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."

Comments

Not a good way to dispose of neuclar waste.

[pragma_x]

Two things come to mind:

1) Wouldn't this process increase the demand for additional power plants and thus increase the possible amount of neuclear waste lying around. I suppose once we get fusion off the ground it's a possibility, but not anytime soon IMHO.

2) About a million atoms of iodine-129 were transformed into iodine-128

Umm.. wouldn't all those neutrons knocked loose generate more radioactive waste by contaminating anything nearby?

Seems more like a really nifty way to perform isotopic refinement of a material than than a waste management solution, IMO.

A more interesting problem than iodine ..

[TTK Ciar]

.. would be the elimination of plutonium as a waste product.

There is a type of nuclear reactor called a "breeder reactor" which generates as its waste product more plutonium, which can then be used to power more breeder reactors. All of the recently-constructed nuclear power plants in Japan are of this type. It was hoped to herald a new age of wasteless nuclear power.

Unfortunately, the breeder reactors produce more plutonium than can be used, both in sheer volume and in rate of production. Quite simply, they couldn't build new power plants fast enough to keep up with plutonium production, nor would they want to. Oops.

To make matters worse, the plutonium "waste" is more dangerous than the normal kind, and more difficult to safely store.

If we could economically zap plutnonium en masse and make it into something relatively benign, it would enable the existing breeder-reactor technology to revolutionize the power industry. This iodine-zapping trick only helps with non-breeder plants, which are vastly less valuable.

Not to seem as though I'm harshing on these guys -- Kudos to them! Rather, I hope they are able to apply this technology to plutonium "waste", eventually. If they get it to work economically on iodine first, that's also good, because there is a lot of iodine waste sitting around being dangerous. It would be nice in the long run if we could replace the older iodine-producing nuclear reactors to breeder reactors, but to do that we'd need to figure out how to deal with the plutonium.

-- TTK

Re:alternative

[jgardn]

Some people are really stupid.

Clean coal. It is possible to burn coal so that there is not any of the nasties you get when you burn coal at home.

It is possible to burn most anything without getting nasty byproducts.

Concerning nuclear waste, the previous poster is right. It won't be sitting around for hundreds of thousands of years. We are going to figure out what to do with it very shortly. We are going to have literally clean burning fission power. We will be converting mass to energy with no nasty byproducts.

I find it amazing that on the one hand, people marvel at humanity's ability to do things like create dynamite, nuclear weapons, and clean drinking water from sewage, but on the other hand, say things like making clean burning energy from coal, not to mention plutonium, is impossible.

The BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Nor Anytime) Environmentalist are a walking paradox. One the one hand. science has the power to restore nature, but they refuse to allow science to help mankind.