12 ms·
Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from a million years to 30 minutes
- Aardwolf 5y agoNo mention of the energy cost of doing this? Hopefully not too much compared to the nuclear energy produced. Is there any chance nuclear waste could be useful for something, such as creating more energy, in the future?
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoyes nuclear waste is just nuclear fuel that's very slightly used, and inconvenient to reprocess it's still ~97% viable
- vasama 5y agoMolten salt fuel cycles where waste products may be separated from the liquid fuel through more conventional chemical separation methods seem like a simpler solution. It's too bad about the negative public view on nuclear. I think next gen fission power research deserves greater funding.
- wbl 5y agoExcept for the corrosive hot flourine salts. Pyroprocessing and the IFR were demonstrated and work.
- cinntaile 5y agoIt's cheaper to dig up and refine uranium ore instead so the economics don't make sense.
- adament 5y agoDoes this remain true if the waste producers were forced to factor in the “true” storage cost of the waste?
- Retric 5y agoVery much so, spent fuel contains almost as much uranium and in the same U235:U238 ratio as natural uranium it doesn’t need any special handling on it’s own. The issue is everything else in the fuel. After chemical separating the uranium you still have all the other nasty bits that make nuclear waste such an issue to deal with. Plus all the contaminated machinery you used to do the repressing.
- godelski 5y agoMost waste is actually from other things, not fuel. Anything your nuclear material comes into contact with is treated as waste. But obviously due to this there's drastically different levels of radioactivity in waste (but everyone acts like it's all fuel waste)
- JohnHaugeland 5y agotrue, and fair point but in the reduced context of fuel rod waste i stand by what i said previously
- Retric 5y agoNot the way it’s normally described, U238 is relatively worthless outside of being used in bullets etc. What we currently care about is the 235 which is actually burned up by the reactor down to close to the ratio in natural fuel. Reprocessing for current designs would result in most of the fuel being discarded as depleted uranium the same way the normal enrichment process works. The actual way around this is to directly use natural uranium without enrichment via CANDU or similar design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor No need for enrichment or reprocessing.
- ENadyr 5y agoCorrect, in-fact that’s what TerraPower is claiming to be able to do: https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-problem/ https://www.terrapower.com/a-solution-to-the-nuclear-waste-p...
- metaph6 5y agoHave a look at this: https://futurism.com/diamond-batteries-made-of-nuclear-waste-can-generate-power-for-thousands-of-years https://futurism.com/diamond-batteries-made-of-nuclear-waste...
- jimbob45 5y agoIs nuclear waste still an issue now that we can recycle the waste back into the power plant for more energy? Asking as a total novice on the topic. I want to act as a proponent for nuclear energy but it’s difficult to know what’s propaganda and what’s legitimate.
- Turing_Machine 5y agoOne good rule: anything that uses "long half-life" as a scare term is propaganda.
- ykevinator2 5y agoI don't know anything about this but are you saying there's nothing to worry about here?
- Scarblac 5y agoIt's _short_ half life that can be scary, because that means a lot of radiation.
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoI'm not an expert either, but just to explain a little bit- long half life means there's not much activity going on, and not much radiation emitted. Short half life means there's lots going on, and lots being emitted. So an article equating long half life with danger isn't trying really hard to be accurate and precise.
- Turing_Machine 5y agoI'm saying that, all other factors being equal, that stuff with a long half-life is less dangerous than stuff with a short half-life. To put it another way, "half-life of infinity" = "not radioactive at all". Now, there are other factors involved (type of radiation emitted, what fission products appear further down the decay chain, etc.), but none of them are made worse by a long half-life per se. It's a scare term, pure and simple.
- 5y ago
- Jabbles 5y agouranium 235 and plutonium 239, have a half life of 24,000 years - U235 has a half life of 700,000,000 years. If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level. The article says nothing about how he hopes to gain 4 orders of magnitude. Is there some kind of Moore's law in the "speed" of these pulses? I wasted my time reading this article, it explains nothing.
