Planned Nuclear Reactors Will Destroy Atomic Waste

separsons writes "A group of French scientists are developing a nuclear reactor that burns up actinides — highly radioactive uranium isotopes. They estimate that 'the volume of high-level nuclear waste produced by all of France’s 58 reactors over the past 40 years could fit in one Olympic-size swimming pool.' And they're not the only ones trying to eliminate atomic waste: Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin are working on a fusion-fission reactor. The reactor destroys waste by firing streams of neutrons at it, reducing atomic waste by up to 99 percent!"

Comments

LFTR

[Motor]

The article doesn't make it clear which technology they are referring to... however this google tech talk on LFTR is absolutely fascinating.

He only took away the sit-down money

[dbIII]

No he knew exactly what he was doing, and remember all he did was to remove a huge subsidy for weapons materials that were no longer needed due to the size of the stockpile.
He did nothing at all to stop nuclear succeeding on it's own merits instead of on taxpayer funded life support. The US nuclear industry has done nothing much since then apart from spend a lot of money on PR to get their free gift from the taxpayers back. Other places have actually put some work in and produced far more viable efforts - hence the established USA civilian nuclear industry being twenty years behind South Africa, China and India. The only real exeption is Japanese technology brought in to a US company that had otherwise been sitting around waiting for the handout for twenty years.
Startups and imports will bury them, and should have done it long ago.

Re:See?

[dbIII]

Some of us have been saying for decades that another way to say "nuclear waste" is "nuclear fuel."

But you've been completely wrong, it's exactly like calling what you excrete food. While there is plenty of energy that can be recovered from that it takes a lot of work or something else with a completely different digestive system.
The whole reason people have been saying for years that Uranium is running out is only because ore of very high purity was running out - there was a lot of other stuff but it was a lot more expensive to turn it into fuel.
One of the things about some newer designs is they are nowhere near as fussy about their fuel, so a shortage of high purity Uranium ore doesn't matter to them, or they can use retired or stockpiled weapon material, or even some kinds of waste. It's a lot better than the reprocessing attempts by the French over the last thirty years that resulted in fuel a lot more expensive than making new fuel from ore in the first place - use something that can use the waste without so much reprocessing instead.