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Giant Laser Transmutes Nuclear Waste 81

Posted by timothy from the two-steps-back dept.
paulnuyu writes "NewScientist is reporting that scientists have transmuted nuclear waste with the Vulcan Glass Laser, cutting iodine-129's half-life from 15.7 million years down to just 25 minutes (as iodine-128). The advance is remarkable, but not practical: the laser would need power from a number of power plants to transmute the waste produced from just one nuclear plant."
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Giant Laser Transmutes Nuclear Waste More

Giant Laser Transmutes Nuclear Waste

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  • Yikes... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bob Vila's Hammer ( 614758 ) * on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @05:01PM (#6748484) Homepage Journal
    The Vulcan laser can produce short pulses of enormous power - a million billion watts. Pulses were fired at a small lump of gold, which produced enough gamma radiation to knock out single neutrons from iodine-129, converting it to iodine-128. The results of the experiment will be published by the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

    As if needing the power of several plants to operate wasn't expensive enough, they fire the laser at a lump of gold? Is this a new Austin Powers movie in the making?
  • Now all we need to do is create self-replicating nano-lasers and nano-nuclear power plants, so that the nano-power plants can make more of themselves to power the nano-lasers that were made to clean up after the nano-power plants that made more of themselves to power the nano-lasers that made more of themselves to clean up after the nano-power plants...

    Grey goo, here we come!

  • The conversation went like this (Score:5, Funny)

    by L. VeGas ( 580015 ) on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @05:08PM (#6748540) Homepage Journal
    Kirk: Spock, I know! We'll use your glass laser to destroy our radiocative trash!

    Spock: Captain, that is .... illogical.

  • Beowolf (Score:1, Redundant)

    by foooo ( 634898 )
    Sure, it's too expensive to use the power of multiple power plants to eliminate the waste of only one power plant. That would be completely impractical!

    But imagine if we had a Beowolf Cluster of Vulcan Lasers!

    ~foooo

    • Re:Beowolf (Score:4, Informative)

      by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @05:23PM (#6748667)
      my submission for this story was way more informative "2003-08-20 17:11:37 Using Ultrahigh Power Lasers to "Burn" Rad (science,science) (rejected)" damnit!

      anyway a beowulf cluster of vulcan lasers will probably look something like what's being built at the University of Rochester right now called Omega EP [rochester.edu]. Which will be nearly 10 times as powerfull as Vulcan. :-)
  • I was reading the stupid DivX story by timothy and clicked on "Also by timothy".

    I saw this, which is a new story but not on the front page.

    have I bypassed the "subscibers see it early" ?
  • Two things come to mind:

    1) Wouldn't this process increase the demand for additional power plants and thus increase the possible amount of neuclear waste lying around. I suppose once we get fusion off the ground it's a possibility, but not anytime soon IMHO.

    2) About a million atoms of iodine-129 were transformed into iodine-128

    Umm.. wouldn't all those neutrons knocked loose generate more radioactive waste by contaminating anything nearby?

    Seems more like a really nifty way to perform isotopic refine

  • A more interesting problem than iodine .. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TTK Ciar ( 698795 ) on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @05:30PM (#6748723) Homepage Journal

    .. would be the elimination of plutonium as a waste product.

    There is a type of nuclear reactor called a "breeder reactor" which generates as its waste product more plutonium, which can then be used to power more breeder reactors. All of the recently-constructed nuclear power plants in Japan are of this type. It was hoped to herald a new age of wasteless nuclear power.

    Unfortunately, the breeder reactors produce more plutonium than can be used, both in sheer volume and in rate of production. Quite simply, they couldn't build new power plants fast enough to keep up with plutonium production, nor would they want to. Oops.

    To make matters worse, the plutonium "waste" is more dangerous than the normal kind, and more difficult to safely store.

    If we could economically zap plutnonium en masse and make it into something relatively benign, it would enable the existing breeder-reactor technology to revolutionize the power industry. This iodine-zapping trick only helps with non-breeder plants, which are vastly less valuable.