- belter 5y agoIt's not a novel idea: "Laser induced nuclear waste transmutation" https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08737 https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08737 "Transmutation prospect of long-lived nuclear waste induced by high-charge electron beam from laser plasma accelerator" https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05770 https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05770 "Fusion Driven Transmutation of Transuranics in a Molten Salt" https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08741 https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08741 "Generic method to assess transmutation feasibility for nuclear waste treatment and application to irradiated graphite" https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02623 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02623
- adrian_b 5y agoThe first 2 papers indicated by you refer indeed to the same thing as the article that started this thread, but they explain the possible method. The principle is very similar with the sources of deep ultraviolet light used for photolithography. The laser pulses are used to produce hot plasma and to accelerate the electrons from plasma, which hit then a target, like in the traditional X-ray tubes. The interaction of the accelerated electrons with the target produces gamma rays. Finally, the gamma rays can be used to transmute the nuclear waste. There are 2 problems with this approach. As everybody knows, improving the deep UV sources to have an intensity great enough to be usable in the production of integrated circuits took several decades and many billions of dollars. The gamma ray sources that would be needed for waste treatment are significantly more complex and the output intensity must be much higher, so it is impossible to guess how much time and money would be needed, but certainly much more than for photolithography. The second much more serious problem is that already mentioned in another post. If these gamma-ray sources would have a global efficiency of 1%, starting from the electrical input power, passing through pump diodes for lasers, then solid-state lasers for pulse generation, then heating plasma, accelerating electrons, radiation from the electron target and finally absorption in the nuclear waste, that would be an amazing achievement. Actually a global efficiency of less than 1 per ten thousand would be more likely today. The energy required to transmute all the waste from a nuclear reactor might be of 10% or more of the output energy of the reactor. Multiplied with a factor between 100 and 10000, the result is that a nuclear reactor would not be a net producer of energy, but a huge consumer of energy, making it useless. A little more realistic would be to not treat all the nuclear waste, but only 1 or a few especially dangerous isotopes, e.g. only the radioactive iodine. While this would reduce a lot the energy required for transmutation, a lot of additional energy would be needed for the separation of the desired isotopes from the radioactive waste. Maybe transmuting only the iodine could be done in a distant future with a little less energy than the nuclear reactor produces. However that would not solve the problem with the storage of the nuclear waste. Consuming a huge amount of energy with the elimination of the iodine would only lessen the danger of what would happen if the storage of the waste would be compromised and the waste would be dispersed into the environment (because the vertebrates extract the iodine from the environment and concentrate it into the thyroid, so radioactive iodine is dangerous even at smaller concentrations than the rest of the waste).
- Turing_Machine 5y agoPropagates the common error that "long half-life" = "more dangerous", when, by definition, "long half-life" = "not very radioactive".
- technobabbler 5y agoIt's easier to store a highly dangerous thing for a decade than a slightly dangerous thing for millennia, though. Chernobyl and Fukushima have been interesting studies in what low-dose long-term radiation can do to ecosystems (not much? things seem to adapt ok), but we should still take what precautions we can and not just irradiate things willy-nilly...
- Turing_Machine 5y agoThe thing is, the "slightly dangerous thing" (i.e., uranium with all its associated breakdown products) occurs naturally in vast and totally uncontrolled ore bodies, sometimes right in contact with the water table. Yet somehow we're not worried about that (except in a very few cases where the concentration is extremely high). Why not? It's like the way that no one gives a crap about the natural oil seeps off the coast of Southern California, which dump about 5 million gallons per year right into the ocean, then they have a panic reaction when a boat accident dumps a couple of hundred.
- userbinator 5y agoI believe naturally occurring uranium vs. nuclear waste is several orders of magnitude difference in radioactivity.
- Turing_Machine 5y agoThat is due to short half-life fission products, not long half-life components.
