Charles U. Farley on Nostr: It's because of proliferation fears, which for whatever reason the US federal ...

It's because of proliferation fears, which for whatever reason the US federal government seems obsessed about. There have been a bunch of experiments like the Integral Fast Reactor, but they keep shutting them down because they depend on reprocessing during which someone could hypothetically (but probably not actually) extract plutonium. It's baffling.

But you're right, the volume of waste is *tiny*. Tiny enough that so far we've been able to just store it all on site at nuclear power plants. The long term storage is mostly just so we don't have to manage it forever. It just seems silly when we can convert all the long-lived waste into inert stuff and short-lived waste by sticking it in a fast reactor.