Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-nuclear-waste-storage-france/

by malshe • 7 years ago

100 234 7 years ago

chmaynard• 7 years ago

This is another of many "silver bullet" proposals to reverse the environmental damage caused by Western civilization. Most of they won't work and will have unintended consequences. As always, prevention is the best cure.

mises• 7 years ago

Only by Western civilization? China is the largest polluter; India is third. The West may not be blameless, but it is not solely the fault thereof.

What is your better idea, now that the time for prevention has passed?

mschuster912• 7 years ago

Yeah but most nuclear waste came from the US, UK, France and Russia.

As for a better idea, molten salt/thorium reactors, they can eat at least the highly dangerous/ultra long half life stuff.

6nf• 7 years ago

This is about nuclear waste that came from power plants that massively helped the amount of greenhouse gases we emit (cause the alternatives were fossil fuelled plants) so I’m not sure what you mean exactly

arcticbull9• 7 years ago

Everything we do is about trade-offs. Solar panels have toxic chemicals, too (Cadmium compounds, Hexaflouroethane, Lead [1]). Wind involves rare-earth metals like Neodymium which are produced in mines that resemble toxic war zones in far-flung regions of China [2]. None of us will ever exist on this earth without leaving fingerprints. It's not about 'zero' it's about 'better' one step at a time. Defeatism and refusing to accept anything short of perfection is a good way to get nowhere.

For reference 1 ton of Thorium produces as much electricity as 200 tons of Uranium or 3.5 megatons of coal -- which would you rather use?

[1] https://sciencing.com/toxic-chemicals-solar-panels-18393.htm...

[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1241872/EXCLUSIVE-I...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

dang• 7 years ago

Maybe so, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN, especially about grand divisive topics? It leads to much less specific and much less interesting discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

saagarjha4• 7 years ago

The idea is to transmute this nuclear waste into new forms of atoms which don’t have the problem of radioactivity. What you have to do is to change the makeup of the nucleus.

Ok, but what exactly is it transmuting the atom to?

mimixco19• 7 years ago

Radioactive materials are dangerous because their subatomic makeup is unstable, meaning they emit dangerous particles as the atom degrades from the inside. So it would seem that, in order to fix that, you'd have to re-populate the innards of the atom with enough protons to make it stable again.

It's worth noting that transmutation is definitely possible. The alchemists of old would be thrilled to know that we can, in fact, make gold from base metals (in a nuclear reactor). The problem with that is that the cost of doing so is worth more than the gold could be sold for.

Armisael16• 7 years ago

That didn't answer the question asked at all.

saagarjha4• 7 years ago

I know how radioactivity and transmutation works; my problem is that I don't actually know how this problem is being "solved".

Someone• 7 years ago

I also wonder about that. If it transmutes into the natural decay products, energy must come out, and, depending on the size of that laser/proton gun, we could (although I think that’s highly unlikely) even be talking about a way to make small nuclear bombs.

Also, will the end result still be energy positive? Even if the transmutation doesn’t add energy to the nucleus, that can be problematic, as that laser will need to be powered.

And of course, there’s the question of ‘aim’: can we really target individual atoms well enough to ‘hit’ them exactly once? (this might be fairly easy if the process requires specific energies that the radioactive atoms, once ‘hit’ no longer are sensitive to)

jayalpha• 7 years ago

Well, other atoms?

Depending where you start from and how do it. Here is an example: http://www.ipodphysics.com/resources/trans90.jpg

saagarjha4• 7 years ago

That's my question: I don't know which way they're moving.

rocqua4• 7 years ago

I think the best option would be to accelerate the decay. That should be relatively easy (i.e. has a net energy output) and massively reduces the radioactivity.

saagarjha4• 7 years ago

Accelerating the decay would increase the radioactivity, at least until you've reached something with a long half-life.

credit_guy2• 7 years ago

Let's take an example.

Here's the list of the 7 long-lived fission products [1]. The nastiest appears to be Caesium-135 [2]. If you zap this with a proton it becomes Barium-136, which is a stable element (the half-life is so long that it cannot be estimated; probably it is in the trillions of years).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product#The...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_caesium#Caesium-13...

mschuster912• 7 years ago

Mourou and Tajima want to create a high-speed laser-driven accelerator to produce a beam of protons that can penetrate atoms.

Is it only me who is reminded of Iron Man 2 and the new element created by that hacked together accelerator in Tony Stark's basement?

As for the topic of the article: I would really find it interesting how much "bandwidth" (=kg/day) such a setup has and what the energy requirements are. If the process consumes more than half the energy that the fission process generated, is it still profitable then? Also, what are the byproducts? I can't really believe that this leaves stable lead and other things only behind.

mimixco19• 7 years ago

Nuclear energy has its advocates—it spews little by way of emissions and is produced relatively cheaply.

