this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Not a better plan but just a curiosity as a physicist enthusiast.
Regarding nuclear fission and nuclear waste (and ignoring the big elephant in the room that are nuclear weapons)....
What are the technical difficulties to turn the radiation emitted by nuclear waste into electricity?
I mean, if the nuclear waste is still radiating, it has stored energy that is radiated as photons, right?
Then, we have the photo-electric effect which turns photons into moving electrons as long as the frequency surpasses a minimum threshold.
Given that the radiation of nuclear waste has frequency way higher than UV, why can't it be used to feed a photoelectric generator?
Also, we have tons of nuclear waste, so the argument that a single rod doesn't generate enough radiation seems kinda bogus since we could just store the nuclear waste into a safer recipient that turns the harmful rays directly into electricity and we have a shit-ton of them stored in thick lead or concrete barrels just so this radiation don't harm the surroundings.
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It is a genuine question that I had, but never had enough physics class to understand where this logic falls apart.
Because, if it were feasible and "cheap", I bet that the US would already be doing it and having access to "free energy" (not really, but a long-standing generator that doubles as removing nuclear waste from the ambient).
You're probably using one of these right now (albeit indirectly)! They're called Photovoltaic nuclear batteries and they're critical to modern encryption. They ensure that encryption keys, which are stored in highly volatile memory (memory where if power is ever lost the contents are immediately erased), never lose power unless the memory modules are physically disconnected.
The reason they're not used more extensively is that they just don't produce very much power - the high-energy electromagnetic radiations are very difficult to harness constructively (things like gamma and X-rays) and as a result we have to do some weird physics stuff to convert them. PVN batteries convert particle radiation, beta radiation from tritium decay specifically, into usable photons via a thin coating of phosphorus on the glass, instead of them being captured directly.
(this is a wild oversimplification just to be clear)
These types of energy generating current from radioactive decay exist and are used to power spacecraft for years. Not very efficient and the cost/benefit ratio is really only justified on space exploration budgets.
Short answer to why aren't we doing X is always, always, cost.