Radioactivity of nuclear waste could be reduced from thousands of years to less than 500 years.
As countries look for ways to move away from fossil fuels, nuclear fission technology is poised for a comeback. At COP28 last year, 20 nations decided to triple their nuclear energy capacity in the next 25 years but plans for long-term storage of spent fuel have yet to be drawn up.
Where the alchemists failed, former scientists from CERN have been able to succeed. Using a particle accelerator, the researchers propose using a slightly radioactive element such as thorium and transmuting it into an isotope of uranium.
The technology is the brainchild of Carlo Rubbia, the former director-general of the physics laboratory at CERN.
While Rubbia might have had access to a particle accelerator at his old workplace, nuclear energy plants do not have the same luxuries. Building a particle accelerator near each plant can be quite expensive, considering that CERN spent nearly US$5 billion to deliver the Large Hadron Collider.
The other challenge is the opposition to nuclear technology itself. Interesting Engineering has previously reported how Germany phased off its nuclear power plants. Switzerland, too, has similar plans for its four existing nuclear power production facilities.
According to the Swiss national body, Transmutex’s technology could help reduce the volume of nuclear waste generated by 80 percent and reduce the time it remains radioactive to less than 500 years. More importantly, the technology could also be applied to 99 percent of existing nuclear waste.
Edit: added info below
Links in article:
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Finland builds a facility to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years [Ameya Paleja | Jun 01 22 | Interesting Engineering]
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Goodbye nuclear! Germany shuts down its last three remaining nuclear plants [Loukia Papadopoulos | Apr 15 23 | Interesting Engineering] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/germany-shuts-down-last-nuclear-plants
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Transmutex receives CHF 20 million for its breakthrough nuclear energy technology [05 Feb 2024 | Greater Geneva Bern area (GGBa)] https://ggba.swiss/en/transmutex-receives-chf-20-million-for-its-breakthrough-nuclear-energy-technology/
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that’s just thorium nuclear cycle but worse
Please explain further or provide some info you have read or seen in video format, only if you would like to share that info with us!
Thanks!
it’s in their faq https://www.transmutex.com/faq
It’s a thorium based subcritical reactor. India tried to make something similar, but with some amount of plutonium to start this thing and to not include accelerator. The problem is that accelerator required is large and expensive, and needs to use up some fraction of power produced. As of waste, no heavy actinides are produced, and spiciest fission products have half-life of about 30 years, in particular there’s no plutonium or americium made with half life of 80 ish years and 430ish years respectively. This makes radioactivity drop in 100s of years instead of thousands. These problems can be solved in other ways, for example by using fast breeder reactors, but these are hard to make. So will be massive accelerator required, so i’m not holding my breath
don’t you have to transport the waste from the regular reactor to the breeder reactor though.
transport is a complete nonissue, this approach requires special reprocessing of spent fuel
but isn’t the worst stuff in the fuel in the short term? seems like the worst time to be moving it around.
freshly burned fuel is kept at nuclear powerplant spent fuel pool for months to years anyway precisely for this reason. heavy actinides have longer halflifes anyway
do they wait like that with this solution considering its onsite? Honestly the details are a bit sparse from what I can see.
Oh, awesome! Thanks for sharing your knowledge on the topic!
So it’s more complicated than just saying it’s like a thorium nuclear cycle but worse.
not more complicated, different
Same same
