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Chemists have found a new use for the waste product of nuclear power - transforming an unused stockpile into a versatile compound which could be used to create valuable commodity chemicals as well as new energy sources.
Depleted uranium (DU) is a radioactive by-product from the process used to create nuclear energy. Many fear the health risks from DU, as it is either stored in expensive facilities or used to manufacture controversial armour-piercing missiles.
But, in a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Professor Geoff Cloke, Professor Richard Layfield and Dr Nikolaos Tsoureas, all at the University of Sussex, have revealed that DU could, in fact, be more useful than we might think.
By using a catalyst which contains depleted uranium, the researchers have managed to convert ethylene (an alkene used to make plastic) into ethane (an alkane used to produce a number of other compounds including ethanol).
Their work is a breakthrough that could help reduce the heavy burden of large-scale storage of DU, and lead to the transformation of more complicated alkenes.
Prof Layfield said: "The ability to convert alkenes into alkanes is an important chemical reaction that means we may be able to take simple molecules and upgrade them into valuable commodity chemicals, like hydrogenated oils and petrochemicals which can be used as an energy source.
"The fact that we can use depleted uranium to do this provides proof that we don't need to be afraid of it as it might actually be very useful for us."
Journal Reference:
Nikolaos Tsoureas, Laurent Maron, Alexander F. R. Kilpatrick, Richard A. Layfield, F. Geoffrey N. Cloke. Ethene Activation and Catalytic Hydrogenation by a Low-Valent Uranium Pentalene Complex. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2019; 142 (1): 89 DOI: 10.1021/jacs.9b11929
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday January 13 2020, @03:40AM (16 children)
Nuclear waste has almost nothing to do with depleted uranium. https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html [whatisnuclear.com]
Nuclear waste is highly radioactive spent reactor fuel.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @03:45AM (15 children)
If it is highly radioactive that means it is still fuel. There is just cheaper fuel around to use... for now. But I guarantee you there are groups getting paid to accumulate this nuclear "waste" and lobbying for laws to prevent new mining of uranium/plutonium/etc.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday January 13 2020, @08:55AM (11 children)
Wrong. It is nuclear fuel if you can cause a chain reaction. If it is merely radioactive, no matter how highly, then it is not usable as nuclear fuel.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @09:51AM (4 children)
If it heats something up it can be used as fuel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @01:31PM (3 children)
True, but it doesn't head high enough ... to produce electricity you need a big temperature delta, if it is too small, it will not be useful... specially if you then have to take care of the radioactive problem
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday January 13 2020, @03:44PM (2 children)
Not at all radiothermal batteries are a wonderful source of long-term power from non-fissile radioactive material. What they're not is a *large* source of such power. There is a trade-off to be made between longevity and power output (more radioactive material produces more power for a shorter time), but anything that produced power on the scale of a power plant would likely be to large, costly, dangerous, and short-lived to be even worth considering. Work great for remote lighthouses, space probes, etc. though.
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday January 13 2020, @09:11PM (1 child)
My understanding is that nuclear waste also has a tendency to be chemically very active.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday January 14 2020, @02:16AM
Probably so - a whole bunch of newly created atoms sitting around in a completely (chemically) unnatural deposit? That's probably about as chemically volatile a state as those atoms will ever be in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @12:15PM (3 children)
Then why are we putting all this non-fuel to be a fuel in nuclear reactors?? Hmm???
Little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It allows you to get in trouble but you don't know enough to get yourself out of that trouble.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @01:49PM (2 children)
i agree.
nuclear waste is man made thru fission or irradiation, for example neutron bombardment.
call "depleted" uranium a form of nuclear waste is wrong in the sense that it waters down the seriousness of nuclear waste.
so called "depleted uranium" is just regular uranium from the mine that has been subjected to a seperation process to remove the more radioactif isotope of uranium which is then use in a regular non heavy water reactor to make lots of radiation, some steam and "once thru" electricity.
obviously it is furthermore a mistake to call "depleted" uranium radioactif waste because it is acctually less radioactif then the original mined ore. this just servers to muddle the water.
and ofc there are rather huge amounts of uranium from the seperation process (on top of regular tailings from mining works) and there are some fears, maybe, that some genius and evil hacker finds a design and assembly that turns golf clubs into a city leveling shovel...?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @03:31PM (1 child)
Uranium ore is depleted of U-235 isotopes. Then we have a game of telephone with sales guys or a few generals and you end up with "this is depleted uranium".... akin of some people calling "high blood pressure" just "high blood", which is a ridicules shortening of the correct expression.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday January 13 2020, @04:13PM
And spent fuel rods have more U-235 than depleted uranium. Our current PWR reactor designs don't burn the fuel terribly efficiently.
The problem is the spent rods also have a lot of other isotopes in them which make them a pain to deal with, so they end up sitting in pools near reactors.
If we made use of breeder reactors, we could make use of these spent fuel rods and put them to work. Currently it is cheaper and more politically acceptable to just let them sit.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Informative) by Muad'Dave on Monday January 13 2020, @01:41PM (1 child)
You do not need a chain reaction [wikipedia.org] to make use of nuclear fuel. [csmonitor.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @03:52PM
Right, only with specific designs.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday January 13 2020, @04:08PM (2 children)
>If it is highly radioactive that means it is still fuel.
Actually, no. Most nuclear fuel is not appreciably radioactive, it's the fission products created by the reaction (the waste) that are radioactive, and they're pretty reliably not fissile, so can't be used as nuclear fuel. They can be used in far lower power radiothermal batteries and the like, .
There is a related issue though that you might be thinking of: most nuclear "waste" is in fact still perfectly good fuel - most modern reactors only use about 5-10% of the fuel before the waste products poison the reaction so badly that the fuel can no longer sustain a chain reaction and needs to be replaced. In a sane world that fuel would be reprocessed, extracting the 5-10% of short-lived highly radioactive waste for disposal, and sending the rest back to be re-used in the reactor as perfectly good fuel. It's a dangerous and expensive process, but was actually standard in the early days of nuclear power, before advances in uranium mining and refining technologies made producing fresh fuel substantially cheaper than reprocessing. *
Which gets us to the current situation - rather than just sequestering short-lived, highly radioactive waste that would be safe to handle within a few centuries, we're storing it thoroughly mixed with 10x as much fission fuel, which fissions in response to some of the radiation, producing fresh waste products in a process that will ensure it remains dangerously radioactive for millions of years. But we do intentionally store the "waste" in ways that will make it relatively easy for our descendants to extract and reprocess it somewhere down the line...aside from the ridiculous radiation levels at least.
* Alternatively it's possible to build reactors that "burn" (almost) all the fuel in a single pass, drastically reducing the amount of reprocessing needed to only dispose of actual waste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 13 2020, @04:39PM (1 child)
Actually, yes. If it is meaningfully radioactive (enough to be dangerous) then it is a possible source of energy, ie fuel.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday January 13 2020, @04:58PM
Not nuclear (fission or fusion) fuel though. And the energy that can be extracted from it is almost nonexistent compared to what was available in the original fuel. Nobody is going to be shutting down uranium mining in favor of converting radiation from waste into energy - all the waste produced by the entire world to date probably doesn't produce as much power as a single decent-sized fission reactor. Not to mention most of the radioactivity disappears quickly - within a few decades you'd only be getting a fraction of the power it's releasing today.