Slashdot Mirror
Halving Half Lives
An anonymous reader writes "PhysicsWeb is reporting that German scientists may have found a way to significantly reduce the radioactive decay time of nuclear waste. This could render the waste harmless in just tens of years and make disposal much less difficult as opposed to current standards. From the article: 'Their proposed technique - which involves slashing the half-life of an alpha emitter by embedding it in a metal and cooling the metal to a few degrees kelvin - could therefore avoid the need to bury nuclear waste in deep repositories, a hugely expensive and politically difficult process. But other researchers are skeptical and believe that the technique contradicts well-established theory as well as experiment.'"
hold Gordon Freeman between HL1 and HL2?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
As from TFA,
It states that this occurs also when the device is stored in metal instead of an insulator.
Wouldn't this cause a larger issue with potential radioactive containment?
wdd
What's wrong with just launching it into the sun?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Is this wise? Decreasing the half-life means increasing the radioactivity. Given the option of living near a nuclear waste site and living near the lab where this is performed, I'd choose the former....
In order to get the radiation down to safe levels, you have to out-radiate everything up to that level. Same radiation, doesn't matter if it takes the normal amount of time or less.
I hope they know about that.
The electromagnetic force doesn't affect the nuclear weak or strong forces. Sorry.
I'm so glad I'll be able to life in Prypiat in only 3280 years...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How do these Germans know so much about the atomic nucleus? Did Neils Bohr leave them a working model or something? The German contribution to nuclear physics seems really disproprtionate to their actual population. Is there something unusually German about the model they committed us all to when they kicked off the science in the 1800s?
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make install -not war
"How do you power your cooling process?"
"With that nulcear power plant in the next town over."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ok, so all you have to do is cool it to near absolute zero. How long do you have to do that for and how much energy does it take to maintain it?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
When you double the halve life the radiation is halve.
And also, first we need to build a fusion reactor to have energy to cool that shit.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
To this, the researchers answered with an article titled "We're one of those fancy college-title nuclear scientists"
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Ah yes... finally we can play several episodes of that beloved franchise called Half-Life 2... oh wait...
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
I haven't read the article, but doesn't cooling things to a few K consume a sizeable amount of energy?
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
There are lots of different kinds of nuclear waste - the worst excesses are things like uranium mines and the US's Hanford Washington and Rocky Flats compounds, plus wherever the Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons development work was done, with huge volumes of fairly high-level waste and even huger volumes of low-level waste. Leave aside the risks of rocket failure, we simply don't have the payload capacity to haul significant quantities of it into Earth orbit, much less out of the gravity well to take it on a sundive.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Careful, you're dangerously close to the Not Politically Correct idea that different races may be different intellectual characteristics.
Of course, anyone with half a brain who applies the smallest amount of thought to the idea without political consideration or contamination realizes that, of course, races have different brain structures, just like any other physical structure, and some races are going to be ON THE AVERAGE better at some things than others. It's just stupid to assume otherwise, especially with the mountain of evidence in favor.
You may now burn this heretic at the stake.
that only got 30fps when playing half-life.
Does that count?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How much power is going to be needed to cool the material to 4K? I imagine you'd be creating quite a bit of waste (some of which would be nuclear) by doing this, thus negating some of its usefulness.
Even if this works, it will be tough to use. You'll have to cool something that emits heat down to near absolute zero. The energy required for that refrigeration job will be greater than the heat energy the radioactive material will emit over its remaining decay life.
Oh, shut up. There are differences between races. None of them involve brain structure.
It all makes sense now, this is why we are only getting episodes!
*runs*
I wonder what this process would do to the thermodynamic equation for the entire lifecycle of nuclear energy. I am not teh Smrt, so bear with me
Nuclear energy is roughly as follows: Ore is mined -> ore is refined -> Energy is extracted from fuel -> Spent fuel is prepared and kept in a single degree kelvin fridge for several years. -> Safe spent fuel is disposed
How many Joules does it take to keep the spent fuel at that low temperature for so long as compared to the energy extracted? Is there an orders-of-magnitude difference?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
you slow down an atom to near absolute zero, you would be lengthening the half-life, say from 200,000 years to 400,000 or whatever, because the binding energy would stay the same, just the ability of the particles to break free would be reduced because of the slowed movements between the particles. you might even generate a spike in atomic activity when it warms up.
how does some of what passes for scientific papers get accepted, anyway? box tops? there's a lot of stuff that the mass media picks up on and publicizes that just can't stand the smell test.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Gamma and Neutron emitters are a much different problem - Plutonium isotopes and their decay products, for instance, are a risk here, and even the alpha decay from most of the plutoniums is long enough that this technique is unlikely to help enough (e.g. 2000 years of liquid helium might be hard to maintain.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Oh, shut up. There are differences between races. None of them involve brain structure.