    Not to seem as though I'm harshing on these guys -- Kudos to them! Rather, I hope they are able to apply this technology to plutonium "waste", eventually. If they get it to work economically on iodine first, that's also good, because there is a lot of iodine waste sitting around being dangerous. It would be nice in the long run if we could replace the older iodine-producing nuclear reactors to breeder reactors, but to do that we'd need to figure out how to deal with the plutonium.

    -- TTK

    • Not to seem as though I'm harshing on these guys -- Kudos to them! Rather, I hope they are able to apply this technology to plutonium "waste", eventually. If they get it to work economically on iodine first, that's also good, because there is a lot of iodine waste sitting around being dangerous. It would be nice in the long run if we could replace the older iodine-producing nuclear reactors to breeder reactors, but to do that we'd need to figure out how to deal with the plutonium.

      I didn't read the articl

    • This is a violation of the laws of thermodynamics, sorry.

    • Re:A more interesting problem than iodine .. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 21, 2003 @01:23AM (#6751961)
      I'm sorry, but your post contains many technical inaccuracies. Here they are, with brief commentary, in no particular order.
      1. Japan has only one fast breeder reactor, Monju... an experimental design.
      2. All of the recently constructed reactors in Japan are Light Water Reactors, either pressurized (PWR) or boiling (BWR).
      3. ALL reactors fueled with uranium produce plutonium... and since the plutonium is in the core, some of it gets burned (and destroyed) by fission, contributing to the energy released by the fuel.
      4. If we have excess plutonium available, we can use it to make fuel for reactors... it will be mixed with uranium dioxide to make mixed oxide fuel (MOX).
      5. The difference betweeen a breeder and a non-breeder is the conversion ratio attainable. In non-breeders, the value is less than 1. In breeders, the value is greater than 1. A value of exactly 1 implies that for every atom of fuel fissioned, one new atom of fuel is created by transmutation of fertile material (i.e., U-238).
      6. The ONLY reason to build a breeder with high conversion ratio is to produce excess plutonium for use in non-breeders.
      7. Breeding is possible in light water reactors. This was demonstrated at Shippingport, PA. The conversion ratio is not high, but it is definitely greater than 1.
      8. ALL reactors, whether breeder or non-breeder, produce wastes, including iodine.
      9. The feature that distinguishes nuclear power is the energy density of the fuel, and the corresponding small volume of waste relative to amount of energy generated.
      10. All spent fuel is not waste. Typically, about 95% of nuclear waste is just U-238... which just happens to be a fertile material perfect for creating plutonium in a breeder reactor.
      11. A closed nuclear fuel cycle, in which breeder and non-breeder reactors are used and fuel reprocessing is allowed, achieves the highest possible utilization of fuel.
      12. The closed fuel cycle is the holy grail of nuclear power. Even so, there would be waste products to eliminate.
      13. Another method proposed for elimination of such waste is accelerator transmutation.
      14. ANY method of reducing the toxicity of this waste is a welcome addition to the technological toolbox.

      In summary... we know what to do with the plutonium (burn it as fuel). All reactors produce iodine, cesium, barium, krypton, xenon, lanthanum, etc. The volume of these waste products is small, but any method that can reduce the toxicity is desirable.

  • A giant FRIKKIN laser (Score:1, Redundant)

    by n1ywb ( 555767 )
    This may be impractical now, but I'm counting on humanity discovering some new abundant source of power, such as Mr. Fusion, hopefully sooner than later. If energy weren't so hard to produce, a lot of technologies would immediately become feasable, or at least easier to research, like ion propulsion, anti-gravity devices, matter synthesis a la STTNG, teleportation, time travel, the list goes on. So anyway once we have Mr. Fusions then it shouldn't be any problem to dispose of all of our old nuke waste so go

  • So what... (Score:3, Funny)

    by 3-State Bit ( 225583 ) on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @05:36PM (#6748771)
    ...if it needs power from many conventional nuclear power plants to process the waste from a single one?

