[ 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

[stewart farber]

Hello all,

The posting by Fred Dawson [see below] with the link to New Scientist 
magazine brings up a rather obvious and basic way in which radioactive decay 
[for the longest lived nuclides residual from a first pass thru a nuclear 
reactor] can be "hurried" which is completly non-debatable. It's just a 
matter of perspective.

Namely, if the spent fuel from the first cycle of power generation is 
reprocessed and the residual long-lived U-235 [and U-238] and Pu-239 is 
removed from the spent fuel, and passed thru subsequent power generation 
cycles, the longest lived radionuclides in nuclear waste  will be transmuted 
into much shorter-lived breakdown products, mainly Sr-90 and Cs-137.

So one can certainly view the second, and subsequent power generation cycles 
in conventional reactors as simply the operation of nuclear reactors we can 
reasonably term "transmutation reactors" vs. power reactors, which happen to 
use reprocessed fuel derived fissile material. The not insignificant amount 
of electricity from these "transmutation reactors"  is merely a modest 
side-benefit :-) of huge ecomonic benefit to society, while reducing the 
issue of long-term nuclear waste storage dramatically in terms of the time 
span of concern, and volume of the waste, in managing the nuclear waste 
products.

The "transmutation reactor"  approach requires no "New Science" and saves 
cooling nuclear waste to absolute zero as suggested should the claimed 
technique work in some unexpected way to speed up nuclear decay. I'd hate to 
see the energy bill for cooling thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel to 
absolute zero!!!

Stewart Farber, MS Public Health
[203] 367-0791 [office]


============================================
From: "Fred Dawson" <fd003f0606 at blueyonder.co.uk>
writes [in part]:

To: <srp-uk at yahoogroups.com>; <radsafe at radlab.nl>
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2006 1:13 PM



> 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
>
............... 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.
> 



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