Comment by randallsquared
3 hours ago
As mentioned elsethread, it doesn't actually clean up anything, since it doesn't affect the waste at all, just turns some of the radiation into metabolism in the same way that plants turn solar radiation into metabolism.
Even if it did somehow accelerate the decay, it wouldn't be that useful, since (Chernobyl aside), all the waste from the typical civilian nuclear reactor can fit in a side lot on the site of the reactor complex itself (and often does!). There just isn't that much radioactive waste to clean up!
Yeah waste has been a red herring that anti nuclear people like to bring up. Yes it’s nasty stuff but there isn’t that much of it and it can be buried or reprocessed it’s not a real problem.
Low level waste is an expensive pain in the buttocks. I toured a local medical and research reactor back in highschool, and they were running out of space to store their discarded PPE and other minimally contaminated waste. You could probably empty most of the barrels on the floor and roll in the contents without any noticeable effect, and yet they still needed to be treated like real waste, just in case.
Not to disagree with you, just to say that even though it's a minor nuisance it nevertheless occupies a lot of mental space because of how annoying it is.