Nuclear is anything but cheap. It's a net negative energy source, meaning the the electricity costs more to produce than it can be sold for. This is why the industry requires massive subsidies to stay alive. (If I recall correctly, the last round of subsidy in the US was over $50 billion.)

Nuclear power also requires massive amounts of carbon, as the uranium fuel must be mined and extensively processed before it is useful. The mining and milling process is horribly polluting and has ruined the land and water in many places on Earth.

Now, having said that, I certainly hope this guy can come up with a way to transmute radioactive elements with lasers. That would be terrific. But I'm doubtful.

graeme2• 7 years ago

Got a source? I'd read the EROI of nuclear is quite high.

mimixco19• 7 years ago

The simplest source is the closure of many existing nuclear plants and the cancellation of all but one which we're planned for the US.

It's not well known that the industry requires billions in government subsidies to even exist today. If taxpayers are footing the bill, that tells you that selling electricity isn't paying its own way.

Fewer people still know that nuclear plants are uninsurable, for somewhat obvious reasons. Government insurance for nuclear accidents is another huge subsidy that shows the industry isn't viable on its own.

For more info, see Helen Caldicott's excellent book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.

godelski2• 7 years ago

I have a counter source[0]:

France is highly powered by nuclear and is on the cheaper side of European cost of electricity. Not the cheapest, but cheaper than the average and especially so for being a major country.

Part of the reason France does so well is that 17% of its energy comes from recycled nuclear waste. That's not 17% of nuclear power is from waste, that's 17% of TOTAL power is just from waste.

[0] https://1-stromvergleich.com/electricity-prices-europe/

arcticbull9• 7 years ago

This is true not of nuclear energy in general but -- if what you're saying is true -- of the Uranium cycle commonly in use today. To my knowledge, it was originally selected because it can support production of weapons-grade Plutonium. I'd wager, at the time, the power generation (and economics) was more of a side-effect.

I'm personally more interested in seeing Thorium reactors re-visited, as Thorium is much more prevalent in the earth, can't be used to produce weapons-grade Plutonium, is much safer, more stable, yields fissile products with much shorter half-lives, and so on. That's not to say there aren't challenges but I think this would be something worth investing in. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

mimixco19• 7 years ago

Since there is no working thorium reactor at scale, it would be more accurate to say that it is true today and some people hope that we could escape the uranium cycle with thorium. So far, no one has.

MertsA2• 7 years ago

Thorium [...] can't be used to produce weapons-grade Plutonium

Sure it can. Thorium breeder reactors do not burn Thorium as Thorium is not fissile. Thorium is fertile and a blanket of Thorium is used to generate fissile Uranium. It's pretty straightforward to introduce U-238 into the U-233 from the Thorium. Then at that point it's no different than breeding Plutonium in a traditional reactor.

The difference is that Plutonium is an unavoidable waste product for traditional reactors but you don't need to produce it operating a Thorium molten salt reactor.

tlocke• 7 years ago

A big problem with nuclear is expense. The figures from France are misleading because the state and the power companies are deeply entangled financially. A clearer view is possible in the UK because they have market system, and subsidies tend to be more transparent. The message from the UK is that nuclear power is not financially viable, and no nuclear power stations would be built without government subsidy. The subsidy required is far greater than that required by renewables. See https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/22/hinkley-poin...

marcus_holmes• 7 years ago

does that take into account that the designs for nuclear reactors are optimised not for economic production of electricity, but for plutonium output for nuclear weapons programs?

Not a coincidence that nuclear power plants have been mostly built during the cold war. Or that nuclear power is inextricably linked with nuclear weapons in the minds of defence people (see Iran).

However, there's no actual need for this, and a pacifist nuclear power program could be very economically viable. But there wouldn't be any government subsidies for it, of course, because it would be useless militarily.

mimixco19• 7 years ago

^^ This

xanth2• 7 years ago

I wonder how much this processes would consume and further reduce the effective yield.

turbohz• 7 years ago

Energy from other sources, such as renewals could be used. The disposal could be scheduled when those are generated in excess.

xanth2• 7 years ago

Good point, even with non renewable resources excess power is often entirety wasted when the expected grid consumption is lower than the production.

nickik2• 7 years ago

Or we could just use that valuable fuel and put it into nuclear reactors to make energy and other useful stuff. But that seem to be a totally crazy idea.

