Nuclear waste: Back to Yucca Mountain?
This link is about a year old and discusses the closure of Yucca Mountain. Yucca Mountain was to be a repository for nuclear wastes from the nuclear arms industry and nuclear power industry.
An idea struck me was this: what if you were to take Thorium, which is a byproduct of mining waste for rare earths, and put it in this repository instead? Thorium, is much less hazardous and may be a useful resource in its own right when LFTR technology is developed. Frankly, to me, it is hard to see the downside to a strategy such as this. The repository already exists. Thorium can't be mined because of the problem that it poses in its disposal, so this strategy will solve that problem while allowing the mining of rare earths. In other words, the thorium advocates will have their thorium "bank" and the world will have a new supply of rare earths. How can we lose?
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