So explain to me exactly why the brain would be different from every other part of the body. Or are you saying that every race is the same average height?
Or maybe you think that God makes everyone's brain the same, and isn't subject to evolutionary pressure like everything else.
Wow this could have made Half-Life 2 come out YEARS sooner. At least there's still time to apply it to Duke Nukem Forever...
Correct me if I'm wrong and it's been a while since I did high school physics but isn't alpha radiation pretty harmless?
I'd be more impressed if they found a way to dispose of gamma emiters safely
Anonymous racist Coward, you are the one who's so dangerously close to racism that you're jumping at an imaginary change to indulge it.
"German" is not a race, no matter how nazi your brain.
The whole notion of distinct "races" is contrived. Even skin colors aren't that neat, which is what we usually reduce "race" to. Our species family tree is very interwoven, and overall differences are superficial.
Besides, "brain capacity" doesn't equate to "nuclear engineering". It's an academic tradition, or some cultural archetype, or a coincidence, or a misperception on my part through the American media lens of history.
"Stupid" isn't a race, either, as racists like you across the world prove every day. Talk about "mountain of evidence" - that's what your racist talk generates for the "universal stupidity" theory.
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make install -not war
We can achieve the same goal by allowing the reprocessing of nuclear "waste". PBS had a good interview on the subject, which mentions that power generating reactors are only permitted to extract less than 1 percent of the energy. This is what leaves the "waste" highly radioactive.
I keep putting the word waste in quotes, because it's more like a nuclear fuel reserve than an unusable energy source. Use all the energy, and the half-life of what's left is a few decades.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I just read an article in from a few months ago in Scientific American about fast reactors that can use the "spent" fuel from thermal reactors. Their waste is 95% smaller than thermal reactors and dangerous for only 10s of years, not 10s of thousands of years. _That_ technology has proven in prototype reactors.
One of my favorite technologies from the Traveller/Striker universe... nuclear dampers.
It was supposed to increase or decrease decay of nuclear materials -- at a distance.
A fun use of such a device is to neutralise an enemies nuclear arsenal and then starting a war with them. They then fire their nukes which does... nothing much at all.
If only we could have these in the real world.
Or at least a bio-engineered organism that eats black powder...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Prove this process and in less than a year the anti-evolutionists will be using it to discredit carbon dating.
> you slow down an atom to near absolute zero, you would be lengthening the half-life, say from 200,000 years to 400,000 or whatever, because the binding energy would stay the same, just the ability of the particles to break free would be reduced because of the slowed movements between the particles. you might even generate a spike in atomic activity when it warms up.
FYI, radioactive decay isn't caused by thermal energy. Notice the lack of a term for temperature in the relevant equations.
> how does some of what passes for scientific papers get accepted, anyway? box tops? there's a lot of stuff that the mass media picks up on and publicizes that just can't stand the smell test.
One might ask a similar question about Slashdot moderation.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, it's currently illegal to dump waste at sea due to the London Convention, so don't expect this solution any time soon.
Also, subduction zones aren't particularly stable and predictable, so the waste would likely spew about rather than being neatly sucked away. There was an article on New Scientist about this.
Yeah, like "embedding it in a metal and cooling the metal to a few degrees kelvin" is not "hugely expensive".
Now where would we put this accelerated waste?
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
The plan is to release Half Lives episodically.
"What's wrong with just launching it into the sun?"
Yeah, lets do that and hope the shuttle/rocket/vehicle doesn't explode and send radioactive waste over hundreds or thousands of square miles killing/harming everything thing in that area. What a good idea.
(goes back to the drawing board)
Why not recycle nuclear waste in breeder reactors? Nuclear waste is rich in thorium, which is a great fuel. Waste not, want not....
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Don't tell Gordon Freeman!
If you're going to dump the stuff, why not just dump it into one of the readily available (and very deep) trenches that feed various tectonic subduction zones? The earth literally will swallow it up in a short (in geological terms) period of time. That seems a bit safer than blasting it off into space or trying to make it orders of magnitude more radioactive in the short run to "bleed the nasties out."
