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?"

Re:Cue the hippies

[Hatta]

It's true, many on the left are overly skeptical about nuclear power. But at least liberals change their opinions [salon.com] when educated.

Nuclear power is a classic test case for liberal biasesâ"kind of the flip side of the global warming issueâ"for the following reason. Itâ(TM)s well known that liberals tend to start out distrustful of nuclear energy: Thereâ(TM)s a long history of this on the left. But this impulse puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on the matter (scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal).

So are liberals âoesmart idiotsâ on nukes? Not in Kahanâ(TM)s study. As members of the âoeegalitarian communitarianâ group in the studyâ"people with more liberal valuesâ"knew more science and math, they did not become more worried, overall, about the risks of nuclear power. Rather, they moved in the opposite direction from where these initial impulses would have taken them. They become less worriedâ"and, I might add, closer to the opinion of the scientific community on the matter.

You may or may not support nuclear power personally, but letâ(TM)s face it: This is not the âoesmart idiotâ effect. It looks a lot more like open-mindedness.

Re:no

[lightknight]

Haha, no. It's the only technology immediately available that can deal with a doubling of energy usage. Green technology has, unfortunately, been mostly a wash -> we blew a huge amount of the economy on its fairy-tale promises of reducing our environmental impact and creating tons of new jobs; it was meant to replace current technology with something equally as capable or better; it's nowhere near that mark. What we have, instead, is a giant bill and a bunch of green technology that might be able to put a worthwhile fight against something from the 1800s, but definitely not against something from the 1940s, let alone current technology.

Face it -> battery technology isn't there yet. Most of the green power-plants work only in certain places, under certain conditions, and many of them have an even greater environmental impact that the technology they're trying to replace. Nuclear fusion would be nice, but we still haven't cracked it. Which leaves coal, natural gas, oil, and so forth, where coal is the most popular option on the table right now; this is coal, mind you, where entire mountain mining communities are ready to vote for anyone who backs it (thus giving themselves a job), while being the biggest polluter.

With nuclear technology, the waste is contained. Yes, it's dangerous, but it's a bloody known dangerous, and as long as you do not hire someone from the bottom of the barrel to take care of it, you're pretty safe. What more, there are reactor designs, breeder reactors, which burn this waste, but are somewhat outlawed as they can be used to create weapons-grade material. Only an irrational fear of radiation keeps us from re-adopting it as a technology.

And Fukushima was an ancient reactor, build to yesterday's standards, which still held its own against a larger earthquake than it was designed to withstand. The inability to keep up with industry standards for running a nuclear reactor was a political / accounting problem, not a technology problem. You might as well argue that a B-2 bomber wasn't built to withstand a passing meteor storm; it wasn't built with that in mind, but if you'd be willing to untie our hands / remove some red-tape and give us the damn resources to fix the problem...

Re:1,000 year? 200 year? Who cares.

[HornWumpus]

A large part of the cost of Yucca Mtn was that it was designed to be monitored and the waste recovered.

That ship has sailed. We're more or less committed to breeding it away. Which is most likely the right call. Liquid sodium complications and all. We should suck it up and buy the technology from the frogs. If they don't want to sell, we'll just have to steel it.