🚀 go-pugleaf

>[Obviously off-topic newsgroups removed.]

Jim Trek  <progress@frontiernet.net> wrote:
}
} 4.  What is the status of conversion of nuclear waste to
} non-radioactive products?

bunn@pac2.berkeley.edu writes:
>
>I'll let someone else take that one.

 Slow.  ;-)  

 The current approach is to wait, and along the way try to put that 
 waste in a form where it is least likely to migrate and cause trouble. 
 Mostly that means, leave it where it is, but there is some progress 
 on "WIPP" to "glassify" some of that waste and store it in tunnels 
 under Yucca mountain at the Nevada test site.  All that does is to 
 (hopefully) isolated the waste, it does not make it non-radioactive. 

 There are proposals (called "accelerator driven transmutation of 
 nuclear waste" for obvious reasons) that would use a high current 
 accelerator similar to the 0.8 GeV machine at Los Alamos to make 
 lots of high energy neutrons, and use those neutrons to drive various 
 fission and fragmentation reactions on the most problematic waste 
 (the actinides) and make electricity at the same time. 

 Those are some ways off in the future.

-- 
 James A. Carr   <jac@scri.fsu.edu>     | Commercial e-mail is _NOT_ 
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