- technobabbler 5y agoI dunno, maybe the localized increase over background levels? As they say, "dilution is the solution to pollution"... a little oil or radiation here and there will be reabsorbed by the ecosystem without much incident. Seemed like Fukushima was basically dumped into the sea and we didn't end up with Godzilla (too bad, really). Likewise, some slow underwater seepage probably just gets washed away? But if you add a whole bunch of oil on a seashore that normally doesn't have much, it'll kill a bunch of cute animals and make your PR team have to work weekends. If you drastically increase the background radiation near a suburb by piling spent fuel near it, the residents won't scientifically analyze the risk, they'll just try to keep you away. If you try to build a new plant, every politician within bribing distance of some special interest goes haywire. Yucca Mountain might've been an option but that got shot down too. A mix of precaution and NIMBYism, some of which is good science, some of which is just junk politics, and much of which is just people being primates. We're not evolutionarily equipped to make these sort of large scale long term decisions, only to live and die by our tiny, intimate lives.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago>If no solution is found, we're already stuck with some 22,000 cubic meters of long-lasting hazardous waste. Not trying to be glib, but 20,000 cubic meters isn't a significant amount of space. Obviously this isn't the same as storing paper plates or pillows, but the physical size of it all is something that would fit in a small grocery store. 2,000 m^3 or 2,000,000 m^3, the size of it really isn't the attribute that's the problem.
- Turing_Machine 5y agoYes, especially by comparison with the amount of space the ash from coal plants is taking up.
- Filligree 5y agoEh. Most of it’s in the air, where you can’t see it. Or in your lungs. Either way we clearly don’t need to deal with it.
- theonemind 5y ago[removed serious response to sarcasm]
- infogulch 5y agoGP's post is clearly sarcasm.
- theonemind 5y agoI agree now that you've pointed it out. Too close to how people apparently think to immediately click for me.
- infogulch 5y agoTrying to step close enough to the line to make it questionable is part of the fun. Poe's law etc. I suppose on a large forum there will always be someone that misses it, purely stochastically. Happened to me recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30614766#30618068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30614766#30618068
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoWhat a giant fucking waste of effort. That waste is fuel, and in human history, zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste. This obsession with nuclear waste is ridiculous. We produce less of it than any other kind of energy waste by four orders of magnitude, and it's far less radioactive than the waste that's being belched into the atmosphere to cause global warming. This ridiculous hand-wringing is why we're shutting nuclear reactors down during a fuel shortage crisis in the middle of climate change. We have *got* to stop pretending this is real work.
- TehCorwiz 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide... This disagrees with your assertion that “…in human history, zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste.” The page lists waste incidents going back to the 50s.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoAs far as I can see, there isn't a single waste incident anywhere in that list. It kind of looks like you googled for something, didn't read it, and started arguing. Looks like the only thing even mentioned there is that in the 1950s, there was an incident, and someone who isn't a doctor made an estimate that some cancer deaths might have happened later. Amusingly, it's the same person who predicted 20 million deaths from Chernobyl, and still insists they happened and are being covered up. Can you tell me which specific disagreement you see there? I'd like to think you're not listening to the guy who says there were three secret holocausts worth of death in the 1990s.
- ozim 5y agoI agree, list does not indicate anything about waste unless it is "metal waste".
- emkoemko 5y agohow does a nuclear reactor create waste? is this radioactive material not mined from the earth its self? does the reactor make it more radioactive then it was before we extracted it?
- vasama 5y agoNuclear fuels such as U235 are radioactive but very slightly so, U235 specifically having a half life of roughly 700 million years. The various fission products produced by splitting these atoms in a reactor may have much shorter half lives and as such are more radioactive. In the operation of a reactor, some atoms inevitably absorb neutrons as well, which increases their mass number. Through subsequent beta decay whereby a neutron is converted into a proton, their atomic numbers may also increase, producing transuranic elements such as plutonium which account for some of the nastiest nuclear waste products.
- Armisael16 5y agoThe fuel going into the reactor is also radioactive. It isn’t radioactive waste, but that’s because it isn’t waste. The stuff in a reactor is orders of magnitude more concentrated than what we pull out of the ground. Also yes many of the byproducts are more radioactive than the fuel. The stuff in the dirt tends to be comparatively stable - the unstable stuff decayed long ago. Stuff coming out of a reactor is like a year old.
