at site makes sense - not scary.
I, for one, think fission power is cheap, clean, very low risk.
And - I actually looked at the decay products chains (see Wikipedia) and realized that what George said is true over long times - but faster-decaying products in the short term confuse the issue.
It has been at least a half-century.
I read the Time magazine report of Castle Bravo. Real-time or so. back in '54
I attended the "Youth Conference on the Atom" back in the 60's when Fission was hot.
I visited Hiroshima 2 years back, and ate the oysters (yummy) with no qualms at all.
The problems at "good fortune island number one" -- seriously - minor injuries -
Nobody died from reactor at Fukushima.
Nobody died from the meltdown at 3 mile.
Nobody has died of radiocative waste.
The military plutonium-generating reactor at Chernobyl exploded - there are no more reactors of this type. Ever again.
our
Why aren't the public schools teaching our kids the costs and risks of energy?
Repeat that.