Accelerator Driven Treatment of Nuclear Waste 226
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?"
A step (Score:4, Insightful)
Either that or productive Fusion, which does not produce near the lasting Radioactive waste.
Cue the hippies (Score:5, Insightful)
"Nuclear is bad for everyone!"
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?
I'll take a nuclear reactor in my backyard over a natural gas plant in my neighborhood or a coal power plant within a 20 km radius any day.
Re:or, they could bombard it with neutrinos.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh, material with a half-life of a few years is hardly 'innocuous'. That's what we normally call 'crazy freaking radioactive'.
People seem to have this bizarre idea that a long half-life makes something dangerous, when it's precisely the opposite.
Thorium reactors? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the long term plan for the industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Spent fuel has always been considered a long term asset by the nuclear industry. People in that industry believe that as mining the raw ore becomes more expensive and the technology for reprocessing the spent fuel becomes better it starts to become a more valuable source of future fuel.
The industry would be very different if the governments did not push the technology towards weapons production. The reactor designs we have are all old and they are designed in a way that facilitates the production of plutonium. If the research into other reactor and fuel designs that did not have as many dangerous byproducts were pursued it would be a safer industry today.
The most promising alternative is and was to use Thorium fuelled reactors instead of uranium. There is the potential for far safer reactor designs and far less hazardous waste when using that type of fuel. The USA took a relatively short look at this but then they stopped since they could not also produce weapons from these reactors and at the time it was all about the bomb. But from what I have read they will likely become a technology that becomes more interesting over time as it's capable of using depleted uranium along with the Thorium as a way to use up that spent fuel that's hanging around.
It should be obvious though there are significant challenges to getting the theory into a practical design. All those research reactor projects back in the 50's that gave engineers and scientists the knowledge to build the current reactors would need similar efforts to develop the technology for these alternative fuels and reprocessing technologies. It's starting to happen but in China and India where they have not lost their love for nuclear power yet.
There's no such thing as nuclear waste... (Score:5, Insightful)
... there's just stuff you haven't configured your second fast-breeder reactor to run on yet.
Re:1,000 year? 200 year? Who cares. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:1,000 year? 200 year? Who cares. (Score:1, Insightful)
No they don't. They _collect_ HUGE amounts of money to be used to find/build a permanent storage facility.
They spend the money on bread and circuses while leaving the waste at the plants. Typical federal government.
Re:Cue the hippies (Score:4, Insightful)
Generally speaking you will find that the same people who oppose nuclear also oppose coal, for precisely the reason you state, as well as a few others—e.g., mountaintop removal, watershed destruction, deforestation. In fact, in general at this point I think you will find that people who oppose both oppose coal more than nuclear. But it's not an either-or proposition—despite widespread naysaying, it turns out that renewables really can work. What we lack is not the technology, but the ability to wean people who depend on extractive industries for a living from the dark teat.
Re:no (Score:4, Insightful)
In the long term, all of our current methods of producing electricity is dead. Just depends on what your definition of long is, and just because it is not the perfect solution for eternity doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile until we discover something better.
Re:Developed in the US not Belgium (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in the 1990s this was developed at Los Alamos and a few other accelerator centers. it's not new or unique to belgium.
But because it's a technological solution to a political problem, it's a wheel that will keep being reinvented and everyone who ignored it the previous time will be surprised by it the subsequent time.
The dialog goes like this:
Anti-nukes: "Nuclear power is unsafe. We must ban it!"
Engineer: "Look, I have found a way to make nuclear power safer than coal!"
Anti-nukes: "That would be terrible! It would make people want nuclear power, but we can't be having with that because nuclear power is unsafe. We must ban it!"
Until we have a solution for the political problem, which is that there is a large body of ignorant and fearful people who think that nuclear power is far more dangerous than it actually is and who will steadfastly refuse to ever under any circumstances to compare nuclear power with any other viable source of base-load industrial supply, the advances of technology will be almost completely irrelevant to human progress.
Re:sounds too good to be true (Score:4, Insightful)
Shame on you for posting a "paper" that is published by a politically driven organization (IEER) and not any recognized academic journal.