Superficially, it sounds like a really bad idea to shoot a laser on nuclear waste. 🙃
Ya it does sound like what a bond villain would do.
99% chance of safely destroying nuclear waste
1% chance of creating Nuclear Man from Superman 4
Lasers are the new /dev/null
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The reality is that there are no credible alternatives to nuclear especially given the time frame we have to act. Germany closed down all their nuclear plants in favor of renewables and the end result was that they just started using more fossil fuels.
Germany closed down all their nuclear plants
That’s wrong: 3 plants are still running (probably) until the end of this year.
the end result was that they just started using more fossil fuels.
This is true, but the reason isn’t the lack of alternatives but incompetent and corrupt state and federal government. They sabotaged the domestic solar sector, they made running private (roof-) solar plants unnecessarily complicated, they made building new (on-shore) wind parks basically impossible and they blocked the extension of the electrical grid. (And thats just the stuff I remember from the top of my head)
This is true, but the reason isn’t the lack of alternatives but incompetent and corrupt state and federal government.
That may be, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have a short window to move off fossils and renewables aren’t being deployed at the scale that’s necessary.
Also worth noting that the blades from wind turbines have a relatively short lifecycle and need to be constantly replaced which itself contributes to the problem https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-06/wind-turbine-blades
Energy production has to be looked at in a holistic sense of total inputs and outputs.
Is it credible? If it were 1980 again, I’d certainly agree with you. But given the long lead times just to get a new plant up and running, can it make any difference now? At least in the US, it’s something like 30 years from the day that everyone agrees to do it to the day it lights up the first light bulb. My understanding is that it’s a similar timeframe in Europe.
And for that matter, it’s not even clear that there is the capacity to build significant numbers… the pressure vessel components are only built in two places on our planet, and I wouldn’t even want to know how difficult it’d be to build more such factories.
It’s absolutely credible. China’s committing to building 150 reactors in the next 15 years. That’s going to do more for climate change than anything that’s been done today.
good, developing thorium would be nice also
Also being tested now, big advantage of thorium reactors is that they use molten salt instead of water. This means you don’t have to build them next to large bodies of water for cooling, and in case of a shutdown the salt solidifies precluding the problems with radioactive leaks. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-w
will these 150 be thorium based ?
( 2nd ref., yours is paywalled )possible answer :
( source )
(…) the international Nuclear Energy Agency predicts that the thorium cycle will never be commercially viable while uranium is available in abundance—a situation which may persist “in the coming decades”.I suspect the ability to build thorium reactors away from large water sources may play a role as well as availability. My understanding is that’s the main reason China is experimenting with them. However, I’m guessing the 150 proposed reactors will be uranium based since it’s mature technology.
Can someone please explain the alleged physics of this? I can’t tell if it’s pseudoscience nonsense or genius.
If the latter, is this exothermic? By fast-burning these isotopes, won’t you release alot of energy too? Or is the laser just that costly that it’s net negative?
( published 2019-04-04 )
in theory at least it's okay :
CPA produces high-intensity, super-short optical pulses that pack a tremendous amount of power (…)
This capability is what Mourou hopes give CPA a chance of neutralizing nuclear waste, (…)Yet, it is not efficient :
Rodney C. Ewing of Stanford tells Bloomberg, “I can imagine that the physics might work, but the transmutation of high-level nuclear waste requires a number of challenging steps, such as the separation of individual radionuclides, the fabrication of targets on a large scale, and finally, their irradiation and disposal.”
Somehow doubt that Nobel prize winner is peddling pseudoscience. The research is legit and has been published in Journal of Physics https://www.science.org/content/article/lasers-defuse-nuclear-waste
I’d doubt it too, but when the article does nothing to describe how it works it sounds like pseudoscience to me. Thanks for the link.
Anyone have a realistic estimation of how much nuclear ressources are know to ne availableandd if humanity as a whole switched toita as the main energy production, how much time can it buy us ? I’m from France, a country with a huge amount of nuclear power, and I don’t know if such a strategy would be viable worldwide, or is it just egoistic to promote it in a nation that have the choice ?
some numbers about uranium https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html
Some numbers about thorium https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium.aspx
There are around 6.3 million tons of thorium around, and it’s estimated that 1 tonne produces roughly 1GWe-yr.
Thank you !
from Wikipedia :
In 2011 a group of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology assessed thorium-based power as “a 1000+ year solution or a quality low-carbon bridge to truly sustainable energy sources solving a huge portion of mankind’s negative environmental impact.”Thank you !
