this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Crazy Ideas
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Just crazy ideas!
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I always like the semi-sci fi idea of the universal recycler. It's a method of recycling that relies entirely on known science and technology, but is simply impractical in the current economy.
The idea is that you literally turn everything into a plasma and then separate it down into base elements via magnetic separation. On one end, you input nearly anything - regular trash, construction waste, "recyclables," medical waste, decommissioned biological weapons - it doesn't matter. It all gets torn down to base elements and sold back into the economy. The only waste this method couldn't deal with would be nuclear waste, as magnetic separation isn't going to magically make unstable nuclei stable again.
This would totally work in principle. It's just incredibly energy-intensive. You need an economy where either the cost of energy is much much lower, or people are willing to spend much more in order to dispose of waste. It would enable the complete recycling of nearly anything, but it would just require an ungodly amount of energy.
Would storing nuclear waste this way be a problem though? I'd basically be an extremely overkill version of the current best known method for storing the waste sealed in base rock for millennia or 20
No. This is separating things down into their base elements. Yes, if you had some alloy that was half enriched uranium and half some other element, this machine would separate the alloy into those two elements. So you have one bin full of another metal like iron or tin. And then in the other....you have a pile of extremely radioactive uranium. Simply sorting things by atomic number does not make an isotope cease being radioactive. However, you could use this to aid in nuclear waste processing. It would be a lot easier to deal with waste if it is broken down into its constitutive elements. However, it's likely that if we ever built these, we would keep the ones used for anything radioactive kept for that and only that use. Highly radioactive material passing through any complex machine is going to cause all sorts of problems. So your local city recycler wouldn't be doing any nuclear materials recycling. That would be done at dedicated facilities.