Whatever one thinks of nuclear energy, the process results in tons of radioactive, toxic waste no one quite knows what to do with. As a result, it’s tucked away as safely as possible in underground storage areas where it’s meant to remain a long, long time: The worst of it, uranium 235 and plutonium 239, have a half life of 24,000 years. That’s the reason eyebrows were raised in Europe — where more countries depend on nuclear energy than anywhere else — when physicist Gérard Mourou mentioned in his wide-ranging Nobel acceptance speech that lasers could cut the lifespan of nuclear waste from “a million years to 30 minutes,” as he put it in a followup interview with The Conversation.

Link

Hopefully it’ll work.

Hopefully a $100 billion waste-storage industry doesn’t do all it can to prevent it becoming a reality.

Interesting. It would be nice to know the reaction path.

U235 has a much longer half life, I think.

(checks)

Yes, about 700 million years.

Michael V said:

U235 has a much longer half life, I think.

(checks)

Yes, about 700 million years.

Facts, mere facts…

buffy said:

Michael V said:

U235 has a much longer half life, I think.

(checks)

Yes, about 700 million years.

Facts, mere facts…

Yet where wold we be without them?

Coal fired powerstations are worse. 2ppm of Australian coal is uranium, when its burnt the uranium is released, some of it bonds with the ash and MIGHT be captured – the rest goes up the chimney. One thing I’ve always wanted to do it get a Geiger counter and take background readings in / around a powerstation.

wookiemeister said:

Coal fired powerstations are worse. 2ppm of Australian coal is uranium, when its burnt the uranium is released, some of it bonds with the ash and MIGHT be captured – the rest goes up the chimney. One thing I’ve always wanted to do it get a Geiger counter and take background readings in / around a powerstation.

This & other articles might help: https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-power-plants

Spiny Norman said:

Whatever one thinks of nuclear energy, the process results in tons of radioactive, toxic waste no one quite knows what to do with. As a result, it’s tucked away as safely as possible in underground storage areas where it’s meant to remain a long, long time: The worst of it, uranium 235 and plutonium 239, have a half life of 24,000 years. That’s the reason eyebrows were raised in Europe — where more countries depend on nuclear energy than anywhere else — when physicist Gérard Mourou mentioned in his wide-ranging Nobel acceptance speech that lasers could cut the lifespan of nuclear waste from “a million years to 30 minutes,” as he put it in a followup interview with The Conversation.

Link

Hopefully it’ll work.

> no one quite knows what to do with

I do. This stuff is valuable. For all sorts of uses, not just glow in the dark watches. Uses such as home heating, de-icing, and deep mining of tar sands.

> The worst of it, uranium 235 and plutonium 239

LOL. That’s not the worst of it. That’s not even in the ballpark. Those are both excruciatingly useful as nuclear reactor fuels.

> Chirped Pulse Amplification

I’ve heard of this, but not under that name.

> lasers could cut the lifespan of nuclear waste from a million years to 30 minutes,

One of the holy grails of science fiction.

I haven’t heard of it being done. Essentially, if you feed say ten or a hundred times as much energy as produced by nuclear reactions into some nuclei you can change them back from being useful to being useless. Perhaps, I don’t know if it can work at all because the wavelength of a laser is way too long to affect atomic nuclei normally, too long by a factor of a million or so.

> The worst of it, uranium 235 and plutonium 239

A thermal neutron gets rid of both of those.

And a thermal neutron on both of those generates energy rather than using it up.

Is half life the correct term to use, it’s still radioactive isn’t it just less so, isn’t it still dangerous