Laser lights renders radioactive waste safe

The Scotsman ^ | Wednesday, 6 August, 2003 | JAMES REYNOLDS

[Willie Green]

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.

DANGERS associated with radioactive waste, and the problems and huge expense of its disposal could soon end after a Scottish researcher discovered how to neutralise its harmful effects using light.

New research by a leading scientist at the University of Strathclyde could revolutionise the waning fortunes of the nuclear power industry - restoring both political and public faith in an energy source that was once hailed as the future of clean, green energy.

Using a laser, Professor Ken Ledingham has successfully transformed one of the deadliest products of nuclear fission into inert matter in minutes.

The Vulcan laser, housed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, has enabled Prof Ledingham and his team to use nothing more than the focused energy contained in light to excite the nucleus of the iodine 129 isotope, with a radioactive half life of 15.7 million years.

When hit with laser light the isotope becomes totally inert and safe to handle in less than an hour.

If developed on a commercial scale the technology would transform nuclear power generation from a hazardous and prohibitively expensive means of power production by making it safer and cheaper, as well as opening a potentially huge lead for the UK.

It is forecast that such lasers could achieve pulse powers greater than the electrical power generated by all the world´s power plants combined. Laser driven nuclear power means that radioactive material can be dealt with on site.

Prof Ledingham said: "The question of transmutation of all radioactive waste is a long way down the track, probably ten to 20 years. The only way of doing this at present is by building huge accelerators. However, in the same time lasers will develop enormously and so there will be two players on the block."

[Zathras]

Interesting find but it sounds like BS to me.

[far sider]

This is a hoax. Even if he found a way to do this in the lab there's no way it can work on a large scale.

[At _War_With_Liberals]

The laser also turns the waste into gold.

Can they beam it on NJ?

[samuel_adams_us]

Actually it might be possible, LASER does stand for Light Amplified Serial Emitted Radiation and using the charge from one form of radiation against another is exactly how we ended up with nuclear power in the first place, the discharge of radiation and energy.

[ChewedGum]

Sounds too good to be true, but I will wait for more information before I make a judgement.

Would it be possible for the energy in the coherent light beam to have that kind of effect on the radioactive material? I'm thinking they mean it excites the material so it's half life decreases so much that it burns itself out very quickly. Any other ideas out there?

Gum

[samuel_adams_us]

I agree, kind of like putting a car battery to direct ground.

[Willie Green]

Have you heard anything about this?

[wildbill]

If true it will be a terrible blow to the Greens and other wacky enviros. They can only raise money by howling about imminent doom to the planet unless we get rid of humans.

[Petronski]

It sounds great...and impossible.

[thulldud]

These fellows have been working on this for some years. They have a way of spreading a laser pulse out and reconcentrating it into a very short blast of tremendous power--enough to affect atomic nuclei. They can already kick U-238 into fission with lasers, so why not try it on radwaste?

Relevant article here.

[Gorzaloon]

The Vulcan laser, housed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, has enabled Prof Ledingham and his team to use nothing more than the focused energy contained in light to excite the nucleus of the iodine 129 isotope, with a radioactive half life of 15.7 million years. When hit with laser light the isotope becomes totally inert and safe to handle in less than an hour.

Techno-Barf.

Show me the transitions.

Provisional Top Quack Declaration.

[samuel_adams_us]

I thought it was possible, I remember reading the book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and I remember part of how they actually made the reactions which created the plutionium, etc. I am going to go back through that book tonight and see how it all fits together with LASER.

[tortoise]

Sounds too good to be true, but I will wait for more information before I make a judgement.

My bullshit meter is pegged -- the physics is inconsistent and doesn't follow. While you can accelerate the decay of radioactive waste, it usually requires particle "radiation", not actual EM radiation (e.g. a laser). This is essentially what happens in fast breeder reactors -- you "burn up the radioactivity" very fast and convert it into useful energy, leaving very little radioactive waste. But it has absolutely nothing to do with EM radiation or lasers.

[Springman]

Maybe they can power the laser
with cold fusion?

[I got the rope]

I believe the University of Rochester's Laser Fusion Research Facility is working on sustaining a controlled fusion reaction with Hydrogen.

[tortoise]

They can already kick U-238 into fission with lasers, so why not try it on radwaste?

