Obama giving go ahead for Georgia nuke

[Lissa]

The purpose of the main process used is to reclaim the reusable Uranium and Plutonium isotopes, and reduce the amount of dangerous high alpha emitting isotopes for secure sequestration. The remainder still has many useful chemical components, and there is study of how to further refine the "waste" to remove those bits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing and most often http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUREX

Even animal waste has its uses if allowed to mellow in a dung heap. You just need to guard from the runoff getting into the water supply. Radioactive materials are just 1000's of times more lethal, yet easier to detect with Geiger counter.

Alpha emitter lethality depends on where the alpha emitter is. If it's external to the body, alpha emitters are harmless, if inside the body, they do a lot of damage (alpha particles cannot get past the detrious layers of skin, that that is already dead, so cannot cause harm externally).

Radiation damage all depends on where the source is relative to you and what the source is. Alpha and beta emitters are not harmful if external to the body (high energy betas could be a minor issue, but you would have to take extreme does for betas to kill you), internally they are very harmful because they slow down in a very short period causing a lot of damage as they do so. Neutrons and Gammas are not as harmful if internalized, but overall tend to be the most likely causes of death (the faster the neutron is going the less harm it will cause as it's unlikely to interact before exitting your body, thermal neutrons, those moving around 2.2km/s are worse than those moving 100 km/s)

Radiation lethality is dependant on numerous factors (type of emitter, distances from source, flux, energy of emitter, and time in the flux).

And the whole reason for reprocessing is more than just getting back the usable fuel (and I include Plutonium in that catagory), it's to also get the useful fission fragments for industrial and medicinal purposes. Where do you think those tracers and the like come for finding things in the body that shouldn't be there?

As I noted previously, less than 1% of what comes out of a reactor is truly waste, the remaining 99% is useful in some way (either as fuel, in industrial uses, and in medicinal uses).