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Re: DOE plans to "burn-up" nuclear waste

At 07:01 03/14/2000 Tuesday, you wrote:
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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The ATW (Accelerator Transmutation of  Waste) seems to have caused so much merriment among people uninformed about it, that a few references to the now-ongoing work might help to clear up some misunderstandings.
        First, the idea has been around for a long time: indeed, when LANSCE (then called LAMPF) first was turned on in the 1970s, I was only one of the visiting faculty who tried to promote a few related experiments.
        Second, there was a burst of interest in the mid 1980s, as someone pointed out. When future waste disposal sites appear to be plentiful and cheap, there isn't much enthusiasm for devising a replacement. Moreover, the rapid demise of the USSR was not forseen, and the associated need to literally destroy a lot of fissile material.
The current design can be found in a number of documents from Los Alamos National Laboratory, in a Report to Congress dated September 1999," A roadmap for developing ATW Technology " ( the Accelerator Technology section is LA-UR-99-3225; the more comprehensive document is DOE/RW-0519, October, 1999; both are available on the web). There are a lot of very competent people working on this project.

The present reference design is as follows:

        Two (approximately 1 GeV accelerators, probably linear) would each drive four subcritical assemblies, each of the four at a  level of 840 MW th. At an assumed thermal-electric efficiency of 0.38, for a total of 2554 MWe of power. The accelerators require a total of 380 MWe to operate, so 2174 MWe can be sent to the grid.

For those unfamiliar with recent developments in accelerator technology, new designs make it possible to produce and handle beam powers of up to 1 GWe without excessive component activation (not required here) so the major technical difficulty is in the design of the "burners" and the radiochemistry of the partially transmuted waste. But the idea is not new ; indeed , when the first model of LAMPF was being designed at Yale (1960-64),  it was determined that a subcritical assembly could be installed at the beam stop that would produce sufficient power to run the accelerator (not done because it was obvious that there would be lots of cheap electrical power for a long time).

The accelerator structure will cost more than a reactor to do the same thing. But it can be built without all the paperwork that a new reactor requires (it is not subject to NRC regulation) and onre really can close it off with a switch. The assemblies will of course remain highly radioactive but that is what one can expect. It is somewhat surprising that there is so little enthusiasm shown for this technology.
H.B. Knowles, PhD, Physics Consulting
4030 Hillcrest Rd, El Sobrante, CA 94803
Phone (510)758-5449
Fax (510) 758-5508
hbknowls@ix.netcom.com (until 1/31/00)
hbknowles@hbknowles.com (new)
<www.hbknowles.com>