Was going to be a grammer nazi then I realized it wasnt half life they were talking about..
Unfortunately it is much worse than just getting it into LEO or even Geo sync. First you need to put it on an escape trajectory to get it out of earth's gravity well. The problem then is it's floating around in a near Earth orbit (like those pesky asteroids we keep worrying about). After a few years/decades/millenia it could find its way back down.
To really get rid of it by dropping it in the sun will require you to cancel out its orbital velocity relative to the sun, 66,000mph! You could reduce that somewhat by complicated slingshot trajectories but then if you don't get it quite right it could come right back at you. Of course dropping it into Jupiter's atmosphere (or Venus for that matter) would probably be sufficient.
Just do it the easy way and put it on the moon! (www.space1999.net).
This development is encouraging, though of course not immediately useful. Because storing radioactive masses in even more metallic mass down near 0K for a century or more sounds like it consumes a vast amount of energy. Maybe more energy than the fuel produces while it's useful in reactors. Add the cost of building, securing and maintaining the nuke plant and its "detox" coolers, and nuke power still looks like a loser.
But there's scientific hope for better engineering that could change that. The extra energy more quickly removed from the spent fuel in this process could possibly be harnessed. That would mean that nuclear fuel not only is made safe in manageable durations, like less than a century, but more of its potential energy is available right away, or during the lifetime of its "soft landing". The combination of greater efficiency and closed-ended management does transform at least that part of nuclear's currently unacceptable cost basis.
As long as we're redesigning these reactions, we should do it all in space. There's plenty of microtemperatures out there; microgravity can make operations more energy efficient; security is less fuzzy; accidents have less exposure to vulnerable facilities, ecosystems and organisisms. It's still risky and expensive transporting fuel out of Earth's gravity well, but that's a lot more addressable by failsafe engineering than terrestrial proliferation.
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make install -not war
"German" is not a race, no matter how nazi your brain.
Sheesh. I know the ignorance of Slashdot knows no bounds, but do a little research before spouting off.
The whole notion of distinct "races" is contrived. Even skin colors aren't that neat, which is what we usually reduce "race" to. Our species family tree is very interwoven, and overall differences are superficial.
What we call "race" is really geographic origin. Yes, there have been some amount of mixing, but not enough (yet) to do away with the genetic difference between people. I mean, obviously, otherwise we'd all be the same shade of light brown. It's pretty obvious you haven't travelled much, otherwise you'd see distinct physical difference between peoples of different areas.
How do you think these differences came about? Why do you think dark skinned people tend to live in bright areas? Why do you think Asian noses have evolved to be small and close to the face? (hint: protection). Why do you think the sickle-cell anemia gene is so prevalent among Africans? (hint: malaria protection). Surprise! Evolution works on isolated human tribes, just like it works in isolated animal groups. Imagine that.
And it's pretty damn amazing how people who lived in African savannas are pretty damn good at running and athletics. Oh, sorry, but that's racist. But Asian noses are not.
And then it's considered racist that maybe, JUST MAYBE, brains might be subject to the same evolutionary pressures. How foolish and arrogant we are to think that we're not subject to nature's laws that we find politically inconvenient.
it might be, except that isn't true about the solar cells.
http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/energy_payback.html
That is an older reference, some newer techniques are even more efficient, and there's at least one solar "breeder' facility out there that uses solar PV to manufacture solar PV. One of the more unfortunate aspects of solar cell production is competition for silicon. Our society is choosing "spend it now, who gives a fuck about our future, our kids and grandkids can go screw themselves" frivolity like throw away obsolete graphics cards good for 6 months and throw away ipods obsolete every year and throw away cell phones obsolete every other month it appears and so on. Why, you just *must* upgrade to the next 5% better CPU and mother board combo because "work" demands it, or a videogame addiction, etc., and etc. If we had a slightly saner set of priorities solar PV would be a lot cheaper right (cheaper as in money and cheaper as in resources needed) now with the tech already developed.
But, slashdot group think is, it is much better to make billionaires into trillionaires, so by all means dis solar, support the corrupt (highly corrupt) overly expensive nuclear industry (despite solar being practical fusion power and actually more high tech than fission power and certainly deserving of MORE R and D than dirty fission power) never get any at all because "it's not cost effective yet", keep spreading that lie (that's been a lie for over 25 years now)that it costs more in energy than it ever will put out, and just complain about things while you improve your scores in the latest first person shooter.