    In just 30 years we will have fusion power plants -- therefore, all we have to do is store those nasty nuclear byproducts for just 30 years.

    Preferably in Utah. Oh wait.
    • I'd love to know where you heard 30 years. That would be a dream come true. Too bad it's not likely...

      • I'd love to know where you heard 30 years. That would be a dream come true. Too bad it's not likely...

        Why is this not likely? What makes you say this? I will turn 37 years old in just a couple months. In my first six years I was privileged to see humankind's first tentative steps into space. The advancement that has been made in technology since I turned 7 years old has been mind boggling to say the least. Now, here we are just a few years into the 21st century and just the assured advances in current tech

        • I'd love to know where you heard 30 years. That would be a dream come true. Too bad it's not likely...

          Why is this not likely? What makes you say this? I will turn 37 years old in just a couple months. In my first six years I was privileged to see humankind's first tentative steps into space. The advancement that has been made in technology since I turned 7 years old has been mind boggling to say the least.

          By playing the odds. Practical fusion power has been 20 years away for the past 50 years. Don't ho
        • Because I worked for the Department of Energy (not on fusion research itself) and read many of the internal publications on the subject. Although the research continues to make progress, all indications are that it's not going to happen in the near future.

          You mention will power. Fusion research funding was decimated by the Clinton administration. There wasn't enough money left over by the time they were done, to pay the maintenance costs (i.e. janitors). Several major projects were cut completely. A

          • Re:why not in 30 years... (Score:1, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            See, now you've done it. Don't you know that you aren't supposed to attack Democrats on here? Since you work for the DoE, you've obviously had time to grow out of your "college-kid-liberal" phase, but most of these people haven't yet so *Shhhhh*. It'll only make them angry.
            • Ok, to save face: The Bush Administration, while talking up the benefits of Hydrogen power, hasn't bothered to include the obvious hydrogen power solution -- fusion. They're guilty too...

              Actually, it's not totally the President's fault -- he just makes suggestions and signs the final document. The Congress actually writes the budget!

    • Storing the waste is very controversial. Here in Southern California, roughly 20% of our power comes from Nuclear (mostly from San Onofre) and the storage tanks there are nearly full. The US government before the plant was built agreed to find a perminant home for the waste. A facility exists in Nevada. I believe it is in a mountain, in an area where there is low rainfall, etc...all to assure there is a negligable chance of leakage. Moving the waste from point A to point B is (last I heard) not happeni
  • Iodine-129: "You expect me to talk, Mr. Ledingham?"
    Ledingham: "No, Mr. I-129, I expect you to die."

    Note: Inexplicable urge to change the last word to "dye" overcome by recalling the first mantra of humor: "Pun is the death of wit ... Pun is the death of wit."

  • from the truth in article titles department... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @05:41PM (#6748818)
    "Giant Waste of Electricity Transmutes Grant Money into Laser"

    w00t!

    I bet _that's_ a fun lab to play in. Just don't hook up the controls to the MCP, boys.

    End of Line

  • That's going the wrong way! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @07:05PM (#6749543) Journal

    Why does everyone seem to equate "long half-life" with "bad" and "short half-life" with "good"? Things with long half-lives are stable; the ones you need to worry about are the ones with the short half-lives because they break down very quickly. Why is this so hard for everyone to comprehend?

    I saw a poll once where people said they wouldn't mind having large quantities of radioactive material with < 1 day half-life trucked past their home, but would object strongly to matierial with million-to-billion year half life passing by. This means that the most radioactive isotopes of Radon, Plutonium, etc. are fine, but they don't want any of the normal isotopes of Iron, Silicon, Carbon, etc. in their neighborhood.

    That's just plain nuts!

    -- MarkusQ

    • Why does everyone seem to equate "long half-life" with "bad" and "short half-life" with "good"?

