And what do you propose to do with the remaining radioactive ash, or smoke from burning the corpses? Radioactivity is not affected by fire

The longer the half life, the longer the radioactive material will last, and thus you have the radioactivity to take a much longer time to fall off. It has nothing to do with the how radioactive the nuclei really is. The half life only describes how long it'll take the [initial] radioactive material's radioactivity (i.e. half the initial material has decayed to something else) to drop by half.

We would like a longer half life for U235 honestly because it would've meant that there would be a much larger amount of U235 available on this planet for use in nuclear plants if it had a say, a half life of 1.4 billion years instead.

In the fission of U235, you have a heck lot of neutrons, and daughter nuclei being produced. These neutrons/daughter products have a high energy, and lose energy in the process as they travel through the moderator, changing their kinetic energy into heat, which is then used to drive turbines.

The problem with the waste is that they emit other forms of radiation which are not easily captured and converted into 'useful forms of energy', (e.g. gamma rays will probably just blast through the medium to only be stopped by the reactor's walls from the decay of the daughter products, whose radioactivity is sometimes even more harmful than the original U235)

[note: pretty much all radioactivity is defined to be harmful, but there does exist a somewhat natural level of radiation we are all exposed to all the time - it doesn't mean that any non-zero level of radioactivity instantly means death]

This post has been edited by bgeh: Aug 15 2009, 01:50 AM