Italian ph. Rubbia already said this a long time ago
Note that beta electron emitters actually get a longer half-life out of this process, not a shorter one. It only shortens the half-life of alpha emitters and beta positron emitters. On the plus side, the main hazardous electron beta emitter that we care about is Tritium, which already has a very short half-life.
In fact, the effect on beta electron emitters could turn out to be even more useful. Using this effect to dispose of alpha emitters is a problem because the decay process emits heat, but you could use the same phenomenon to preserve your 12-year-half-life tritium, since you're suppressing the process that would be heating it up.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
You're a nazi clown. The Wikipedia entry you're citing for the nonsense that "German" is a race has only an "external link" to "race (historical definitions)" at the very end of the article. In other words, you're so demented in your committment to one of the 20th Century's worst bad ideas that you see documentation that you're wrong as proof that you're right.
So the rest of your nazi gibberish isn't worth reading, as you pretend to be expert in "race", when all you are is a garden variety racist.
There's nothing "maybe" about your racism. Classing broad related groups of people as races, then ascribing innate behavioral traits to them, is by definition racist, regardless of the "considerations" that wound your denial complex.
What's sad about people like you is that you can't even blame your parents for your stupidity. It's all your own fault, regardless of which continent your ancestors live for the last couple-few thousand years. Even sadder is that evolution has allowed your traits to survive, either out of genetic irrelevance or some kind of species need for self-destruction that we've long ago outgrown.
Anonymous nazi Coward.
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make install -not war
- fission
- alpha emission
- electron emission
- positron emission
- electron capture
(I don't include gamma emission, because, although it does occur frequently in the aftermath of one of the types of decay above, it generally has a very short half-life, so it typically doesn't affect the time it takes for an entire decay chain to go.) Processes 1-4 are all purely nuclear, and don't depend in any way on the surrounding electrons. Process 5 does depend on the surrounding electrons, and, e.g., can't occur in an atom that's been completely ionized down to the bare nucleus. However, when it does occur, the electron that gets captured, with extremely high probability, is one of the ones in the innermost electron shells (known as the K shell in nuclear physics). That's because the K-shell electrons are the ones whose wavefunctions overlap the nucleus the most strongly. If you embed the atom in metal, or cool the substance it's embedded in, it has very, very little effect on the K-shell electrons. The electrons in the surrounding substance aren't going to get into the act, either, basically because of the Pauli exclusion principle.Find free books.
The best near term solution is just to burn it all and dump it into the atmosphere. It's easy, cheap, fast, and it releases substantially fewer radioactive heavy metals into the atmosphere than the world's coal-fired power plants do. People only get so upset about nuclear waste because they're a bunch of panicky morons with the combined intelligence of a pickled rat.
is one percent plutonium, which is also a great nuclear fuel
Doesn't slowing decay actually EXTEND its half life? I mean, doesn't this merely make it radioactive for a longer period of time, a slower decay keeping the isotope in its initial form longer? Isn't the typical mode of decay from "More highly radioactive isotope to less radioactive isotope? I didn't RTFA, and I am not a new clear fizzy cyst, but, am I missing something obvious here? Or is the poster? Contradicting well established theory this is. What is it about cooling to near Kelvin that makes it burn faster? Did someone merely get things backwards? Is there some sort of semantic misapprehension going on? Did they merely mean, reduce decay, rather than, reducing decay time?
This would ultimately have the effect of focusing more and more electric charge into a smaller area -- sort of analogous to the principle behind hydraulic brakes.
I don't think anybody's ever thought of radially polarizing a molecule before (probably because before fullerenes, no molecule had an inside and outside) -- hmm, could I get a patent on that idea?
Anyway, with all that unprecedented free electron charge at the interior of the nanotube, then perhaps it could more strongly accelerate that electroweak decay (IF their research is correct)
There's nothing "maybe" about your racism. Classing broad related groups of people as races, then ascribing innate behavioral traits to them, is by definition racist, regardless of the "considerations" that wound your denial complex.
If you want to define the premise, "people of different geographic origin have different physical characteristics" as racism, then fine, I'm racist. -shrug-
But are you seriously arguing that there are NO physical differences between people of different geographic origin? I'd love to hear you claim that Asian people are just as tall on the average as Croatian people.
But note that all you've done is scream "RACIST!!!" without giving me shred of theory on why mental ability would not be subject to evolutionary pressure. Come on, I DARE you. Give me a scenerio whereby isolated tribes would evolve different skin colors, different nose shapes, but not different mental abilities. I'm waiting.