mimixco19• 7 years ago

Reprocessing is its own nightmare and, I think, only France tries to do it. All of these processes (the "uranium cycle") are terribly polluting in their waste outputs and dangerous places for the people who have to work there and live near them.

garmaine2• 7 years ago

What nightmare? Reprocessing is a net cleanup compared with letting the waste sit. I have some nuclear engineering background and honestly I don’t know what you’re referring to.

benzofuran2• 7 years ago

It's like the US doesn't already have a number of remote areas like Hanford, Oak Ridge, Idaho Falls, the Savannah River Site, Rocky Flats, etc. that are already set up (and somewhat contaminated already) for handling this sort of material and process. In reality it's a political nightmare, not a pollution one.

baylisscg• 7 years ago

The UK still has a site too but yes there's only a handful globally. The former site at Dounreay in Scotland used to leak particles on a regular basis which were all kinds of bad news for anything living that came into contact with them or perhaps one kind of bad news: horrible death.

roenxi3• 7 years ago

France's power is cheap by European standard [0]. So there isn't an economic issue.

Going by order-of-magnitude of input materials, if it is an environmental nightmare it is still going to be better than the mining process for raw materials going in to solar panels and whatever else. AFAIK they all use rare earths that get mined in China and refined with some horrible process. Pure volumes of solar panels suggest the incidental environmental damage will be worse from, eg, trampled grass and land disturbed.

So it isn't an environmental or an economic nightmare relative to the alternatives. In what sense is it a nightmare? It seems to be working for France.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

nickik2• 7 years ago

This is wrong. There are many ways of reprocessing and many are far better then the limited once used so far. Its just that we haven't advanced in terms of nuclear technology in the last 40 years.

We will never solve any of these problems if we don't embrace nuclear technology.

nl3• 7 years ago

Your periodic reminder that - despite the propaganda campaign run by nuclear advocates to make it seem like being anti-nuclear is to be anti-science - nuclear power remains massively expensive and even less safe than people think.

Here's the most comprehensive peer-reviewed survey around:

We summarize the results of a recent statistical analysis of 216 nuclear energy accidents and incidents (events). The dataset is twice as large as the previous best available. We employ cost in US dollars as a severity measure to facilitate the comparison of different types and sizes of events, a method more complete and consistent that the industry-standard approach. Despite significant reforms following past disasters, we estimate that, with 388 reactors in operation, there is a 50% chance that a Fukushima event (or more costly) occurs every 60–150 years. We also find that the average cost of events per year is around the cost of the construction of a new plant. This dire outlook necessitates post-Fukushima reforms that will truly minimize extreme nuclear power risks. Nuclear power accidents are decreasing in frequency, but increasing in severity.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961...

Consultant324522• 7 years ago

How many Fukushimas will we (society) accept every 150 years in order to stop climate change? That's really the only question that matters.

c1sc0• 7 years ago

Both Fukushima & Chernobyl would have been essentially non-issues if built further away from population centers. I know this is Sim City logic: but my answer to that would be: quite a lot!

ovi2562• 7 years ago

An infinity of them, as there are very few deaths attributable to Fukushima, whereas the coal generation plants spew pollution and radionuclides into the atmosphere which result in definitely attributable deaths.

SmellyGeekBoy2• 7 years ago

This attitude is what's keeping these old and less safe reactor designs running in the first place.

gridlockd7• 7 years ago

The problem is that people who are anti-nuclear are often also anti-coal and anti-fossil-fuel and anti-everything-that-actually-sustains-current-human-level-of-development.

For those people, it has to be "clean renewables", with the speculation being that technology will fix all the issues with it. That ignores that maybe technology can also fix the issues with nuclear - and more readily so.

jayd163• 7 years ago

This is really not compelling. If you can't provide any more compelling evidence for nuclear vs clean energy improvements, why not gamble on the currently safer/cleaner bet?

caymanjim4• 7 years ago

Funny how they're never anti-using-electricity themselves, though.

hairytrog5• 7 years ago

Kind of agree. There's been 4 catasrpohpic reactor meltdowns and there are ~400 reactors. That's a 1% failure rate. That's really bad. That's the status quo, which does not mandate continued low safety and lack of economic advantage. That's why there is R&D. Today what you say is true - great. Tomorrow, who knows. High energy density and human ingenuity could make genIV a reality.

kyberias3• 7 years ago

What were the meltdowns?

croh• 7 years ago

is there a way to zap plastic waste in minutes ?

gambiting8• 7 years ago

Yes - you can burn it for energy, which is already done in many countries. With good enough filters it's the best solution to plastic waste that we have.

m0llusk• 7 years ago

There are multiple ways. Grinding it up and then using a plasma furnace to break down the molecules is a proven way to reduce a waste stream to component elements.

hairytrog5• 7 years ago

Spent nuclear fuel, sometimes called waste, is actually a resource that next generation reactors will be able to tap - both for energy and uncommon element feedstock. Just like shale used to be "garbage" until the tech to make it useful was developed, spent fuel will be seen as waste until we can make it useful. Letting this very manageable amount of waste sit in repositories until we get our shit together is utterly reasonable. In the US, it would take just one facility to deal with all 99 reactor waste streams.