- emkoemko 5y agoyea i guess i don't understand how its possible for these elements to be safe before we extract it but unsafe to put it back in a depleted form? and if its not depleted why can't we keep using it until it is?
- MertsA 5y agoThe fuel going into a reactor has a tiny amount of radioactivity. The technicians handling fresh fuel bundles don't need lead lined protective gear, just some gloves and clean room procedures to keep the technician's greasy grubby paws off the highly refined and expensive fuel bundles. https://nrcpublicblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/fuelrods.jpg https://nrcpublicblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/fuelrods.j... That technician probably works with nuclear fuel every day and he's exposed to far less occupational radioactivity than a flight attendant because at higher altitudes there's less atmosphere to attenuate cosmic radiation. Even orders of magnitude more concentrated doesn't lead to some extreme amount of radiation. If it hasn't gone critical then the radiation hazard is negligible outside your body. In fact, if you were to finely grind up some Uranium and chemically process it into some biologically absorbable form and ingest a lethal amount the heavy metal poisoning would be lethal before the radioactivity. >Also yes many of the byproducts are more radioactive than the fuel. That's the understatement of the year. The fission products are extremely radioactive and are responsible for the massive amounts of shielding and care needed around high level nuclear waste. >The stuff in the dirt tends to be comparatively stable - the unstable stuff decayed long ago. Also not true, the stuff in the dirt has been constantly decaying and building up to a steady state decay chain in proportion to the half life of each isotope and the production rate of it. Fresh fuel is basically entirely Uranium with almost no decay products whereas all the radon that seeps up in basements all comes from radioactive decay of unstable isotopes underground. "The stuff in the dirt" is responsible for around 21,000 lung cancer deaths every year in the United States.
- mrfusion 5y agoCould we use this to transmute gold?
- MrDresden 5y agoHeck, this is reported by BigThink so I don't see why not. Everything is possible, no matter the physics. /s
- mrfusion 5y agoCan anyone explain the physics here? I thought light only affected the electron shell. Are we saying light can induce fission at will?
- IgorPartola 5y agoWhat is really exciting about this is that we have finally achieved alchemy!
- neals 5y agoHow many tonnes of nuclear waste is produced anyway? At what point do we deem SpaceX safe enough to transfer that to outerspace?
- a1371 5y agoI've noticed that the word "could" in the title is usually a giveaway that the idea is at the hypothesis level.
- dudeinjapan 5y agoNuclear waste storage is a solved problem. There are no shortages of underground facilities to store the waste forever. What is a bigger risks/concern is environmental radioisotope contamination in the case of a disaster. Lasers won't help with this.
- yummypaint 5y agoI'm a practicing nuclear physicist and do work on gamma ray interactions with actinides. It's possible i'm missing something important, but i think this article is an utter mess and was clearly written by someone with absolutely no understanding of what they are saying. Attempting to learn anything from this article will be counterproductive. Here is an explanation of chirped pulse amplification: https://www.rp-photonics.com/chirped_pulse_amplification.html https://www.rp-photonics.com/chirped_pulse_amplification.htm... This technique is for producing optical photons, which will have less than 10 ev of energy. In the same way that you can't focus the sun's light to a point that gets hotter than the surface of the sun (violates second law of thermodynamics), it isn't obvious how low energy laser pulses can be useful for this. The article offers no explanation whatsoever. Maybe the electric field across the nucleus can be made strong enough to induce scission? In general, if you want to interact with the nucleus you need photons on the order of 1 Mev or more, whose wavelengths are comparable to the size of the nucleus. These are gamma rays, which are not optical photons. There are ways to boost optical photons to those energies (like inverse compton scattering), but the article says nothing about that either. I would think inverse compton scattering of a chirped pulse from an electron packet in an accelerator will completely destroy the sharp timing and reflect the distribution of the electrons instead.
