Fusion-Fission System Burns Hot Radioactive Waste

An anonymous reader writes "A hybrid fission-fusion process has been developed that can be used in some traditional fission reactors to process radioactive waste and reduce the amount of waste produced by 99%. This process uses magnetic bottle techniques developed from fusion research. This seems like the first viable solution to the radioactive waste problem of traditional nuclear reactors. This could be a big breakthrough in the search for environmentally friendly energy sources. Lots of work remains to take the concept to an engineering prototype and then to a production reactor."

Comments

Transmutation of waste

[goombah99]

I'm also guess here. A decade ago, Los Alamos pioneered Accelerator Transmutation of Waste. There the idea was you bombard high level waste with a particle beam to, ironically, make it even higher level waste. The clever thing was this. The higher the radioactivity the shorter the half life.

The plan was to convert things with halflifes of 50,000 years to half lifes of hours. An insanely clever idea. But it never got much funding.

I'm guessing that this Fission/fussion system is probably playing the same game. Fusion makes for heavier nuclii, which if they are not stable, tend to be even short lived as a general trend.

Re:Weapons Grade Production?

[inviolet]

Generations ago we were masters of waste not want not. If you burned candles for light, you collected your drippings, remelted them into new candles.

That was the consequence of materials costing more than manhours. Now thanks to industrialization and automation, manhours are vastly more expensive than material, simply because one manhour produces 1000x more material than it did before. (In the grand scheme of things, the cost of either is a function of its exchange rate with the other.)

Our allegedly wasteful modern society is wasteful of the visible component (material) because it is so careful to conserve the invisible component (manhours). Unfortunately most people are concrete-bound and so do not understand what's going on.

Imagine if the 13 Colonies outlawed this because you could also remelt them into canon wicks... absolute stupidity.

Indeed.

Re:Mr. Fusion

[Firethorn]

What we need is a mainstream movie and miniseries about the hazards of coal; perhaps going through the life of a Chinese coal miner?

Oh, and point out the cost/hazards of solar and wind while you're at it.