If you actually could make arbitrary isotope radwaste decay that fast (as opposed to selective isotopic material), you have two very obvious problems. First, the energy requirements alone would make this fantastically expensive on an industrial scale. Second, you would need some really heavy shielding because the complete fission decay of that much material would generate one hell of a nasty particle and radiation flux.

[3Lean]

"Actually it might be possible, LASER does stand for Light Amplified Serial Emitted Radiation and using the charge from one form of radiation against another is exactly how we ended up with nuclear power in the first place, the discharge of radiation and energy. "

That sounds scientific, but what on earth do you mean? The radiation emitted from a laser is light (generally UV or visible). The radiation emitted from nuclear waste is at totally different levels (gamma rays) or made up of particles (alpha rays).
The radiation (light) from the laser isn't used to "neutralize" the radiation nor is it being used to stop the emission. I suspect the opposite, the nucleus is excited to the point that the probability of it's splitting is much higher than normal, resulting in a mass emission, followed by inertness. If this is the case I'm not sure I'd like to be around when they "neutralize" a big pile of waste as the ambient radiation might get a bit dangerous as you stimulate 10,000 years worth of emission in one hour.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[FreeMe2]

LASER - Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

[nightdriver]

"When hit with laser light the isotope becomes totally inert and safe to handle in less than an hour."

I call Bee Ess.

If even you could, you would have a radioactive reaction that would be disasterously huge and dangerous.

It appears that these people are confusing chemical reactions with nuclear reactions.

[Willie Green]

I suspect the opposite, the nucleus is excited to the point that the probability of it's splitting is much higher than normal, resulting in a mass emission, followed by inertness.

I would think that you don't even have to split the nucleus with the laser directly, just knock out a neutron so you change it to a different isotope with a different natural decay rate, preferably one with an extremely short half-life. All you're really doing is accelerating natural decay until you get to something stable.

[TexConfederate1861]

Better yet, why not California...?

[syriacus]

I see those canny, creative Celts are at it again.

  This Month in Celtic History by Stephen Paul DeVillo

The story of the invention of radio has an interesting number of Celtic connections that are little known today.

Inventor Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna, Italy in 1874. His mother, Anna Jamieson, was from the County Wexford in Ireland, and was a member of the famous distilling family, itself of Scottish origins.

Although he was brought up mainly in Italy and educated in Florence, Marconi's mom never let him forget his Celtic origins, and Marconi always thought of himself as being as much Irish as Italian.

[syriacus]

Anyone else tried one of those new, powerful penlight lasers that can reach for miles?

We can make one show up on a cloud when we go outside to observe the nighttime skies.

[RightWhale]

The laser light would have to be very high energy, that is beyond ultraviolet, maybe x-rays, to interact with the nucleus. This is not an ordinary staff conference laser pointer.

[techcor]

Ha! I have the distinct pleasure of telling you all (including Physicist) that you're wrong.  I've been trying for two years to have anyone listen to me on this subject on this forum. I first became aware of it through this article Light plays tricks on nuclei.  Here's an excerpt from the article.

If it were possible to release the enormous energy stored in an isomer in a controlled way, we would have prodigious energy densities at our fingertips. It now appears that Carl Collins of the University of Texas at Dallas and co-workers from Romania, Russia, the Ukraine and the US have managed to achieve this feat. They bombarded an isomer of hafnium-178 with X-rays, and observed an increase in the number of high-energy gamma-rays released by the isomer (Phys. Rev. Lett. 1999 82 695). A deeper understanding of these nuclear isomers and their decay modes could pave the way to novel applications including gamma-ray lasers and, possibly, space travel

 Another study seemed to disprove it while one more seemed to confirm it.   But the concept is simple. Everybody thinks of nuclei as being spherical.  In nuclear isomers though the nuclei are in a higher state (think a spinning dumbbell or two pyramids or a stack of cans) normally they fall into the lower state and emit gamma or high end x-rays.  But if someone throws a bowling ball into your stack of cans it will crash down much faster.  
If this is for real and can be applied to americium 242m then the solar system will be open to space travel.  In 2001 americium 242m ("m" stands for metastable) was found to be the most powerful nuclear power source.  A gram is suppose to be equal to about 2 tons of jet fuel.  The article was "Two weeks to Mars" to let you know how powerful the scientists thought it was going to be. In this particular case with this isotope it may be changing it into a metastable form that then decays more quickly.
With the advent of new "raman" type lasers this is definitely possible. And will change a whole bunch of things.

