I'm a practicing nuclear physicist and do work on gamma ray interactions with actinides. It's possible i'm missing something important, but i think this article is an utter mess and was clearly written by someone with absolutely no understanding of what they are saying. Attempting to learn anything from this article will be counterproductive.
Here is an explanation of chirped pulse amplification: https://www.rp-photonics.com/chirped_pulse_amplification.htm...
This technique is for producing optical photons, which will have less than 10 ev of energy. In the same way that you can't focus the sun's light to a point that gets hotter than the surface of the sun (violates second law of thermodynamics), it isn't obvious how low energy laser pulses can be useful for this. The article offers no explanation whatsoever. Maybe the electric field across the nucleus can be made strong enough to induce scission?
In general, if you want to interact with the nucleus you need photons on the order of 1 Mev or more, whose wavelengths are comparable to the size of the nucleus. These are gamma rays, which are not optical photons. There are ways to boost optical photons to those energies (like inverse compton scattering), but the article says nothing about that either. I would think inverse compton scattering of a chirped pulse from an electron packet in an accelerator will completely destroy the sharp timing and reflect the distribution of the electrons instead.
While I was a graduate student at UT Austin, I attended a talk By Dr. C.P.J. Barty, Chief Technology Officer for the National Ignition Facility and Photon Science Directorate at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, titled “Extreme Gamma-ray Sources and the Dawn of Nuclear Photonics”. It was quite fascinating. The basic idea is to use a linear accelerator to accelerate packets of electrons to relativistic speeds, and then to interact those packets with an infrared laser pulse (inside the laser cavity), to generate tunable extreme Gamma-ray laser pulses. They were able to demonstrate burning of nuclear waste products, as well as distinguishing between different elemental isotopes based on their absorption.
I haven't heard anything about the project since, but it sounded like a promising approach for burning nuclear waste, particularly when using a superconducting accelerator to do energy recycling.
Mourou's Nobel lecture [1] has brief explanation of the envisioned process. The idea is to use intense laser pulses to accelerate deuterium ions into a tritium target. The deuterium-tritium fusion then generates high-energy neutrons that can transmutate nuclei.
This is probably not impossible, but I have doubts if this could be implemented efficiently at scale.
Doing dt fusion to make neutrons for other purposes is a pretty common technique in general. It sounds like the twist is using lasers to provide the energy instead of a traditional accelerator. Commercial neutron generators that exist now can approach fluxes comparable to that in small reactors, but the main difference is the energy distribution. Reactors are much more low-energy dominated so it's true that other reactions can become accessible with a high energy quasi monoenergetic source. However, i think we are still missing orders of magnitude of capability before it could become feasible. On top of that, laser based facilities like NIF are probably the most expensive and slowest-repeating way to generate neutrons right now. Plus when you make that many neutrons alot of other stuff will end up getting activated and pottentially become waste itself.
Personally i think there also need to be some nuclear chemistry advances to be able to efficiently and cleanly separate isotopes before they can be transmuted. There is some neat work being done on this by people at FRIB trying to extract medical isotopes etc from the beam dump.
I don't think it's correct to think of a laser as a source in some thermal equilibrium. "Concentrating temperature" passively from sources in thermal equilibrium is forbidden, but there's nothing preventing "concentrating power".
Pulsed lasers bring material interactions into a highly non-linear regime - photon intensity is so high that multiple photon absorption is common. In the typical nuclear decay regime you are concerned with single photon absorption, and the gamma ray intuition is correct. There are also a number of approaches where various targets hit with ultrafast lasers produce controllable flux of gamma rays which are used in downstream experimentation.
You could, you know, read a little more, especially for physics that is outside your scope of study. Just the fact that the person in the article has a Nobel Prize should be enough for you to take a moment to google a little and learn about physics that you might simply not be aware of.
CPA with Ti-Sapphire produces photons that are optical (near-IR specifically, usually 800nm) but it is their interaction with matter, usually solid density matter that is how you achieve that causes such violent reactions, it is in the so-called "laser-plasma interaction," specifically that the material you shoot with ultra-short laser pulses is immediately ionized into a plasma and that light matter interaction leads to all sorts of energetic by-products, including (easily) MeV scale radiation. Now the radiation does not have necessarily good beam qualities, which is part of the current focus of research, but it does happen and it is easy to reach MeV scale.
