Particle accelerators could make spent nuclear fuel 200x safer

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Particle accelerators could make spent nuclear fuel 200x safer

Particle accelerators could make spent nuclear fuel 200x safer | DVICE

Until we can manage to make renewable energy sources pay off, nuclear power is arguably (and feel free to argue this) one of the cleanest and safest methods of energy generation there is. One of the biggest problems is the dangerous spent fuel, but there may be a solution to that: particle accelerators.

Spent nuclear fuel contains dangerous radioactive components with half-lives of tens of thousands to millions of years, meaning that generally, it takes at least that long for the material to become safe for living things. This is an impossibly long time frame to plan around, but we don't have a choice: high level nuclear waste just gets buried, and we have to hope that nobody in the future ever gets curious, which is obviously a vain hope, since even right now, whenever we find something that's even just a few thousand years old buried in the ground and sealed up with dire warnings not to touch it, we bust right in and loot the place.

Anyway, the point is that trying to just forget about this stuff is not a viable solution: we need to deal with it. One way of mitigating the danger is through reprocessing to turn the used fuel into new fuel, which helps, but you're still left with a whole heap o' nastiness. Scientists at the Belgium nuclear research center SCK CEN have a different idea: just turn the bad stuff into less-bad stuff using a particle accelerator and a neutron source.



Here's how it would work: you'd have a nuclear reactor. Inside that nuclear reactor would be a neutron spallation source, which is a material that can produce lots of fast-moving neutrons when you hit it with high energy protons. To get those high energy protons, you attach a particle accelerator to the top of the reactor and turn it on. So now you have a nuclear reactor that can produce its own neutrons outside of the fuel, meaning that a.) it can produce power without going critical for inherent safety,* and b.) you can use the neutrons to transmute fuel waste into much safer fission products, with half lives of about 200 years instead of 200,000.



This type of reactor is called MYRRHA (Multi-purpose hYbrid Research Reactor for High-tech Applications), and the beautiful thing about it is that it produces power without risk of a meltdown while at the same time making spent nuclear fuel safer by several orders of magnitude. Belgium is currently working on a prototype that should be up and running by the early 2020s, and we can only hope that this will help to promote the idea of nuclear power as a cleaner, and safer, alternative source of energy.

SCK CEN, via WaveWatching

*The inherent safety comes from being able to switch off the particle accelerator and instantly stopping the reaction. Since the reaction depends on neutrons from the spallation source, the fuel itself cannot generate enough neutrons to make it to a chain reaction on its own, making a meltdown impossible.

Technological innovation could make nuclear more popular!
 
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Yeah a few hundred billion to make the prototype.
I am sure that the nuclear industry will fund this effort with no taxpayer dollars.
 
Uncle Ferd would like to put one of `em on his pick-em' up truck to make it go faster...

New Research Could Lead to Particle Accelerator on a Chip
September 30, 2013 ~ Scientists from Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory say they’ve developed an innovation that could lead to particle accelerators the size of a computer chip, a development that could have far-reaching implications for science and medicine.
When many think about a particle accelerator device, they may think of units such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. The LHC is enormous - a tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference sitting 175 meters underground. Writing in Nature, the researchers said they used a laser rather than microwaves to accelerate electrons in a nanostructured glass chip smaller than a grain of rice. The scientists said they were able speed up those electrons at a rate 10 times higher than its possible using current conventional technology. "We still have a number of challenges before this technology becomes practical for real-world use, but eventually it would substantially reduce the size and cost of future high-energy particle colliders for exploring the world of fundamental particles and forces," said Joel England, the SLAC physicist who led the experiments.

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Particle accelerator on a nanostructured glass chip is smaller than a grain of rice.

The findings could lead to miniature, compact accelerators as well x-ray devices that could be used in a variety of applications such as security scanning, medical imaging for hospitals, materials science and biology research. The innovation could also lead to medical treatment such as particle therapy that uses accelerated protons, neutrons, or positive ions to treat cancer or improve medical care for people injured in combat. Not only would the new micro-accelerators be a lot smaller is size, said the scientists, the technology could also be cost effective since commercial lasers could be used and low-cost, mass-production techniques could be employed in building the units. The researchers think their findings could make way for new generations of "tabletop accelerators.”

However, the researchers have some fundamental issues they need to address first. To conduct their “accelerator-on-a-chip” experiments, the scientists first had to speed up electrons to near the speed of light by using a conventional accelerator such as SLAC's 3.22 kilometer-long linear accelerator in California. After getting up to light-speed, the electrons were then focused into a tiny channel within a glass chip that’s only about a half-micron-high and a half millimeter long in size.

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The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's linear particle accelerator consists of 3.22 kilometers of copper cavities.

In order to create a real tabletop accelerator, the scientists say they will first need to come up with a much more compact device to get those electrons up to light-speed before they enter a small accelerator. Once they can solve that problem, the scientists said their new mini-accelerator would not only be able to accelerate particles as powerfully as SLAC's large linear accelerator in just about 30 meters, but would be able to deliver a million more electron pulses per second as well. That could result in a unit that is not only as powerful as the mammoth accelerators, but perhaps even more so.

New Research Could Lead to Particle Accelerator on a Chip
 
Whoever wrote this article is sadly under-informed. There currently exists a repository for spent nuclear fuel in New Mexico, at a facility called WIPP. It has more than enough space for all the fuel we have accumulated and will produce for thousands of years, and it is for all practical purposes, secure and safe enough to last forever (couple hundred thousand years at least). It is a huge underground salt deposit, which has been carved out to create underground storage areas. And unlike in Nevada, the locals are keen to have it used to store spent fuel.

Furthermore funding is not a problem, since the utilities who produce nuclear power have been collecting and paying a surcharge for a federal storage repository for decades, and the money is just sitting there. It was initially used to prepare Yucca Mountain, which has since been abandoned.

There will be a lot of political bullshit when Congress finally tackles the details. The spent fuel is currently stored right at the nuclear power plants and will have to be transported to WIPP (imagine protesters lying down on the road to prevent passage of the fuel-bearing casks), but this is one problem (what to do with spent fuel, aka "Nuclear Waste") that has already been solved.

Carry on.
 

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