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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 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
Actually yes it is wise.
It is easy to shield high level waste. Water will work just fine. If you only have to store it for a few years then it really becomes a simple problem.
The sad thing is I doubt that this could work they way the say it will. It really needs to be tested.
I could understand if they used a good neutron emitter like beryllium. When an Alpha particle hits that you get neutrons. The neutrons could then cause an increase in decay type reactions, if it was captured by a nuclei of the the substance that you wanted to degrade. Even that is a big maybe since I am just thinking of ways it could work without doing any math.
Even then it seems like you wouldn't get anything like what this guy is claiming.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I had the pleasure of witnessing a container test.
they took this container, put it into a rocket that was on it' side, and then launched it into a specially designed bunker.i.e a real think ass wall.
the container survived without a leak.
It is much easier to create a device that will survive a traunmatic event then it is to create one for people.
They could just send it down to the Mariennes trench. Naturally people with no knowledge of radiation, or the trench would complain about it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
How do these Germans know so much about the atomic nucleus? Did Neils Bohr leave them a working model or something?
Easy: General education level, good science classes in high school, social image/reputation of science and scientists, and an absence of religious bias against science.
Niels Bohr was Danish, FWIW.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
> 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.
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.
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