A good example of how different this regime is that if you're sharp yet ignorant you might have balked at the idea of it being a plasma given near-IR photons should not be able to ionize matter to a decent degree. The reality though is these interactions are not baby's first "single-photon" tree-level diagram quantum interactions, instead the intensity is high enough you model the ionization interaction as a so-called "many photon ionization" process, where you either say many photons pile on-top of each other (which has issues in accuracy honestly) or better, the external field is strong enough it's on scale with the coulombic field at the bound electron's radius that it distorts the field seen by the electron leading to ionization[0], similar to the Stark effect but with an AC field instead of a DC field.
EDIT:re-reading the "hotter than the sun" comment, it looks like I misread it and apologize, it's not as bad as I read it. Basically, think about the natural timescale of this system and realize that the timescale needed to produce gamma rays is pretty short.
Ok, I won't bore you with figuring it out yourself, basically the whole intense interaction before material recombines is at longest a few hundred picoseconds, in fact, the electron acceleration that is MeV+ that then you can convert into x-rays happens on the optical wavelength timescale (that, yes 3fs is the natural timescale! at least for the electrons). So, you can in fact achieve KeV+ plasma "temperatures" for very short periods by focusing the energy of a plasma, ~joule or so, into small spaces (again, natural space scale is laser wavelength, although it's really the laser spot here, so say 100 wavelengths so about 10s of microns) in a short time (picoseconds) you easily achieve yes astrophysical scale temperatures for very short times and small scales--but enough to produce high energy particles and even model astrophysical phenomena! In fact it's a grant writing/masturbatory phrase we use but these systems have even been used to do so-called "laboratory astrophysics[1]" that is model astrophysical phenomena in the lab by creating plasma conditions that you can actually probe experimentally. Again, since we're all laser physicists, the fact the plasmas last picoseconds or nanoseconds isn't a problem because we use the same optical systems that create the matter to probe them that can probe the system on the picosecond scale.
One last note, this is the entire premise of inertial conefinement fusion, you create stellar core pressures and temperatures in a ~mm hohlraum for a very short time, nanoseconds, but that is enough to generate fusion conditions for the deuterium which is what matters. Ditto for creating plasma conditions for radiation generation although that's even shorter, again femto to picoseconds.
Okay well I am not a particle physicist, but I did design and build laser plasma ablation devices, and I will echo the skepticism of the particle physicist.
> easy to reach MeV scale
Thermal photons in MeV!? Whoa. Going to need a citation on that one.
Yikes indeed! with the headline, I was thinking that this was some variant of the National Ignition facility, trying to heat up samples enough to break the nucleii... but yeah, without massive intensities like at the NIF I don't wee how optical photons would even be noticed by the heavy nucleii.
I'd hope there's more to it that the journalist just failed to catch...
"Transmutation prospect of long-lived nuclear waste induced
by high-charge electron beam from laser plasma accelerator"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05770
"Generic method to assess transmutation feasibility for nuclear waste treatment and application to irradiated graphite"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02623
Could superconducting diamonds or atomic batteries or graphene sheets for filtration be made from any remaining carbon and peanut butter under pressure? What can be made from brine with e.g. lasers?
The first 2 papers indicated by you refer indeed to the same thing as the article that started this thread, but they explain the possible method.
The principle is very similar with the sources of deep ultraviolet light used for photolithography. The laser pulses are used to produce hot plasma and to accelerate the electrons from plasma, which hit then a target, like in the traditional X-ray tubes. The interaction of the accelerated electrons with the target produces gamma rays. Finally, the gamma rays can be used to transmute the nuclear waste.
There are 2 problems with this approach. As everybody knows, improving the deep UV sources to have an intensity great enough to be usable in the production of integrated circuits took several decades and many billions of dollars.
The gamma ray sources that would be needed for waste treatment are significantly more complex and the output intensity must be much higher, so it is impossible to guess how much time and money would be needed, but certainly much more than for photolithography.
The second much more serious problem is that already mentioned in another post. If these gamma-ray sources would have a global efficiency of 1%, starting from the electrical input power, passing through pump diodes for lasers, then solid-state lasers for pulse generation, then heating plasma, accelerating electrons, radiation from the electron target and finally absorption in the nuclear waste, that would be an amazing achievement.
Actually a global efficiency of less than 1 per ten thousand would be more likely today.
The energy required to transmute all the waste from a nuclear reactor might be of 10% or more of the output energy of the reactor. Multiplied with a factor between 100 and 10000, the result is that a nuclear reactor would not be a net producer of energy, but a huge consumer of energy, making it useless.
