A cool solution to [Nuclear] waste disposal

Physics Web ^ | July 31, 2006 | Edwin Cartlidge

[AFreeBird]

If this works, then that would go a long way towards silencing the anti-nuke crowds, and we could again start building power plants to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

[AFreeBird]

Saw this over on /. thought I'd ping for comment.

[Mr. Jazzy]

It almost sounds too good to be true.

You basically just kill the radioactivity by turning the waste into really cold ice cubes. After all, there really is no such thing as "cold" per se, just heat in varying quantities. Cool the waste down for a period of time, allow it to thaw and you could use it to pave roads.

[masadaman]

Old saw goes: To eliminate nuclear waste, just put five points in it and give it to Merrill Lynch. It will be gone 15 minutes after the market opens.

[Mr. Jazzy]

LOL! The old "Pump & Dump"!

[Steely Tom]

So where does the energy go?

[satchmodog9]

I will read the article later. I have a better idea regardless. Get a big butter knife and spread it on the middle east.

[BlazingArizona]

Why do we want to get rid of it, anyway? Nuclear "waste' is a resource, not a liability. Uranium and plutonium, the elements that give the stuff its long life, can be separated and fed back to reactors to create more energy. Japan and France already recycle their waste in this way; the only reason we don't is that the process is still expensive. Since we have plenty of raw uranium and arid land, it makes more sense for us to store waste ion the desert for the next hundred ears or so until recycling gets cheap.

This is a far better ultimate solution than those daffy schemes for shooting waste into the Sun.

[Max in Utah]

Or... we could pile the waste up in the desert underneath a huge inverted funnel with turbines in the 'spout' and generate electricity from the rising hot air.

(have to admit I stole the idea from the solar project in Oz)

[Young Werther]

NASA has tested a hypervelocity gun which could be scaled to launch nuclear waste material encased in lead ingots. Fire the ingots into a space on a retrograde trajectory and they would slow down in relation to the Earth's orbit They would fall into the Sun and hopefully wouldn't stoke the solar furnace and cause more global warming!

Gun Laying would be necessary to insure we don't hit Venus or Mercury.

[ASOC]

LOL
I read a sci-fi story where waste been shot onto the moon...and that is part of the plot.

[timer]

Problem of nuc-waste was solved long ago, but it makes the hot fusion community look bad, that's why the hatred and malice towards Cold Fusion/LENR, emanating from MIT/Charles Vest(GWB's science advisor)and their DOE. Stan Gleason in cincinnati invented, in the corner of a welding shop, a process that transmutates thorium to copper and titanium isotopes in 3 hours : a zirconium pipe 3" in diameter, 4 " long, with end caps. Central stainless steel rod with stainless steel disc at middle. 3KWH input. 90%nitric acid, 10% thorium. In 3 hours 90% of the thorium is gone, and the detrius at the bottom shows VISIBLE copper flakes. This is but one of many CF techniques, but you'll never hear about it in the media controlled by uknowwho.

[SuziQ]

Have you heard of this?

[Mr. Jazzy]

Ahhh.

The old "glass lined, self illuminating parking lot" treatment for the land of Mecca, eh?

[satchmodog9]

After finally reading the article, I am now convinced the anti nuke crowd is behind the objections. If it is just in the research stage, why downplay the idea?

[RightWhale]

Physics World is a good physics journal for laymen. Many read it to see what is going on in areas of physics not in their own particular discipline, and it has many items of interest to science, biography, and minds of the scientific type. For that reason it might be assumed that this article is not too far off from mainstream science.

If the rate of decay can be doubled, the halflife will be reduced, and if the hotter material is still not so hot as to be beyond the means of handling as waste, it would bring the material to a safer state sooner. Whether 1000 years to a nearly inert state is really any better than 100,000 years is another question.

[Eepsy]

Wasn't that the plot of SPACE: 1999? Or maybe Moonbase?