[ 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

[John R Johnson]

Stewart et al

The term "long-term nuclear waste" is Technically Enhanced Naturally
Occurring Radioactive Material, and is discussed in detail in the soon
(hopefully) to be published ANSI Standard N13.53.

Jean-Claude may be able to update us.

John




-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl [mailto:radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl]On
Behalf Of stewart farber
Sent: October 24, 2006 10:08 AM
To: radsafe at radlab.nl; srp-uk at yahoogroups.com; Fred Dawson
Subject: Re: [ 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


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-her
esy-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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