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

Beowolf

[foooo]

Sure, it's too expensive to use the power of multiple power plants to eliminate the waste of only one power plant. That would be completely impractical!

But imagine if we had a Beowolf Cluster of Vulcan Lasers!

~foooo

A giant FRIKKIN laser

[n1ywb]

This may be impractical now, but I'm counting on humanity discovering some new abundant source of power, such as Mr. Fusion, hopefully sooner than later. If energy weren't so hard to produce, a lot of technologies would immediately become feasable, or at least easier to research, like ion propulsion, anti-gravity devices, matter synthesis a la STTNG, teleportation, time travel, the list goes on. So anyway once we have Mr. Fusions then it shouldn't be any problem to dispose of all of our old nuke waste so go ahead and make more! Afterall we have a secure location in Yucca mountain to store it, right? Right? Oh, hmm... shit