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Breaking the Nuclear Waste Logjam
| Article
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10562 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
2,844 Words |
| Author
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Daniel Gibson
Daniel Gibson writes from Santa Fe, New Mexico, about issues
related to science and the environment. |
Particle accelerators have been around for several decades, but today researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico are investigating a new generation of accelerators that could offer solutions to several vexing problems facing mankind. Perhaps most importantly, these new accelerators might help in the disposal of the mountains of nuclear waste created through 40 years of nuclear weapons production and energy generation.
In addition, there is a chance they could provide a significant new method of generating electricity both from nuclear wastes and from uranium ore. These accelerators also may assume an important role in nuclear weapons disarmament programs. Finally, they might also offer a new means of producing a radioactive gas, tritium, to be used in new nuclear warheads.
Radioactive waste has been called the "ultimate pollution." Produced in massive quantities, deadly in microscopic amounts, and dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, it has proven to be the Achilles' heel of nuclear energy.
Work is now under way at LANL and at other national research laboratories on ways to "neutralize" radioactive wastes through a process called "transmutation." If this process is successful, it could have significant implications for dealing with nuclear wastes.
Supporters of transmutation believe it could provide an alternative to the plan adopted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for disposal of the nation's high-level (most dangerous) radioactive wastes. DOE favors deep geologic disposal of high deep geologic disposal of high level wastes in man-made repositories, such as the proposed Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada. There is public concern, however, that these underground repositories may not function as designed over the tens of thousands of years required to sequester their toxic contents from the biosphere. Geologic repositories, critics say, could be infiltrated by water, cracked open in earthquakes, blown apart by volcanic eruptions, or breached by unwitting human beings thousands of years in the future.
Essentially, transmutation is a contemporary twist on the age-old alchemical idea of transforming one element into another in this case radioactive wastes into nonradioactive elements or into elements with much shorter radioactive life spans. The elements that remained radioactive would still require isolation, but the storage time would be on the order of several hundred years instead of tens of
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