      That is an oversimplification, true, but it's not entirely irrational. Things with really long half-lives are essentially stable, things with somewhat long half-lives aren't. If we were able to transmute a material that is somewhat dangerous for centuries to a material that's really dangerous for a day and then not at all dangerous, that could be helpful. It may be more practical to strictly control exposur


      • Granted. I'm mostly just objecting to the knee-jerk assumption that shorter half-lives are always better than longer ones, when in fact they generally aren't (excluding factors such as practicality of management scheduling).

        Remember though, even in the some-what long half-life range (e.g., most radioactive wastes) the longer half-life isotopes are generally safer than the shorter half-life ones, since they produce fewer events per mole. I say generally because there are "gotcha" isotopes that have a lon

    • One, people don't understand.

      Two: science understands. Something with a halflife of a few days isn't a problem, it is gone before it sits around long. Something with a half life of thousands of years can still be radioactive enough to be very dangerious, but because of the long halflife it will be very dangerious for years. Once you get into millions of years for a halflife, it isn't very dangerious, but thousands of years turns out to still be dangerious.

      Note, I'm talking total half life until it de


      • Something with a halflife of a few days isn't a problem, it is gone before it sits around long... If something has a halflife of 10e-16 seconds, but decays into something with a halflife of 10,000 years, it is still dangerious in quanity.

        Foul! You changed scope there. I agree that something with a half life of 10,000 years can be dangeous in quantity but I still maintain that it would be safer than the same quantity of the 10e-16 precursor. You are right, it will be gone before it sits around long, b

  • Storing waste for 250,000 years (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @07:09PM (#6749563) Homepage
    I've always thought it was pretty silly spending millions or billions of dollars on plans for storing radioactive wastes for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. The simplistic assumption is that it is "scientificly impossible" to alter the halflife of waste - that it would be useless and deadly for ages. This article is a perfect example of how advancing technology makes that irrational. In a few tens of years (or even a few hundred years if you're a pessimist) we will have the technology to reprocess the waste or something. Hell, we'll probably mine the waste and USE it.

    -
  • The title of this story remind's me of Calvin's adventures with his transmogrifer [tripod.com]. I still wish I had that kind of imagination.
  • This idea (using laser-produced photons for transmuting waste by photonuclear reactions) is fundamentally flawed. The efficiency of producing the photons by this mechanism sucks, and the cross section for (gamma,n) reactions is much lower than the cross section for the gammas to scatter off of (and lose energy to) electrons.

  • alternative (Score:3, Funny)

    by ggwood ( 70369 ) on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @09:55PM (#6750712) Homepage Journal
    It is possible to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and reuse it in different nuclear reactors. Reprocessing involves more handling of the spent fuel and (as far as I know) is not done in the US but it is done in Europe. I worked at a lab in France where some of this handling is done (either just testing or reprocessing - I'm not sure I was just there to use the magnetometer). Apparently radiation leaks do happen. Thus I'm not saying this is definately the way to go. It may be better than the alternatives, for now at least.

    Remember, the US elected the man who wanted to use "clean coal". (This statement rings in my memory as it singlehandedly changed my friend, a former US Marine, away from voting for Bush.)

    ________________________________________________ _

    • Re:alternative (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jgardn ( 539054 ) <jgardn@alumni.washington.edu> on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @10:13PM (#6750836) Homepage Journal
      Some people are really stupid.

      Clean coal. It is possible to burn coal so that there is not any of the nasties you get when you burn coal at home.

      It is possible to burn most anything without getting nasty byproducts.

      Concerning nuclear waste, the previous poster is right. It won't be sitting around for hundreds of thousands of years. We are going to figure out what to do with it very shortly. We are going to have literally clean burning fission power. We will be converting mass to energy with no nasty byproducts.

      I find it amazing that on the one hand, people marvel at humanity's ability to do things like create dynamite, nuclear weapons, and clean drinking water from sewage, but on the other hand, say things like making clean burning energy from coal, not to mention plutonium, is impossible.

