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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 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 perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
Kirk: Spock, I know! We'll use your glass laser to destroy our radiocative trash!
.... illogical.
Spock: Captain, that is
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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.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
.. 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
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
"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.
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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.
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.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.