Sure, just as soon as the federal government pays them back for the fees it charged while promising to take care of the waste...
Do you mean in terms of nuclear waste or some other toxic externality? Would you please clarify what you mean here?
Oh, and enjoy how things end up priced as we force this standard on other companies... Many of the pollutants that other companies are releasing don't break down, period.
We should be handling them as well. It's the by-product of our era's technology so it is our responsibility to handle it. It doesn't matter if the next generations are super-human or cave men, it's still the responsibility of human's of this era to deal with its mess.
10M years is a bit long as well -
Not for pu-239, about 50 times more time is right. Remember it is still highly toxic even when you exclude its radioactive emmissions and that's what it will take to do that.
allow reprocessing and such, and you can get rid of 90% of the 'waste' by reusing it, and of the 10% remaining, you only need to keep it 'safe' for about 1-10k years, not the over 100k.
C'mon Firethorn, didn't we find common ground on this years ago? You already know that to do this with burners you would already need to have the spent fuel containment, fuel management and reactor units already set up with the reactor disposal in place to even come close to achieving it. Anything those reactors produced will be hot and as toxic to life as anything can be. No structure will last 10k years and siting them in a porus mountain is the same amount of effort to do it in a mountain which actually would last.
If we focused on preparing the infrastructure and technology to burn up the radioisotopes we would have about 30 years work and another 50-70 years research into materials technology to make it worthwhile wrt the energy yeild and burn-up rate of the reactor units. And also for humanity to mature enough to operate them, which reactor accidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl show, we aren't.
It's not impossible, but it does start with a granite mountain site that uses the DOE's original science based defense in depth strategies large enough to house the facilities and the railway (or other) infrastructure to move it from around the country. That is the only rational way to deal with radio isotopes that are radioactive for geological timeframes, treat it geologically, dispose of the reactors in place and avoid the energetic costs of decommissioning while it cools in the belly of a mountain.
Even getting started would mean getting pro- and anti- nuclear folk to agree that a geological spent fuel containment facility where you would site the facilities, is the starting point. Which is the truely fucked-up irony of this fully polarized debate.
Ok, so maybe it is impossible.