- fsh 5y agoMourou's Nobel lecture [1] has brief explanation of the envisioned process. The idea is to use intense laser pulses to accelerate deuterium ions into a tritium target. The deuterium-tritium fusion then generates high-energy neutrons that can transmutate nuclei. This is probably not impossible, but I have doubts if this could be implemented efficiently at scale. [1] https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.91.030501 https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.91....
- trhway 5y agoYou can do that with fusor. It does direct acceleration without laser generation losses.
- 5y ago
- moistly 5y agoThe Canadian Shield is, afaik, stable, deep, plutonic rock. I don’t understand why we aren’t drilling miles-deep holes and excavating storage chambers down there. Seems ideal for a storage facility.
- multiplegeorges 5y agoThat's exactly what is happening: https://www.nwmo.ca/en/A-Safe-Approach/Facilities/Deep-Geological-Repository https://www.nwmo.ca/en/A-Safe-Approach/Facilities/Deep-Geolo... Site selection isn't finished, but it is down to two candidate sites in Ontario.
- moistly 5y agoStarted looking ten years ago. Construction itself will take ten years. And years away from selecting and expropriating the site. There’s no good excuse to not be halfway there by now. It’s a make-work project. Some small organization is dragging this out because it pays well to never finish. Edit: sorry, it’s that this sort of never-ending government project is all too common in Canada. Military procurement is an especially sore point right now, atrociously delayed.
- parineum 5y agoI feel like I've posted this comment too many times already but here goes.... Materials with long half lives are LESS radioactive than those with short half lives. Things with short half lives are what we make bombs out of and what fuel these reactors (EDIT: This is wrong, read the comment chain). All materials have a half life (probably/maybe, looking at you protons[2]), the longer it is, the safer they are. https://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2021-11-30/Key-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel.html https://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2021-11-30/Key-facts-abou... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay
- fsh 5y agoNo, quite the opposite. Bombs and reactors use fissile materials with long half lifes, i.e. 235U (700 million years) and 239Pu (24 thousand years). Isotopes with short half lifes are very difficult to handle since they produce a lot of heat and emit high levels of dangerous radiation.
- boxed 5y agoClassic example of talking past each other. The previous poster is clearly right in the bigger picture. You don't treat hydrogen as a scary radioactive material! There's a sweet spot. So you are bott right and both wrong ;)
- fsh 5y agoThe sweet spot would be a fissile material that can sustain a chain reaction but is not radioactive at all. Unfortunately, such an isotope does not exist. 235U and 239Pu are the next best thing.
- ouid 5y agoNot at all, plutonium is essentially safe enough to eat. Fissile isotopes require free neutrons to undergo fission. The dangerous components of radioactive waste are the fission products. When I break apart a large nucleus in fission, I get random configurations of protons and neutrons as a result. These rnadom configurations are very likely to themselves be unstable.
- karaterobot 5y ago> If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level. The great thing about articles like this is that it reminds me to go rewatch the the video "Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great?"[1], which neatly summarizes so much of the breathless excitement of vague, detail-free scientific and entrepreneurial claims. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q
- mycall 5y agoIf anything like this could lead to destruction of nuclear bomb material, nuclear disarmament could actually become reality.
- pojzon 5y agoWhy not use nuclear waste as a fuel for reactors ? New generation of reactors can run on nuclear waste.
- lmilcin 5y agoI am continually amused that disposing nuclear waste is still such a hot (!) topic. There is simple and effective way of disposing the most dangerous types of nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel) -- dig a deep hole in an ancient, stable, solid rock and bury it there forever. The place needs to be selected carefully but we know of a number of places that are perfect from geological point of view. The only problem is that nobody wants that in their vicinity because of an irrational fear.
- mike503 5y agohttps://m.imdb.com/title/tt0318649/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0318649/ /s
- ggm 5y agoWhat's the energy balance please? Assuming fission in, what mW of power is generated to make x units of waste, and what mW of power is needed to speed up decay/transmutation to shrink the half-life.
- nahuel0x 5y agoCan this method be used as an emergency device to neutralize the reactor uranium rods? Or to sanitize Chernobyl?