Slashdot Mirror
Giant Laser Transmutes Nuclear Waste
paulnuyu writes "NewScientist is reporting that scientists have transmuted nuclear waste with the Vulcan Glass Laser, cutting iodine-129's half-life from 15.7 million years down to just 25 minutes (as iodine-128). The advance is remarkable, but not practical: the laser would need power from a number of power plants to transmute the waste produced from just one nuclear plant."
The real interesting part about this is that after we develop fusion power we can turn around and clean up all the waste from our time using fission. All the nuclear dump sites can be opened up and be neutralized. This will remove several hazards, terrorism, radiation, etc, etc.
They can use other materials to make gamma radiation, the gold is not a key part.
NarratorDan
"If you're not confused by quantum mechanics, you really don't understand it." - Niels Bohr
Why does everyone seem to equate "long half-life" with "bad" and "short half-life" with "good"? Things with long half-lives are stable; the ones you need to worry about are the ones with the short half-lives because they break down very quickly. Why is this so hard for everyone to comprehend?
I saw a poll once where people said they wouldn't mind having large quantities of radioactive material with < 1 day half-life trucked past their home, but would object strongly to matierial with million-to-billion year half life passing by. This means that the most radioactive isotopes of Radon, Plutonium, etc. are fine, but they don't want any of the normal isotopes of Iron, Silicon, Carbon, etc. in their neighborhood.
That's just plain nuts!
-- MarkusQ
I've always thought it was pretty silly spending millions or billions of dollars on plans for storing radioactive wastes for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. The simplistic assumption is that it is "scientificly impossible" to alter the halflife of waste - that it would be useless and deadly for ages. This article is a perfect example of how advancing technology makes that irrational. In a few tens of years (or even a few hundred years if you're a pessimist) we will have the technology to reprocess the waste or something. Hell, we'll probably mine the waste and USE it.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
See, now you've done it. Don't you know that you aren't supposed to attack Democrats on here? Since you work for the DoE, you've obviously had time to grow out of your "college-kid-liberal" phase, but most of these people haven't yet so *Shhhhh*. It'll only make them angry.