But you'll probably just plug your ears and shout "racist!!" again.
"So the rest of your Nazi gibberish isn't worth reading, as you pretend to be expert in "race", when all you are is a garden variety racist."
Racial lines are indeed largely arbitrary. You are wrong to say that there are not distinct genetics involved. Clearly the waters are muddied so to speak, but you will not find many who are called 'white' with sickle cell either. There could as easily be a traceable gene that results in enhanced abstract mathematical ability as a gene that makes one vulnerable to a disease. Another example of this is the genetic resistance to 'mad cow' and similar diseases that spread via brain tissue.
Even behaviors are possible. While the Nazi party and their methods associated extreme distaste with the ideas of Eugenics it is important to remember that the core principle of Eugenics (the idea that behavior and personality characteristics are passed genetically) has never been dis-proven and remains a sound theory. In fact, one could argue that ranchers have proven this point since they successfully employ the ideas of Eugenics in breeding not just large cattle, but docile cattle. If Eugenics were untrue it would be rather difficult to explain domestication. If the docile manner were entirely learned and not passed genetically then simply raising a wild animal from birth and treating it well would make it completely domesticated. This is not the case.
What is amusing to me is that your own points make a stronger case for many ends the original poster would support. The fact that racial lines are largely arbitrary is precisely why any attempt to use them for equal opportunity or job metrics is completely invalid. This is randomly selecting multiple groups of people and claiming that for some unknown reason they should perform with equal success and earn equal pay; if they do not then it must be the result of racism. This view is highly racist and certainly has a more dramatic negative impact than a couple hundred vocal hillbilly extremists wearing white robes and swastikas.
And I think that an industrial-scale process for near-zero K cooling would generate lots of heat. Like you said, "sounds like it consumes a vast amount of energy".
The sickle-cell genetics that allow a single gene, expressing a single protein, lacking in collapsed red blood cells, are far from the complexity in behavior. Certainly the complexity of behavior claimed by racists. This example is the kind of talk-the-talk, can't walk-the-walk argument from genetic ignorance that racists favor. Because so many people have learned only the buzzwords that they can't see through the BS.
"Eugenics" isn't a theory. It can't be "disproven". It's a political pseudoscience.
Affirmative Action is indeed racism, as its own name implies. It doesn't pretend to ignore race. Instead it engages the racist preferences and denials in their own terms. By looking at the results of recruiting practices, rather than the gamed mechanics.
I see racism all the time. And it's easy to see your yearning for "legitimate racism" in your comment. Those KKK "vocal extremists" numbered in the many thousands when they wore robes. When they burned houses and bombed churches, murdered children. Now that they don't wear the robes, they've got even more power without their repellent image. Your downplaying them, your naive attempt to shock by calling Affirmative Action "racist", all show you're new to the game of coy racism. Give it up now. Before you cheat yourself of the equal opportunity to know, work and play with people without regard to the persistent fictions perpetuated as "racism". You're young enough to quit. And old enough to know better. Give yourself the chance to live life with just humans, rather than letting the racists who set you up steal away the people who make life worth living.
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make install -not war
no matter what the /. story says, it is Kelvin and not degrees of Kelvin.
You can't handle the truth.
It would take more energy doing a retro-burn, getting something to drop into the sun than it would to send something clear out of the solar system.
The solution to the radioactive waste problem already exists: breeder reactors. The reason they aren't being used is politics, not technology.
Even if we could dispose of the current high-level radioactive waste using this technique, it would still be irresponsible. Non-breeder reactors use only a tiny fraction of the energy stored in the nuclear fuel and throw away the rest, and that's an unacceptable waste.
In order to 'reduce the half life' you'd either have to have a mechanism to alter the fundamental properties of the nucleus on a large scale to prevent radioactive decay (which would be an amazing physics breakthrough with applications well beyond handling nuclear waste) or you'd have to find a way to increase the rate of the radioactive decay by many orders of magnitude. Doing the latter is possible. Its called a nuclear bomb. If they did manage to cause the material to give up all its energy and become inert they'd still have to do something with all that energy.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Several interesting Near-Earth asteroids were recently discovered (2004) in a possibly Earth-crossing orbit. Spectroscopic analysis showed they were made of titanium dioxide, making them very unique objects -- the first titanium asteroids ever found. Then someone realized that they were painted. (Titanium dioxide is the whitener used in most paints). They were, in fact, several of the Apollo Saturn V boosters, which are still tooling around in orbits that bring them close to Earth. One day one of them might hit us.
