DOE plans to "burn-up" nuclear waste

["Jacobus, John (OD)" <JJacobus@ors.od.nih.gov>]

I saw this in passing.  It looks like DOE is looking for another mission.  Can
one assume that the politics in the use of plutonium will be a "hurdle?"

-- John 

-----Original Message-----
From: ArcaMax [mailto:ezines@arcamax.com] 
Sent: March 14, 2000 12:27 AM
To: Jacobus, John (OD)
Subject: ArcaMax Science News for March 14, 2000
. . .

   BURNING NEPTUNIUM, AND AMERICIUM, TOO
   By 2015, according to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S.  nuclear 
power industry will have created about 70,000 tons of high-level nuclear 
waste. One expensive, yet attractive way of treating it would be to 
transform much of it, using "accelerated transmutation of wastes," or ATW. 
ATW could potentially take that amount of uranium, plutonium, americium, 
neptunium and curium, and convert it into a small amount that needs 
disposal, and much more material that is stable. 95 percent of reactor 
waste is uranium, which does not require long-term storage. Using a 
waste-burner powered by the plutonium and containing a proton beam, the 
more radioactive parts of the waste would capture neutrons and be converted 
into stable, non-hazardous materials, the lab says. And the weapons-grade 
plutonium would be destroyed in the process, too. Los Alamos would like to 
create a prototype facility in the next five years, if cost and other 
hurdles can be overcome.
. . .
--
Copyright 2000 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
--


"Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat
them. " 
Adlai Stevenson

John Jacobus, MS
Health Physicist
National Institutes of Health
Radiation Safety Branch, Building 21
21 Wilson Drive, MSC 6780
Bethesda, MD  20892-6780
Phone: 301-496-5774      Fax: 301-496-3544
jjacobus@exchange.nih.gov (W)
jenday1@email.msn.com (H)
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