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Physicists race for way to destroy nuclear waste
LONDON (Reuters) - European and American physicists are in a race to come up with a viable solution to destroy hazardous radioactive waste with a neutron treatment called transmutation, the New Scientist reported Wednesday.
The magazine said transmutation might destroy the existing inventory of deadly plutonium, minimize the threat of nuclear terrorism and might even help to generate electricity.
``Add a neutron or two to some of the most dangerous radioactive elements and you destroy then,'' the weekly said. ``Plutonium, for example, is split asunder, while the most intractable fission products are rendered harmless.''
Physicists believe that transmutation can shorten to 15.8 seconds from 200,000 years the time it takes for one of the most noxious constituents of radioactive waste, technetium-99, to decay to half its initial radioactive level.
Technetium-99 is a fission product of uranium and reactors around the world spew out about six tons of it each year. Because it dissolves easily in water, it accumulates in the food chain. Concentrations of the product have risen 100-fold in some parts of the ocean since the 1960s because of nuclear policy.
Despite some skepticism, the Spanish, French and Italian governments are about to receive a report outlining the details needed to build a prototype transmutation reactor, the magazine reported, while the U.S. Department of Energy is putting $4million into its own research and development.
With new research into a theory that had been rejected as technologically and economically unfeasible, European physicists are also now trying to produce cheap power on top of destroying plutonium and reducing hazardous waste.
Their proposed machine has been dubbed the ``Energy Amplifier'' by its designer, the Nobel prize winning physicist Carlo Rubbia.
But so far, all research is at an early stage. Despite being bullish, experts only have a simulation and a series of experiments on isolated aspects of a system.
And observers remain cautious. Richard Bush, the fuel processing manager at Britain's AEA Technology science and engineering business, said too many untested claims were being made. Others say technically the process is on the ``edge of the possible'' but still question whether it makes economic sense.
12:33 01-13-99
Special thanks to GDR Researcher Steven L. Wilson, Sr for finding this.
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