Throughout my hobby and career stages as an atomic energy writer and commentator, I have been writing about the importance of applying one of the wisest mantras of responsible environmentalism to radioactive materials – Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

It’s almost always irresponsible to casually use any material once and then treat it in a way that makes it difficult or impossible for that material to perform any other function or serve anyone else’s needs. It’s especially irresponsible and wasteful to use rare materials with special physical properties in that selfish and careless manner.

It’s a fact that has been gradually forgotten – or perhaps purposefully submerged – over time, but radioactivity is a rare and incredibly useful property.

Its discovery was so fascinating that it dominated the field of physics for several generations. Radium, one of nature’s more intense but also long lasting sources of radioactive emanations (to use a common term from the early days) became the world’s most valuable material. In 1930 a gram of radium would cost a customer (manufacturer, hospital, university or research institution) $250,000. That’s nominal, not inflation adjusted 1930s era dollars.

Radium didn’t command such a lofty price just because it was rare and difficult to isolate. It was valuable because it could perform important functions that no other material could perform. Its price was also supported by the fact that radioactivity, the natural property that gave radium its superpowers, wasn’t easy for humans to recreate or mimic. //

Radioactive waste isn’t a solvable problem

There is no solution to radioactive waste, any more than there is a solution to feces production. Managing wastes is an ongoing enterprise that includes numerous steps, processes, equipment and inventions. It should be addressed with the same philosophies that have helped mitigate the costs and impacts of other sources of wastes.

We don’t manage feces production by starving people or animals or by preventing or eliminating their existence. Both integrated petroleum companies and meat packers have historically addressed stubborn waste problems by using science and ingenuity to turn byproducts of their processes into new products.

Gasoline was a waste stream during the early days of Standard Oil – it was burned off after the production of the more immediately valuable kerosene. //

Don’t expect final solutions. Allow progress, innovation and creativity

The nuclear waste issue will never go away. It’s not fundamentally different from any other waste issue that is a permanent part of all productive processes, both natural and man-made.

It is an issue, however, that can be addressed and handled with ever improving steps, processes and equipment. The most straightforward way to enable the issue to shrink into a routine part of a valuable industrial activity is to make modest changes in the rules that make the government the owner of the material.

It’s the government’s job to provide oversight. It should establish and enforce rules that provide a reasonable assurance of adequate protection, but it should allow multiple entities the freedom to devise useful parts of a functional enterprise.

Like all other successfully handled – but never solved – waste challenges, the used nuclear fuel enterprise should be governed by the principles of reduce, reuse and recycle.