      The BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Nor Anytime) Environmentalist are a walking paradox. One the one hand. science has the power to restore nature, but they refuse to allow science to help mankind.
      • However, here in the real world, it is not finically reasonable to burn coal such that *no* nasty by-products are produced (or that matter even most). Which is why we have pollution in first place.
      • It is possible to burn most anything without getting nasty byproducts.

        How?

        • By regulating the temperature of the burn and what chemicals in what proportions are introduced during the burn. There are currently Japanese garbage-burning facilities that burn plastics and other nasty stuff into harmless gasses like water and C02.

          If all else fails, you can just up the temperature until the substance burns as a plasma. Then the only byproducts are the individual atoms themselves. As a bonus, you can sort the atoms by weight with electromagnetic fields.

          Or you can do this new procedure an
      • BANANA Eviriomentalists?

        STRAW (Synthetic Tactical Response to Argument-Winner) Men?
        • BANANA is a new term coined by House Leader Rep. Tom DeLay. He's at the forefront of the anti-liberal crusade, but he hardly ever makes the headlines.

          His point is that environmentalism is not bad. We do need to keep our lakes and forests clean. But at what costs? Does keeping the lakes and forests clean mean that we can't lay new power lines, build new, modern nuclear facilities or clean burning coal or natural gas power plants? Does keeping the forests and lakes clean mean we can't build new roads, cities
          • "Their true aim in life is to destroy the American way of life." Like I said, straw men. What cost is Mr DeLay prepared to pay? Or is he of the belief that environmentalism is fine as long as it is cost-free?
      • We are going to have literally clean burning fission power. We will be converting mass to energy with no nasty byproducts.

        Dude, 1950 called, it wants its dreams back.

        Oh, and it said to give back the keys to the flying car too...
      • It is possible to burn most anything without getting nasty byproducts.

        No, but it is getting better. The Foster-Wheeler Compact CFB [fwc.com] burns a wide variety of fossil fuels with less (but not none) emissions than most other systems. There are about 30 sizable plants using this technology, and the oldest has been running for 9 years, so it's working. The biggest current installations are in the 150 megawatt range, which is small by power plant standards.

        This is about as good as it gets right now. You s

  • I think I'm seeing a correlation here (Score:3, Funny)

    by Phleg ( 523632 ) * <stephen AT touset DOT org> on Wednesday August 20, 2003 @11:06PM (#6751146)
    The advance is remarkable, but not practical: the laser would need power from a number of power plants to transmute the waste produced from just one nuclear plant.

    They wouldn't happened to have tested this little bugger out on, say, Thursday, would they?
  • "The sub-picosecond pulse is produced using the technique of chirped pulse amplification (CPA)."

    OK, where's the bird?

  • Plutonium? No Problem (Score:3, Funny)

    by fuzzybunny ( 112938 ) on Thursday August 21, 2003 @06:18AM (#6752905) Homepage Journal

    Excess plutonium shouldn't be a problem. My associate, Mr. Moon Kim Sang will buy as much as you can produce.
  • From the [f]A:
    "It's a nice idea," [Swiss nuclear waste scientest Ian] McKinley told New Scientist, "but I wouldn't buy shares in a company selling this process quite yet."

    Hey, Ian, are you nuts? That's like saying "Computers are a nice idea, but I wouldn't buy shares in that IBM automated typewriter company just yet."

    Right now would be the best time to invest in a company that has a chance of developing this technology. Give it 20 or 30 years, and you'll be sitting pretty -- assuming, of course, that
  • Instead of spending so much time and effort on transmuting the waste,they should work on mearly sweeping it under a Somebody Else's Problem field. I'd give it a week before society forgot there ever was a problem...
  • Since the material now decays (knocking out neutrons) in a shorter timeframe than before, are we perhaps enabling the creation of a whole new class of fission bombs? Any physics majors out there?

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