I don't think we need to spend money and energy to transmute it by theses questionable laser schemes. Accelerator driven transmutation of waste was shown the dustbin a few decades ago, hopefully this will have the same fate. Please don't ruin our valuable trash.

carlosdp• 7 years ago

Don't even centralize it all in one facility, just store it on-site.

caymanjim4• 7 years ago

That's how most of the power plant waste in the US is "handled" right now, because it's so far been politically impossible to agree on long-term storage and transportation. It's an inferior solution, though. There are security issues, and many points of failure for environmental damage. It's particularly problematic when plants are decommissioned and the waste is still stuck there requiring indefinite security and storage facilities for an otherwise-defunct plant. We'd be better off with all of it in one secure and safe facility, pending a better solution in the future.

Tepix4• 7 years ago

Spent nuclear fuel, sometimes called waste, is actually a resource that next generation reactors will be able to tap

That's just hope. How convenient not having to deal with the mess! To me, it sounds like a religion.

The same argument could be applied to rising CO2 levels. Just let future generations figure it out. What could go wrong?

netcan• 7 years ago

Rising co2 levels create problems now. Spent fuel, stored safely, doesn't.

The "safely" caveat is controversial, maybe even dubious, certainly politically charged, but there's a fundamental difference here nonetheless.

cm21872• 7 years ago

co2 is not contained. Nuclear waste is.

piokoch• 7 years ago

I think there are important differences. We know that wastes has energy (otherwise they would not radiate), there are stored in a well specified area.

Unfortunately nuclear energy had a very bad PR for past 50 years, as a result nobody wanted to do any searcher in areas related to it).

It seems that it is slightly better now, environmental organizations at least are not trying to occupy nuclear reactors, unfortunately still they are pushing wind farms and solar farms, even though they cannot be usable on a massive scale without efficient way to store energy surplus.

08-153• 7 years ago

It's more than hope, it's engineering. Future generations don't need to figure anything out, because the last two generations already did.

The Integral Fast Reactor was a reality in 1994, including a reprocessing scheme and inherent safety, when congress cut its funding. It's not my favorite reactor. My favorite, the molten chloride fast reactor, was theoretically investigated in 1972, including its potential for transmutation of actinides (excellent), I-129, Tc-99 (both good) and even Sr-90 and Cs-137 (both rather pointless).

What could go wrong and in fact did go wrong is politics. That's what prevents the practical investigations.

manfredo• 7 years ago

That's just hope. How convenient not having to deal with the mess! To me, it sounds like a religion.

Er, no this is demonstrably false. France recycles >98% of its spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors. This isn't fantasy, this is already existing technology. It's not as profitable at the moment which is why few countries recycle waste but it is absolutely something that could be done in the future.

It's not like rising CO2 levels, and this comparison is intellectually dishonest in the extreme. Rising CO2 in the atmosphere levels impact the environment, spent nuclear fuel buried underground does not. The possibility of contamination is either nullified by storing waste in areas already contaminated by nuclear testing, or by burying it miles underground.

erentz• 7 years ago

And no one ever talks about how we’ll handle solar waste. Has it changed and is no longer a problem going forward? Last I looked into it a few years back it was shaping up to be a very serious and toxic problem. They were very difficult to recycle, and full of lead, cadmium, and other nasty things. Something needs to be done with them but everyone was pretending they’re completely clean and safe.

Krasnol22• 7 years ago

I get 27.300 results for "solar waste" on google. 88.000.000 for "solar waste management". Literally "no one ever"...

borkt• 7 years ago

I mention this all the time to coworkers who blindly believe solar is a perfect technology. It is really, really bad - especially the old stuff with all these REE's and extremely low efficiency. I am pretty upset that California now REQUIRES solar for new construction. It really feels we should have waited for the efficiency/cleanliness/recycling to mature a lot before that.

mbostleman2• 7 years ago

My introduction to this was when I went to work for a solar manufacturer and had to take blood tests to measure cadmium levels.