My point: simply hurling into space is not a good way to get rid of anything. Unless you know what you are about, it is likely to hang around for a very long time and maybe eventually hit you.
Screw Jimmy Carter. If someone would just stand up and defy that stupid executive order / ban on breeder reactors, the whole issue would be virtually insignificant! If it wasn't for the stupid, "let's get into bed with eco-freaks" eal that Jimmy Carter made, the issue of nuclear waste would be almost irrelevent. Way to go Carter! If you say you care about humanity so much, why in the hell are you forcing us to stick with nuclear waste instead of letting us actually DO something with it? Moron. He should have stayed a peanut farmer. Thanks for the "Habitat For Humanity", moron. ----- Sig Sauer.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
and cooling this stuff to a few degrees above absolute zero will be a real bear... as one thing that happens when atoms decay is that things get hot, so there will be all this heat to get rid of as well.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The three posts above yours talk about breeder reactors. That is, reactors that can can turn some isotopes into useful fuel as they create energy.
Your post talks about prefab reactors, like the French have been using for years and are improved further (it seems) with pebble-bed designs. These are not breeder reactors.
Also, the US has used breeder reactors. Fermi 1 even operated for a short time as a commercial breeder reactor.
Why do you turn one thing into another?
Toshiba's design uses liquid sodium as a coolant. These designs have been problematic in the past, for example Fermi 1 or Soviet nuclear subs.
I do agree with you that nuclear power is very misunderstood.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The halflife of radioactive materials arises from the fatct that one can calculate the propability per time unit of a decay occurring in a given nucleus. One can of course make that propability higher in a number of ways, but as far as I know they all involve exciting the quantum state of the nucleus, eg. by whacking a neutron into it (happens in a nuclear reactor). I can't imagine how encasing things in metal would have that effect, even at low temperatures.
The mechanisms speculated in the article - I simply can't see them work. How would the free electrons in a metal attract positively charged particles in a radioactive nucleus? Because of the electromagnetic force, right? But since the metal casing is electrically neutral as a whole, the electric field of the electrons, free or not, is cancelled out by the field from the positive metal nuclei. Which is why we don't have sparks flying off pieces of metal just like that.
They'll have to come up with very convincing arguments, either rock solid experiments that others can reproduce or quantum mechanical calculations.
historically, a lot of smart people have come from germany. Off the top of my head:
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (one of two inventors of calculus, philosopher, etc)
Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher)
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (probably most well known atheist philosopher)
Immanuel Kant (came up with the categorical imperative)
Sigmund Freud
and then there's the 20th century physicists and rocket scientists most people are already aware of.
Who's the most impressive of the crowd though really? I'm tempted to say either Liebniz or Kant. Do any of the modern guys put them to shame?
Maybe the cooling process, disapates the heat, that disapated heat has an effect on the radition, if you were cooling this material to such a low tempeture, wouldn't you be removing, energy i.e heat and radiation. I was to see this done and have it verified many times before I believe this. This, if it is true would change the world forever. Or its a promo ad from the atomic energy council!!??
They call me....Tim??!
From TFA, they mention "radium-226, a hazardous component of spent nuclear fuel". Now, whilst Ra-226 is produced in the decay series of U-238, this isn't a nuclear reaction which is desired or significant in fission reactors to my knowledge, and Ra-226 is not a significant source of activity in spent fuel derived wastes.
I came into this thread looking for some laugh-out-loud Gordon Freeman/Half Life jokes... Thus far, I have been sorely disappointed...
Tsk tsk, slashdot... Tsk tsk.
Student Manager - Take control of your education!
This reeks of bullshit.
- Radioactive decay occurs entirely in the nucleus, interactions with electrons after the produced particle leaves the nucleus cannot interfere with it. (Except for K-shell capture, which is an interaction with an electron and can be influenced in Beryllium 7.)
- There is already a good solution for the disposal of dangerous alpha emitters and many long lived beta emitters: stick them into a fast neutron reactor. Watch stable and short lived decay products emerge out of it.
- Radium 226 is not a dangerous component of fission waste. its a dangerous component of natural uranium ore.
... for any radioactive cat. Get stuck in a ~0K freezer and watch your 18 half-lives evaporate.
..or not. If it is real, what is it good for? Radioactive waste is not only radioactive, but at least warm. Now cool it for 100 years down to a few kelvin. This is an energy balance I'd really like to see.
