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sketerpot comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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I wonder how many trivially wrong beliefs we carry around because we've just never checked them. (Probably most of them are mispronunciations of words, at least for people who've read a lot of words they've never heard anybody else use aloud.)
For the longest time, I thought that nuclear waste was a green liquid that tended to ooze out of barrels. I was surprised to learn that it usually came in the form of dull gray metal rods.
Does it still give you superpowers?
If you extract the plutonium and make enough warheads, and you have missiles capable of delivering them, it can make you a superpower in a different sense. I'm assuming that you're a large country, of course.
More seriously, nuclear waste is just a combination of the following:
Mostly Uranium-238, which can be used in breeder reactors.
A fair amount of Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239, which can be recycled for use in conventional reactors.
Hot isotopes with short half lives. These are very radioactive, but they decay fast.
Isotopes with medium half lives. These are the part that makes the waste dangerous for a long time. If you separate them out, you can either store them somewhere (e.g. Yucca Mountain or a deep-sea subduction zone) or turn them into other, more pleasant isotopes by bombarding them with some spare neutrons. This is why liquid fluoride thorium reactor waste is only dangerous for a few hundred years: it does this automatically.
And that is why people are simply ignorant when they say that we still have no idea what to do with nuclear waste. It's actually pretty straightforward.
Incidentally, this is a good example of motivated stopping. People who want nuclear waste to be their trump-card argument have an emotional incentive not to look for viable solutions. Hence the continuing widespread ignorance.