Time to challenge the anti-uranium Luddites A rational country would have built this already - and upgraded it to a site for high-level waste from overseas as well: CONTROVERSIAL plans for a nuclear waste dump are back on the agenda, with the Abbott government commissioning a business case that would allow federal cabinet to consider the project next year and potentially have a facility built by 2019. Officials in the Department of Industry now have concept designs for a $150 million facility, prepared by experts from Spain's radioactive waste management agency, to be built at Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory pending the outcome of a Federal Court challenge. If only we'd created a waste site years ago, when Pangea came knocking. We could now be sitting on many decades of fuel supply, given the development of technology to recycle nuclear waste: Designed by Transatomic co-founders and former MIT researchers Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie, the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) updates the technology utilized in the original Oak Ridge experiment. However, the new system is fuel-agnostic and can run on either the uranium or thorium leftovers from light-water reactors. According to Transatomic's website, their MSR is incredibly efficientâcapable of utilizing as much as 98 percent of the remaining fuel's energy (though even a rate of just 50 percent would be a huge improvement) âsince fuel suspended in a liquid medium can remain in a reactor for far longer than as a rod, allowing more of the fuel to be used. What's more, reusing this waste as a fuel source would reduce their radioactive lifetimes from hundreds of thousands of years to just hundreds. Or take this Bill Gates-backed project: By making more efficient use of depleted uranium as fuel, TerraPower's design results in a lower cost of power. Here is another exciting technological advance that we let green mystics talk us out of.