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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.'"
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
I know this is snark...but...aside from the challenger issue, it would be highly cost-prohibitive. The world produces about 12,000 pounds of nuclear waste a year. At current rates this would cost about $250 billion just to get into orbit. The US has It would be much more expensive to actually escape the earth and get it to the sun, even considering the sun's gravity could do a lot of the work.
d isposal, although I am skeptical, at current rates to get the 600,000 metric tonnes of waste that the DoE has into orbit would cost about $10 trillion.
Wikipedia disagrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Space_
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Actually, if the GP is correct and they are increasing the radiation output in proportion to the reduction in the half life, what's to stop us from harnessing that output as power? The major reason we can't use many forms of nuclear waste as a power source is the difficulty in converting low levels of radiation into usable power; fast fissioning material on the other hand is perfectly usable as a fuel source.
Of course, the temperature of the storage device poses a major problem (if we have to supercool it, then harnessing the radiation as a heat source is right out). Assuming we can't do this at a higher temperature, and I don't understand the article well enough to make a guess here, then we'd have to find a way to convert the energy output of the waste into usable power without heating the storage vessel to the point where the accelerated half life drops back to normal.
I wonder if there is some way to allow the radiation to escape the waste storage vessel and transfer it's energy into something useful...
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
The world produces about 12,000 pounds of nuclear waste a year. At current rates this would cost about $250 billion just to get into orbit.
Your numbers are a bit off. A single Delta IV Heavy rocket can carry about 28,000 pounds to GTO, or about 20,000 to escape orbit, at a cost of around $250 million.
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.
Prove this process and in less than a year the anti-evolutionists will be using it to discredit carbon dating.
It's all pretty much a waste of time. Nuclear waste is really just 99% active and usuable nuclear fuel. IFR, or 4th generation nuclear power generation would easily use most of that stuff up. This is one of the reasons why launching it into the sun or burying it in a subduction zone is so stupid. It's still very valuable. Sure the stuff is safe where we put it, but using it up as fuel in a very safe, impossible to meltdown, non-proliferating, safe nuclear reactor.
Even the old crap we built 30 years ago is still pretty safe and pretty good. And the tech has only gotten better... while at the same time the coal stuff (though a better) is still poisoning the planet. Nuclear power = Green power.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Well, first off, the reason I drew the ocean comparison is the idea of contamination. Urine isn't just gross, it's also toxic, at least to animals like us. However, while nobody would want to get it in their drinking water (fetishists nonwithstanding), nobody would seriously think that pissing in the ocean is going to hurt anybody. It's not that urea is harmless; it's that in a large enough body of water, it becomes irrelevant.
Now as to the effect of dropping waste into the sun, consider both it's size and age. Radioactives are not that uncommon in space, and the sun is an awfully large target. Over 4 billion years, how much uranium do you suppose it's swept up? Hell, during the earlier days of the solar system, it's likely that entire planetary masses fell into the star. These things happen when a system forms. If a "stupid sci-fi apocolypse" scenario was going to happen, it would have done so already.
It's similar to the arguement that particle colliders could create black holes. Given that the same type of reactions occur naturally in the upper atmosphere as they do in a collider, we'd expect miniature black holes to form repeatedly over billions of years. The fact that none have destroyed the planet yet is strong evidence that it won't happen - and our current theories surrounding Hawking radiation says it can't happen anyways.
Remember that all the damage mankind has done to our home throughout history (pre and post industrial) has been climatic or ecological. These systems are delicate and respond strongly to even fairly minor human input, such as importing species into an evironment that they aren't native to. It's also worth remembering that climate change and mass extinctions have happened before; these kinds of destruction did not begin with human civilization, we've merely done more damage in a shorter time frame. In other words, we're effecienty destructive, but the type of damage we've caused isn't novel.
Stuff like igniting the atmosphere and other doomsday scenarios capture our imagination, but are massively implausable. Nuclear weapons are merely the most powerful weapon made to date; far more powerful explosions have occured in the past due to asteroidal collisions. The fear was unfounded then, but was taken seriously nonetheless.
We've seen the amount of damage we can do to the biosphere, and thereby overestimate just how much harm we can do to other pre-existing systems.
If a doomsday scenario can happen naturally, then I will worry about it happening accidentally due to human error (a good example would be anti-biotic resistant bacteria, or global warming). If it can happen due to human malice, then I will likewise worry (nuclear war comes to mind). If it can't happen accidentally, or should already have happened without our help, then I wouldn't worry about it.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.