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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday May 05 2020, @05:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the Not-in-my-back-yard dept.

One of the issues involving nuclear power has been what to do with the waste materials. What if there was a way to not only convert the problematic materials into a safer storage form, but also enable that same storage form to be used as fuel in newer nuclear power generators? Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?
That may have changed:
https://phys.org/news/2020-05-reveals-single-step-strategy-recycling-nuclear.html

I would prefer more 'green' sources of energy production, but this is something that may be useful to help that along, making coal and petroleum energy production a part of history.

Journal Reference
Jeffrey D. Einkauf, Jonathan D. Burns. Recovery of Oxidized Actinides, Np(VI), Pu(VI), and Am(VI), from Cocrystallized Uranyl Nitrate Hexahydrate: A Single Technology Approach to Used Nuclear Fuel Recycling, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research (DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.0c00381)


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Tuesday May 05 2020, @09:14PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Tuesday May 05 2020, @09:14PM (#990868)

    A better alternative to finding ways to recycle/safely store all those byproducts is to use a different nuclear plant style and fuel that doesn't produce them in the first place.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power [wikipedia.org]

    Thorium reactors are expected to produce multiple orders of magnitude less problematic waste than uranium/plutonium reactors, and the waste is does produce would have half lives measured in decades, not millenia. They would use a fuel that's more abundant and easier to mine, and works using common isotopes, not rare ones that have to be separated out at great cost. They are expected to be considerably less prone to meltdown and easier to control in runaway situations.

    There are multiple engineering challenges still required to be solved for thorium-based reactors, but there is a lot of promise. They were hamstrung by "lack of interest" in the early days of nuclear power during the cold war, since they couldn't produce weapons-grade material as a byproduct. But as a way forward, I'd advocate more research on thorium and decomissioning uranium reactors as a better long-term strategy than investing heavily in making the waste products of uranium reactors marginally safer. Not that we can't do both - we have a bunch of these waste products already and we need to do SOMETHING with them. But the next breakthrough in nuclear will hopefully be "not uranium" rather than "slightly safer uranium"

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