I'm a practicing nuclear physicist and do work on gamma ray interactions with actinides. It's possible i'm missing something important, but i think this article is an utter mess and was clearly written by someone with absolutely no understanding of what they are saying. Attempting to learn anything from this article will be counterproductive.<p>Here is an explanation of chirped pulse amplification: <a href="https://www.rp-photonics.com/chirped_pulse_amplification.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.rp-photonics.com/chirped_pulse_amplification.htm...</a>
This technique is for producing optical photons, which will have less than 10 ev of energy. In the same way that you can't focus the sun's light to a point that gets hotter than the surface of the sun (violates second law of thermodynamics), it isn't obvious how low energy laser pulses can be useful for this. The article offers no explanation whatsoever. Maybe the electric field across the nucleus can be made strong enough to induce scission?<p>In general, if you want to interact with the nucleus you need photons on the order of 1 Mev or more, whose wavelengths are comparable to the size of the nucleus. These are gamma rays, which are not optical photons. There are ways to boost optical photons to those energies (like inverse compton scattering), but the article says nothing about that either. I would think inverse compton scattering of a chirped pulse from an electron packet in an accelerator will completely destroy the sharp timing and reflect the distribution of the electrons instead.
<i>uranium 235 and plutonium 239, have a half life of 24,000 years</i><p>- U235 has a half life of 700,000,000 years.<p><i>If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level.</i><p>The article says nothing about how he hopes to gain 4 orders of magnitude. Is there some kind of Moore's law in the "speed" of these pulses?<p>I wasted my time reading this article, it explains nothing.
>If no solution is found, we're already stuck with some 22,000 cubic meters of long-lasting hazardous waste.<p>Not trying to be glib, but 20,000 cubic meters isn't a significant amount of space. Obviously this isn't the same as storing paper plates or pillows, but the physical size of it all is something that would fit in a small grocery store. 2,000 m^3 or 2,000,000 m^3, the size of it really isn't the attribute that's the problem.
No mention of the energy cost of doing this? Hopefully not too much compared to the nuclear energy produced.<p>Is there any chance nuclear waste could be useful for something, such as creating more energy, in the future?
I feel like I've posted this comment too many times already but here goes....<p>Materials with long half lives are LESS radioactive than those with short half lives. Things with short half lives are what we make bombs out of and what fuel these reactors (EDIT: This is wrong, read the comment chain). All materials have a half life (probably/maybe, looking at you protons[2]), the longer it is, the safer they are.<p><a href="https://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2021-11-30/Key-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.kitco.com/commentaries/2021-11-30/Key-facts-abou...</a><p>[2]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay</a>
The Canadian Shield is, afaik, stable, deep, plutonic rock. I don’t understand why we aren’t drilling miles-deep holes and excavating storage chambers down there. Seems ideal for a storage facility.
Nuclear waste storage is a solved problem. There are no shortages of underground facilities to store the waste forever.<p>What is a bigger risks/concern is environmental radioisotope contamination in the case of a disaster. Lasers won't help with this.
> If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level.<p>The great thing about articles like this is that it reminds me to go rewatch the the video "Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great?"[1], which neatly summarizes so much of the breathless excitement of vague, detail-free scientific and entrepreneurial claims.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q</a>
Is nuclear waste still an issue now that we can recycle the waste back into the power plant for more energy?<p>Asking as a total novice on the topic. I want to act as a proponent for nuclear energy but it’s difficult to know what’s propaganda and what’s legitimate.
Propagates the common error that "long half-life" = "more dangerous", when, by definition, "long half-life" = "not very radioactive".
I am continually amused that disposing nuclear waste is still such a hot (!) topic.<p>There is simple and effective way of disposing the most dangerous types of nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel) -- dig a deep hole in an ancient, stable, solid rock and bury it there forever. The place needs to be selected carefully but we know of a number of places that are perfect from geological point of view.<p>The only problem is that nobody wants that in their vicinity because of an irrational fear.
What's the energy balance please?<p>Assuming fission in, what mW of power is generated to make x units of waste, and what mW of power is needed to speed up decay/transmutation to shrink the half-life.
how does a nuclear reactor create waste? is this radioactive material not mined from the earth its self? does the reactor make it more radioactive then it was before we extracted it?
What a giant fucking waste of effort.<p>That waste is fuel, and in human history, zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste.<p>This obsession with nuclear waste is ridiculous. We produce less of it than any other kind of energy waste by four orders of magnitude, and it's far less radioactive than the waste that's being belched into the atmosphere to cause global warming.<p>This ridiculous hand-wringing is why we're shutting nuclear reactors down during a fuel shortage crisis in the middle of climate change.<p>We have *<i>got*</i> to stop pretending this is real work.