RE: Should we recycle nuclear waste?
China also has an immense stockpile of thorium, a sludge lake of it actually, sitting on their frontier with Mongolia. This lake contains some 1.4 million acre-feet of centrifuged precipitated Thorium waste left over from solution-mining Rare-Earth Elements from buried Monazite deposits.
Even if the lake is just 1% Thorium metal by volume that is a stupendous amount of the stuff to have lying around, possibly more than a hundred million tons. Just a thousand tons would suffice to fit out the breeding blanket of a Molten Salt Reactor.
The good news is that North Carolina has Monazite too. Gee, if we could just get Carolingians to take on a few hundred dirty, low-paying jobs involving lakes of radioactive battery acid....