Let me be the first to demand that all nuclear waste be buried under Crawford, Texas, and/or Kennebunkport, Maine. We can use Republicans as shielding.
The biggest political problem is the possibility of weaponization. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
"Use of a breeder reactor assumes nuclear reprocessing of the breeder blanket at least, without which the concept is meaningless. In practice, all proposed breeder reactor programs involve reprocessing of the fuel elements as well. This is important due to nuclear weapons proliferation concerns, as any nation conducting reprocessing using the traditional aqueous-based PUREX family of reprocessing techniques could potentially divert plutonium towards weapons building. In practice, commercial plutonium from reactors with significant burnup would require sophisticated weapon designs, but the possibility must be considered. To address this concern, modified aqueous reprocessing systems are proposed which add extra reagents which force minor actinide "impurities" such as curium and neptunium to commingle with the plutonium. Such impurities matter little in a fast spectrum reactor, but make weaponizing the plutonium extraordinarily difficult, such that even very sophisticated weapon designs are likely to fail to fire properly. Such systems as the TRUEX and SANEX are meant to address this. [8]"
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Am I the only one who sees the implication a non-constant half-life has on our dating techniques? If there are conditions that shorten a half life, then is it possible that some things we've dated are not as old as we thought?
Is this the first time that humans have managed to deliberately affect nuclear decay rates?
And does it mean that decay rates could be boosted by hosing something down with an electron beam?
I work at a CANDU reactor, where we use natural uranium bundles for fuel. Each bundle is about 50lb. We tend to refuel each reactor every day, with at least 4 fresh bundles. So, that's 200lb of waste produced every day, per unit. There are 16 CANDU reactors in Ontario alone, so the total waste there is already 1.16 million pounds a year (the plants run 24/7/365). And that's just Ontario, just counting fuel bundles. How about the activated materials on the fueling machines? How about some pipe that was cut out giving off 300 rem? How about the control rods that need to be replaced every one in a while? That's all waste too, and not a lot of it recoverable (in CANDU we add the uranium to a ceramic matrix, making it hard to reclaim).
If it was just 12000lb, we wouldn't have the Greens on our backs all the time. Too bad you're off by a factor of at least 10000x.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Hrm. But since Gauss' Law says that there can be no electric field on the inside of a conductor, whatever is on or in the inside layers won't feel any affect from a charge placed on an outside shell. Since there's no net charge on the inside layers, there's no field either.
Furthermore, charges aren't polarized-- fields are. Aren't you trying to set up some kind of polarized electric (or magnetic-- you say a material is polarizable, which seems to indicate magnetism) field?
this is an interesting idea
Right now they only major hold back large nations (and even terrorist groups) have from using nuclear weapons is the radioactive fallout it will create for the entire world including themselves. If we are succesful in finding a way to cut half life, true it would really do wonders for our energy crisis, but at the same time I would really be worried about future wars wipeing out the planet.
chicken and egg senario? how much energy will they be obtaining the energy to cool all that waste to 4k, and keep it there for years on end?
The news that there are circumstances under which radioactive decay rates might not be constant under all conditions will surely give ammo to the creationist contention that carbon-dating is inaccurate. They've been looking for evidence for this for decades -- oops, I mean years.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
What bothers me the most about this is the relationship between the amount of energy needed to cool the spent fuel (down to a few Kalvin) and the amount of energy that was produced by the fuel. I'm not going to take the time to do the math but... At a quick glance I would say the two amounts would, at best, be equal. In reality I would bet the amount to cool spent fuel would be greater.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Sometimes we make a straight forward problem hard. We can dig deep mines in geologically stable places. For example check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soudan_Mine (worth a tour). I think there is a whole industry of folks who get money from DOE to over research this problem. As a former researcher the ideal for you is to keep the funding stream going, never solve the problem just keep getting $$ for further studies. My only concern about burial would be a meteor strike ejecting the material into the atmosphere which could be catastophic.
Courtesy of the public service announcements so kindly provided by David Crosby and Graham Nash and by Fred Small, this is already a solved problem. ;)
>What's wrong with just launching it into the sun?
Nothing, until you find out something useful or necessary to do with all that waste you've launched into the sun...
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
What about Brown's Gas? http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/NuclearRemedia tion/index.html
Heard any good sigs lately?
COuld somethign simular be used to atrificially decay stable elements like Lead into lightere elements thus liberating the stong binding energy by using the eletromagnetic/weak interactions???
