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I asked for uranium ore for my birthday this year.
It's not a joke. On United Nuclear, samples start at just $12.00 USD. I'm not planning on starting a weapons program or turning into a mutant, and while I don't have any true scientific applications for it per se, it would make a fun novelty item to keep on my desk or display for parties. You know, for nuclear parties!
United Nuclear has an entire page dedicated to assuring you it's safe to own and handle. Just don't sleep with it or eat it, and you'll be fine. There is no need for Geiger counters or radon alarms. But you should have seen the look on my girlfriend's face when I asked for uranium. It was a combination of "Is that legal/won't you die/how do I buy this?"
In many ways, this scenario is representative of how we've been storing nuclear waste on Earth for the past 50 years. It's a matrix of questions. "Is that legal?" "Is that safe?" "Can we even do this?" While humanity's nuclear future remains questionable, as many countries struggle to weigh the risks and rewards, our nuclear past is questioned: are we keeping future generations safe from radioactive waste that remains dangerous for thousands of years?
 Many individuals see the high cost of storing nuclear waste as a reason for denouncing it as an energy source. But the cost of other energy byproducts, such as greenhouse gases, may ultimately be substantially higher. It certainly hasn't helped that some governments and businesses have illegally abandoned nuclear waste. For example, Italy's nuclear governing agency and several other Italian officials paid the mafia millions to liquidate nuclear waste in the 1980s and 1990s. This waste, originating from Swiss, American, French and German sources, ended up being buried in Somalia in exchange for guns, or illegally sunk in the middle of the Mediterranean.
 Unfortunately there are no means to patrol illegal dumping. There are essentially three accepted ways to get rid of spent nuclear fuel, but beforehand it must be placed in a pool of water for it to lose its decay power. These pools are 40 feet deep with storage racks placed on the bottom. Fuel assemblies, once removed from a reactor, are lowered into the pool which insulates personnel from radioactive particles. Truth is, you could swim in the top 20 feet of the pool before attaining a measurable dose of radiation.
It's what comes after the one to 20 years in the pool that is in discussion, where the material's decay power has diminished to a state where it can be permanently moved. The waste remains highly toxic, so it therefore must be repackaged. Formerly, ocean disposal was the accepted means of eliminating radioactive waste, and until 1993 international treaty all nuclear powers utilized this method. The U.S. has 15 off-shore sites near its mainland, with the closest few located near the coastlines of San Francisco, Calif., and Myrtle Beach, S.C., but there are many more located around the world. Samples taken near these sites conclude that there is some leakage, and other studies show that marine life near the dump sites is contaminated with heavy elements. One Massachusetts fisherman had several catches that included nuclear containers. So now the U.S. is left wondering what to do with fresh nuclear waste, because sinking it to the ocean floor has proven to only delay the issue, and spent fuel pools are expected to hang "no vacancy" signs in the U.S. sometime next year.
 The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is an underground nuclear waste repository located in a remote part of New Mexico that has been collecting transuranic radioactive waste since 1999. The facility features 56 waste storage rooms located a quarter-mile below sea level, and each room is 100 yards long. The plant is expected to be in operation until 2034 or so when it will no longer have room for nuclear waste. Despite several radiation leaks just this year, the facility is on track to reach capacity sometime in the next two decades. After this, the caverns will be entombed with 13 layers of concrete and soil. Salt and water will then fill cracks and fissures around the vessels, known as casks. On the surface layer, a granite structure will host more information about the waste buried below, which will be enclosed in a 33-foot-high stockade. Outside the stockade, 32 granite pillars will feature pictorial warnings, as well as text warnings in six languages. The WIPP is meant to last more than 10,000 years, and the hope is that it will last longer than humanity, and that its warnings can still be conveyed.
The final option is something not yet implemented, such as ejecting it into outer space or inserting it into the Earth's mantle, but these options haven't been tried for clear drawbacks. As such, we're still stuck with the same question that plagued nuclear engineers 70 years ago: what do we do with the waste?
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