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.'"

Comments

Re:why bury it all?

[protohiro1]

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.

Wikipedia disagrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Space_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.

What a waste

[macemoneta]

Throwing all that energy away.

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.

Re:why bury it all?

[RsG]

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.