[techcor]

Yep. It's got to be in the x-ray class. Probably using "raman" lasers.

[el_chupacabra]

what if they dump the waste into the oceans and then strap frickin' lazer beams to some sharks?

[Falcon4.0]

Even if it really worked, they will never believe it.

[Willie Green]

The laser light would have to be very high energy, that is beyond ultraviolet, maybe x-rays, to interact with the nucleus. This is not an ordinary staff conference laser pointer.

I did a Google search on "Vulcan laser appleton" mentioned in the article. Looks like this guy is playing with the right toys anyway. The Vulcan is a super-powered x-ray laser. Here's another article about scientists playing around with this stuff: Lasers Split the Atom.

Contrary to the naysayers on this thread, it looks like this research is legit!

[CyberCowboy777]

Any advent that bring nuclear power back to the forefront will change the power structure of this planet.

[webheart]

...LASER does stand for Light Amplified Serial Emitted Radiation...

Sorry to have to correct you, but the "s" in laser stands for stimulated, not serial. The light is emitted by stimulating some substance, and is coheherent, meaning that all the waves are synchronized. Don't know that this has any effect on your point, just want to keep things factual. Thanks.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks, fascinating!

OFFICIAL BUMP(TOPIC)LIST

[At _War_With_Liberals]

They then focused the laser on venture capital.

[AFreeBird]

B4L8r

[snarkpup]

This sounds feasible if you can use the laser to reproduce the kinds of temperatures found in stellar interiors. Only relatively stable isotopes can exist in stellar interiors because any isotope that isn't is prone to a nuclear reaction that quickly produces more stable by-products. E.g., atoms like deuterium or beryllium are very short-lived even in relatively mild stars like the Sun. Radioactive elements would also be prone to reacting quickly. The lifetimes here may be on the order of nanoseconds to days. More stable atoms (helium, carbon, neon) may last millions or billions of years under the same conditions.

"Melting" stable nuclei that are near the middle of the periodic table requires obscenely high temperatures (billions of degrees); but radioactive isotopes that are "ready to go" might be doable with reasonable temperatures.

[Stallone]

Al Gore says he can diffuse nuclear waste by simply passing it through Hillary's digestive system.

Is this possible?

I implore you - is this possible?

[samuel_adams_us]

Thanks!

[July 4th]

Ok...maybe it does work. But do you make more nuclear waste in generating the power to run the laser???

[samuel_adams_us]

Actually it's radiation, light in itself is radiation from the Sun.

[BiffWondercat]

I think your mixing your Photons and Neutrons.

[LibKill]

We need your knowledge and your incomparable ability to explain things to the common man (me).

[Petronski]

I sincerely hope you're right. America's going to need lots more nuclear power, whether this method works or not.

[spunkets]

₅₃I¹²⁹(1/2life=15Myrs) + enough laser E to knock out a neutron(>2Mev) -> ₅₃I¹²⁸(1/2life=1/2hr)+ P,e, and anti neutrino.

₅₃I¹²⁸(1/2life=1/2hr) -> ₅₄Xe¹²⁸(1/2life=1/2hr)+ beta and other products.

I suppose...

[gitmo]

So how much radiation does this "instant decay" emit? Is it the same decay pattern as would occur over time without the laser?

[SSN558]

Interesting find but it sounds like BS to me.

For starters the nasty byproduct of Nuclear fission is Iodine 131 not 129. Currently this is collected in carbon filters and then disposed of. Secondly the old BWR aka boiling water reactors produce most of this stuff. The newer PWR aka pressurized water reactors produce very small quantities of it.

Yes, it sure does sound like BS, fishing for a fradulent research grant. Happens everyday.

[Consort]

I implore you - is this possible?

Yes. It's called the Gelid Effect.

[spunkets]

The Vulcan Laser

I suppose that laser knocks the nucleus into a state that effects the meson exchange stabilization and a neutron decays. The strong force is carried by the pi-meson. It is exchanged between neutrons and protons. The exchange results in an exchange of particle types. Disrupting the pattern of particle exchange disrupts the stability of the neucleus.

[spunkets]

I think they're using I¹²⁹, because it's an easy nucleus to work with; not that it occurs in any particular waste stream. It doesn't take a lot of E to get rid of a neutron. They are using quite a bit though, see #49.