[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?

[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.

[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.

[Springman]

Maybe they can power the laser
with cold fusion?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[el_chupacabra]

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

[CyberCowboy777]

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

[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.

[July 4th]

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

[LibKill]

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

[FlyVet]

I heard once that radioactive waste could actually be recycled into plutonium, but the feds won't go for it for fear it could be stolen and made into weapons. Anyone know if this is true? If it is, it seems like an incredibly dumb excuse. Give the recycled stuff the appropriate security, and build a plutonium reactor to generate electricity. Geez.

[Captain Beyond]

Bump

[Quix]

Have believed for decades that there were a variety of ways to make the waste safe. Just an intuition, a sense. But a strongly held one. I still believe there are several ways. Did come across some documentation of such in the last decade but I forget where.

This is another piece of believable evidence, to me.

[Beaker]

Ermm.... no? I do a lot of laser materials research, and that just doesn't jive with me, as nice as it does sound.

[Psytaxis]

Actually, folx, the process is sound physics, called Laser-induced Nuclear Physics. See the following sites for technical information on how the U238 is degraded into non-radioactive elements.

www.europhysicsnews.com/full/16/article3/article3.html
www.llnl.gov/str/MPerry.html

The target is struck with a very high intensity laser, usually X-ray, which causes the Uranium to fission into fragments of I-134, Cs-138 and Sr-92. It also releases a lot of energy in the process, gamma rays being only a part.