Blackthorn• 7 years ago

Spent fuel is only a part of it though. There is also tubes, piping, tools... Basically, components that are used for maintenance and are now effectively useless.

sandworm101• 7 years ago

And sand from sandblasting of painted metal to remove contaminants. There are tons and tons of very slightly radioactive sand that needs a place to live.

PopeDotNinja• 7 years ago

Please don't ruin our valuable trash.

How valuable could it possibly be? I challenge you to calculate the net present value on all of that nuclear waste.

hairytrog5• 7 years ago

All modeling fails, because it's worthless until proven otherwise. It's future breakthroughs - JFK speech at Rice, just replace space with nuclear: " Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United Stated, for we have given this program a high national priority--even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us."

a1e2c3• 7 years ago

“A radionuclide is an atom that has excess nuclear energy, making it unstable.”

This seemed like a vague definition, didn’t sit well with my memory of high school chemistry and physics. Turns out it’s the first sentence on Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionuclide

Someone at Bloomberg got a little lazy.

mrpara• 7 years ago

It's accurate and not really vague at all, it's just not highschool level physics. I'll try to explain it in layman terms.

Imagine that you have a bunch of free particles that are not connected to each other in any way, and are far enough from each other that any interaction between them (such as electromagnetic fields) is negligible. Ignoring their own masses, the energy of the system is zero. Now imagine these same particles, bound together into a single atom.

Obviously, for the atom to be stable, you don't want it to be able to fall apart on a whim. You want a system where you have to input a lot of energy for the atom to fall apart. But as we just said, the state where the constituent particles are separate is the default, zero-energy state. Therefore, a stable state where you have to add energy to reach the default free state must actually have negative energy! To be specific, the binding energy is negative while the energy related to the mass of the particles, i.e. e=mc2, is positive. The atom is actually lighter than the sum of its parts!

An atom that doesn't have negative binding energy, i.e. has "excess energy", has nothing binding the constituent particles together, since they have more than enough energy to go run free on their own. Therefore it is unstable. Elements with a small enough binding energy, small enough that random fluctuations can overcome it and make the atoms fall apart, are what we call radioactive elements.

hokus• 7 years ago

here you go

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R5G5hTC7pc

next quest

credit_guy2• 7 years ago

They had me at Cedric Villani

"For Cedric Villani, a French lawmaker and the winner of the Fields Medal—the Nobel Prize equivalent for mathematics—that’s no reason to give up. “What Mourou is really after is the accelerator that the laser creates,” he said. “It’s far-off, but why not?” "

08-153• 7 years ago

A ridiculous idea.

The article doesn't go into technical details, but it appears this boils down to a compact proton accelerator. Those protons could be smashed into heavy metal atoms, which will release high energy neutrons. Those neutrons could in turn be used to irradiate nuclear waste, transmuting it.

The first problem with that idea is that stable atoms would be transmuted, too. So unless the waste is separated chemically (aka reprocessed), irradiating it with neutrons tends to make matters worse. In some cases, notable cesium, isotopic separation seems necessary. But if you assume reprocessing, you might as well stuff the components to be irradiated into a reactor, where the actinides act as fuel and some waste products will transmute away.

The second problem is the ridiculously low efficiency of such an accelerator system. Carlo Rubbia has been talking about the concept (ADS, Accelerator Driven System, also called Energy Amplifier) for something like 20 years, and even he only envisions supplying comparatively few neutrons to a subcritical reactor. But a barely subcritical reactor isn't all that different from a critical reactor, except you can turn it off by turning off the accelerator instead of by moving a control rod.

In short, this is another guy with a solution (the accelerator) looking for a suitable problem.

(For the record, continuous recycling of actinides is a good idea that turns "the waste problem" from an unsolvable million-year problem into a manageable 500 year problem. Transmutation of iodine and technetium may be a good idea, too, because these are the only long term radionuclides that would leach into water.)

Edit: names are difficult

amai• 7 years ago

Doesn't that need more energy than you generated out of the material in the first place?

admax88q• 7 years ago

I wonder what our attitude towards landfills would be if they were described the same way that nuclear waste storage facilities are.

no country can claim to have a comprehensive solution for dealing with its toxic waste.
more than 60 years after getting into nuclear energy, [France] still has no definitive way to cope with it.

Sentences like these imply that there's dangerous waste just sitting sitting around while officials scratch their heads about what to do.

We do have comprehensive solutions. We build giant concrete wells and just put the waste there, problem solved.

This solution seems to be accepted as reasonable for garbage via landfills, but for nuclear waste its somehow treated as a workaround until we find some other magical way to get rid of it.

sfink• 7 years ago

tl;dr - scientist proposes solution to the nuclear waste problem: alchemy. With lasers.

Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

Related Stories