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Affirmative Action has in fact made the lives of many minorities right, despite continuing discrimination against them. AA moved beyond philosophy to results. You wouldn't recognize the American workforce before AA.
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make install -not war
No.
To get a patent, the invention can't be in the public domain prior to submitting an application to the patent office. However, if you have any more good ideas related to this one, you can try to patent it if you keep it a secret or get non-disclosure agreements signed prior to telling anyone about it.
And if you were wondering, IANAL, but I do write patents for a living.
science is a religion
Moderation +1
30% Insightful
40% Troll
30% Underrated
It's outrageous that anything I posted is even controversial after all we've seen in our world. But apparently 40% wear the Anonymous white hood Coward robes, and want to burn your neighbor to death.
--
make install -not war
>leaving out artists, playwrights, authors, musicians, statesmen and the like.
Yes, let's only discuss smart people.
I suspect Newton vs Leibniz is a battle that only Newton and Leibniz would really care about. However, my vote goes to Leibniz because he contributed more to philosophy, and because he's GERMAN.
In terms of ethical theory, Nietzche vs Mill would be a very interesting argument. I would tend to side with Nietzche because he's GERMAN and because although Mill's ideas about morality are very appealing in their simplicity, they lead to some strong contradictions.
Additionally Mill never understood Kant, so he loses some big points with me. BTW, neither did Jesus or Buddha. The categorical imperative has some surface similarities to the golden rule, but isn't really about the same thing. Basically, the golden rule is about making people happy in a consequentalist sense, whereas the categorical imperative is about making them act from reason (I think Kant actually mentions the golden rule in contrast at some point?). If anything, I would argue that the categorical imperative forbids the golden rule as a maxim on the grounds of the second formulation of the categorical imperative.
""Eugenics" isn't a theory. It can't be "disproven". It's a political pseudoscience."
False. Eugenics is a theory, backed by the observations of ranchers and herdsmen spanning thousands of years. It can easily be proven or disproven pending further discoveries in the field of genetics.
"The sickle-cell genetics that allow a single gene, expressing a single protein, lacking in collapsed red blood cells, are far from the complexity in behavior."
If simple genes are found to be shared by those with common roots than more complex genetic trees can be found as well. If you stopped spouting your anti-racism nonsense for a moment you might realize that I am not a racist. I am merely unwilling to close doors on possibilities simply because they are not politically correct.
"By looking at the results of recruiting practices, rather than the gamed mechanics."
Affirmative action SETS gamed mechanics. In a fair and unbiased workplace there would not neccesarily be equal employment. Even when population proportions and education are considered. Believe it or not, given the same budget and talent pool to build teams out of, one football team might beat another by a large margin instead of a statistically insignificant margin. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this and simply because it occurs is not justification for giving the losing team handicap points.
Affirmative action punishes members of a certain race. It does not judge individuals, instead it picks out anyone who shares certain physical characteristics and punishes them with no justification whatsoever. You can not combat racism with racism. Racism has no place in our government, period. Racism certainly has no place in government regulation over a supposedly free market.
Perhaps AA should change and start giving an edge to blondes. Clearly they are disadvantaged. Or perhaps AA should prefer those who can do the spock live long and prosper sign over those who can't. AA really only has one real requirement, giving a job seeker an advantage that is completely unrelated to their ability to perform the job.
"And it's easy to see your yearning for "legitimate racism" in your comment."
If you mean to imply that I am a closet racist yearning to break free you are letting your imagination carry you away. I would have the term racist cast from the books altogether. Grouping people on the basis of physical appearance is useless (although no more evil than any other arbitrary grouping, no matter what the current political winds); but grouping based on common genetics MIGHT lead to interesting findings.
"all show you're new to the game of coy racism"
Coy racism? Perhaps you mean imagined racism. Everyday people imagine themselves cheated by videogames when they can't win or don't pull off some special trick of move. Everyday people imagine they were given a dirty or suspicious look because of their race when their attitude, expression, suspicious behavior, or manner of dress were the real culprits.
"Before you cheat yourself of the equal opportunity to know, work and play with people without regard to the persistent fictions perpetuated as "racism"."
The sad thing is that you do not even realize that people like you are the ones who ensure what is left of those fictions persist.
"You're young enough to quit. And old enough to know better."
You base this upon what. How old am I again?
"Give yourself the chance to live life with just humans."
I'd love to, but people like you spread racism like AA and keep perpetuating the racism thing. Let it go already.