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

Yikes...

[Bob Vila's Hammer]

The Vulcan laser can produce short pulses of enormous power - a million billion watts. Pulses were fired at a small lump of gold, which produced enough gamma radiation to knock out single neutrons from iodine-129, converting it to iodine-128. The results of the experiment will be published by the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

As if needing the power of several plants to operate wasn't expensive enough, they fire the laser at a lump of gold? Is this a new Austin Powers movie in the making?

The conversation went like this

[L. VeGas]

Kirk: Spock, I know! We'll use your glass laser to destroy our radiocative trash!

Spock: Captain, that is .... illogical.

Re:Beowolf

[deglr6328]

my submission for this story was way more informative "2003-08-20 17:11:37 Using Ultrahigh Power Lasers to "Burn" Rad (science,science) (rejected)" damnit!

anyway a beowulf cluster of vulcan lasers will probably look something like what's being built at the University of Rochester right now called Omega EP. Which will be nearly 10 times as powerfull as Vulcan. :-)

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.

Re:Not a good way to dispose of neuclar waste.

[confused one]

First, learn to spell nuclear.

Then read the article -- they said this was an impracticle idea, just shows it can be done.

To answer your second question, not necessarily. If you put the iodine-129 target into a container surrounded by water, for example, the released neutrons would either interact with one of the nuclei to form an isotope with a similarly short half-life, or decay into a hydrogen atom (neutrons have a very short half-life themselves, quickly decaying into a proton and electron).

Re:Not a good way to dispose of neuclar waste.

[sraak]

at the end of the story is this:
"He also points out that dramatic reductions in the half-lives of isotopes inevitably lead to huge immediate increases in the levels of radiation being emitted per second. Initial missions from iodine-128 would be hundreds of billions of times higher than from iodine-129, causing handling problems for nuclear operators."

you are right. if you cut down the radiation time, you multiply the intensity of the radiation...
i do not want to be anywhere near when they start processing nuclear waste with lasers, practical or not.

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:A more interesting problem than iodine ..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but your post contains many technical inaccuracies. Here they are, with brief commentary, in no particular order.

1. Japan has only one fast breeder reactor, Monju... an experimental design.
2. All of the recently constructed reactors in Japan are Light Water Reactors, either pressurized (PWR) or boiling (BWR).
3. ALL reactors fueled with uranium produce plutonium... and since the plutonium is in the core, some of it gets burned (and destroyed) by fission, contributing to the energy released by the fuel.
4. If we have excess plutonium available, we can use it to make fuel for reactors... it will be mixed with uranium dioxide to make mixed oxide fuel (MOX).
5. The difference betweeen a breeder and a non-breeder is the conversion ratio attainable. In non-breeders, the value is less than 1. In breeders, the value is greater than 1. A value of exactly 1 implies that for every atom of fuel fissioned, one new atom of fuel is created by transmutation of fertile material (i.e., U-238).
6. The ONLY reason to build a breeder with high conversion ratio is to produce excess plutonium for use in non-breeders.
7. Breeding is possible in light water reactors. This was demonstrated at Shippingport, PA. The conversion ratio is not high, but it is definitely greater than 1.
8. ALL reactors, whether breeder or non-breeder, produce wastes, including iodine.
9. The feature that distinguishes nuclear power is the energy density of the fuel, and the corresponding small volume of waste relative to amount of energy generated.
10. All spent fuel is not waste. Typically, about 95% of nuclear waste is just U-238... which just happens to be a fertile material perfect for creating plutonium in a breeder reactor.
11. A closed nuclear fuel cycle, in which breeder and non-breeder reactors are used and fuel reprocessing is allowed, achieves the highest possible utilization of fuel.
12. The closed fuel cycle is the holy grail of nuclear power. Even so, there would be waste products to eliminate.
13. Another method proposed for elimination of such waste is accelerator transmutation.
14. ANY method of reducing the toxicity of this waste is a welcome addition to the technological toolbox.

In summary... we know what to do with the plutonium (burn it as fuel). All reactors produce iodine, cesium, barium, krypton, xenon, lanthanum, etc. The volume of these waste products is small, but any method that can reduce the toxicity is desirable.

Not Now, But Later. When We Have Fusion Power

[narratorDan]

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

So what...

[3-State Bit]

...if it needs power from many conventional nuclear power plants to process the waste from a single one?

In just 30 years we will have fusion power plants -- therefore, all we have to do is store those nasty nuclear byproducts for just 30 years.

Preferably in Utah. Oh wait.

from the truth in article titles department...

[Tumbleweed]

"Giant Waste of Electricity Transmutes Grant Money into Laser"

w00t!

I bet _that's_ a fun lab to play in. Just don't hook up the controls to the MCP, boys.

End of Line

That's going the wrong way!

[MarkusQ]

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

Re:That's going the wrong way!

[bluGill]

One, people don't understand.

Two: science understands. Something with a halflife of a few days isn't a problem, it is gone before it sits around long. Something with a half life of thousands of years can still be radioactive enough to be very dangerious, but because of the long halflife it will be very dangerious for years. Once you get into millions of years for a halflife, it isn't very dangerious, but thousands of years turns out to still be dangerious.

Note, I'm talking total half life until it decays either into something stable. If something has a halflife of 10e-16 seconds, but decays into something with a halflife of 10,000 years, it is still dangerious in quanity.

Storing waste for 250,000 years

[Alsee]

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.

-

alternative

[ggwood]

It is possible to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and reuse it in different nuclear reactors. Reprocessing involves more handling of the spent fuel and (as far as I know) is not done in the US but it is done in Europe. I worked at a lab in France where some of this handling is done (either just testing or reprocessing - I'm not sure I was just there to use the magnetometer). Apparently radiation leaks do happen. Thus I'm not saying this is definately the way to go. It may be better than the alternatives, for now at least.

Remember, the US elected the man who wanted to use "clean coal". (This statement rings in my memory as it singlehandedly changed my friend, a former US Marine, away from voting for Bush.)

________________________________________________ _

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.

I think I'm seeing a correlation here

[Phleg]

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.

They wouldn't happened to have tested this little bugger out on, say, Thursday, would they?

Plutonium? No Problem

[fuzzybunny]

Excess plutonium shouldn't be a problem. My associate, Mr. Moon Kim Sang will buy as much as you can produce.