nuclear waste

The Nuclear Safety Institute (NSI) argues that direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel is the quickest route to scaling nuclear energy, according to reporting by the American Nuclear Society's Nuclear Newswire. The position, which skips reprocessing and sends used fuel straight to permanent disposal, feeds an ongoing debate over how best to manage waste while expanding nuclear capacity.

Scientists are highlighting a proposal to use particle accelerators to transmute long-lived radioactive waste from nuclear energy, potentially reducing its hazardous lifespan from around 100,000 years to just a few centuries. The idea, known as accelerator-driven transmutation, is being discussed as a way to ease one of nuclear power's biggest drawbacks: the need to store spent fuel safely for many millennia.

A startup is proposing to use horizontal drilling technology, refined by the oil and gas industry, to bury nuclear waste deep underground. The approach borrows techniques perfected for extracting fossil fuels and applies them to isolating radioactive material, drawing attention to how drilling innovations could reshape waste disposal solutions.

A startup is adapting horizontal drilling methods, long perfected by the oil and gas industry, to handle nuclear waste. The idea is to use the same directional drilling expertise that made fracking profitable to bore deep, stable repositories for spent nuclear fuel. The story highlights how skills from fossil fuel extraction could find a second life in nuclear energy, a sector seeing renewed interest as governments look for ways to store waste safely and expand clean power.

A decades-long design problem is drawing attention: how to warn people thousands of years from now about buried nuclear waste, when languages and civilizations may have vanished. Proposed solutions range from hostile architecture and eerie earthworks to atomic 'ray cats' bred to change color near radiation, with semioticians and physicists still debating whether any message can truly outlast time.

A joint venture involving Amentum has been selected for a contract worth about $2.78 billion linked to the Sellafield nuclear site in the UK. The deal is one of the larger nuclear awards in Britain and covers work at the Cumbria complex, which handles decommissioning and nuclear waste management. Industry watchers are following the award for its size and what it signals for future UK nuclear cleanup contracts.

The US Department of Energy's Environmental Management program will hold a cleanup forum on Wednesday, September 3. The event is expected to cover ongoing cleanup work, including efforts at sites such as Los Alamos, where legacy nuclear waste remains a local concern. Further details about the agenda and participants were not provided.