[ RadSafe ] There's nothing you can do to hurry radioactive decay, the textbooks will tell you, but New Scientist meets a physicist who begs to differ

[Fred Dawson]

There's nothing you can do to hurry radioactive decay, the textbooks will 
tell you, but New Scientist meets a physicist who begs to differ
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19225741.100-halflife-heresy-accelerating-radioactive-decay.html

FOR ALL its eureka moments, science has taught us many unpalatable lessons 
about what we are powerless to do. We can't dim the sun to remedy droughts 
or global warming. We can't stave off the ravages of time to live for 
thousands of years. And there's little we can do about radioactive waste 
from nuclear reactors that will be a health hazard for generations to come. 
Radioactivity cannot be tamed; all we can do is bundle the waste somewhere 
safe and wait for it to decay away. So it takes some nerve to say otherwise, 
and suggest that there are, after all, ways to speed up radioactive decay.

Yet that is exactly what Claus Rolfs, a physicist at the Ruhr University in 
Bochum, Germany, is doing. His dramatic - and controversial - claim is that 
by encasing certain radioisotopes in metal and chilling them close to 
absolute zero, it ought ...

Fred Dawson

fwp_dawson at hotmail.com