Accelerator Driven Treatment of Nuclear Waste

quax writes "In the wake of the Fukushima disaster the nuclear industry again faces massive opposition. Germany even decided to abandon nuclear energy altogether and the future of the industry is under a cloud of uncertainty in Japan. But one thing seems to be here to stay for a very, very long time: radioactive waste that has half-lives measured in thousands of years. But there is a technology under development in Belgium that could change all this: A sub-critical reactor design, driven by a particle accelerator can transmute the nuclear waste into something that goes away in about two hundred years. Could this lead to a revival of the nuclear industry and the reprocessing of spent reactor fuel?"

Comments

Re:Cue the hippies

[Medievalist]

Compared to what? Coal and natural gas, that are bad for us even when they're within normal parameters? Renewables that are nowhere near enough to properly replace what we're currently using without using up massive land areas?

Well, personally I'd just use enough renewables to properly replace what we're currently using, since we have tremendous land area available - hundreds of thousands of times the area actually required to power the world, in fact, even using fairly old technologies.

But don't let me get in the way of your anti-hippy rant, I can tell it's very meaningful to you. Please carry on.