A little more realistic would be to not treat all the nuclear waste, but only 1 or a few especially dangerous isotopes, e.g. only the radioactive iodine.
While this would reduce a lot the energy required for transmutation, a lot of additional energy would be needed for the separation of the desired isotopes from the radioactive waste.
Maybe transmuting only the iodine could be done in a distant future with a little less energy than the nuclear reactor produces.
However that would not solve the problem with the storage of the nuclear waste. Consuming a huge amount of energy with the elimination of the iodine would only lessen the danger of what would happen if the storage of the waste would be compromised and the waste would be dispersed into the environment (because the vertebrates extract the iodine from the environment and concentrate it into the thyroid, so radioactive iodine is dangerous even at smaller concentrations than the rest of the waste).
I have looked at the French article quoted in this but neither that one is more explicit.
In the initial article, an allusion is made to what happens if you irradiate nuclear waste with gamma rays, which extract neutrons, or some times protons, from nuclei, transforming the radioactive nuclei into other isotopes with much shorter lifetime.
However, that method does not work for waste treatment, because there is no gamma-ray source of sufficient intensity to treat a macroscopic quantity of waste.
Then the article talks about lasers with record high impulse power, but there is no connection between these 2, no matter how high the intensity of the laser pulse, the frequency of the light is too low to transmute nuclei.
It is true that multi-photon reactions are possible with very high-intensity pulses, but for transforming nuclei about a million photons would have to take part in each reaction. The probability of such a reaction is astronomically low.
Another way to cause reactions that need high-energy photons, by using laser pulses, is like in the deep UV lithography for up-to-date CMOS processes, by producing hot plasma with the laser pulses. However even this method can produce only soft X rays, not the hard gamma rays needed for transmuting nuclear waste.
But there is a much stronger reason why this method cannot be useful, even if it could work.
The nuclear waste nuclei with a long lifetime have such a long lifetime because they have only a small energy excess over stable nuclei.
When you transmute them into nuclei with a short lifetime, those have a much higher energy excess, so you must provide energy for the transmutation.
If this method of treating nuclear waste would be possible and it would be employed, then the global fission reaction from U235 to fission products will be changed, replacing the low-energy products with high-energy products, so the total energy produced by a nuclear reactor, which is the difference between the energy stored in the input fuel and the energy stored in the output products, would be diminished with the value needed for waste treatment, which would be similar in magnitude with the energy produced by the nuclear reactor.
Depending on the exact reactions used for waste treatment, a complex computation of the energy would be needed, but after taking into consideration the very low efficiency of the intermediate devices used, like lasers, it would not be surprising if the energy output of a nuclear reactor would be diminished 10 times or more, making nuclear energy completely noncompetitive.
So, no, this does not have any chance.
What would be a real breakthrough would be if it would be possible to extract energy from a nuclear reaction where the products are non-radioactive, because this would solve the waste problem, while simultaneously providing a maximum energy output.
Unfortunately this is hopeless for fission reactions, because those cannot have unique output products, and among the many possible output nuclei it is certain that some will be radioactive.
This is also hopeless for deuterium or tritium fusion reactions, because those are guaranteed to generate huge amounts of neutrons.
Other more difficult fusion reactions without radioactive output nuclei are theoretically possible, but no practical method to perform them is known yet.
> there is no gamma-ray source of sufficient intensity to treat a macroscopic quantity of waste.
If you get some of the waste to start producing neutrons and gamma rays through stimulated fusion, couldn't you harness those products to speed the decay of other nearby waste atoms? Sure, you might need a moderator, but can you more or less stimulate a sort of chain reaction?
Transmuting the nuclear waste needs energy, it does not produce energy.
Unlike the fission from U235 or Pu239, which starts with high energy nuclei and it produces low-energy radioactive nuclei with long lifetimes, so the difference is produced energy, when transmuting long lifetime nuclei into short lifetime nuclei, you end with nuclei having higher energy.
The difference in energy is obtained from the gamma rays. So the gamma ray source must provide a huge amount of energy, of the order of 1 MeV = 1.6E-13 joule per atom, so of the order 1E14 joule = about 28 GWh per kilogram of treated nuclear waste.
This estimation is very approximate, because the required energy per atom depends a lot on the exact composition of the nuclear waste, but even if it would be 10 times lower for certain isotopes, it would still be a huge amount. After being multiplied by the efficiency of the gamma-ray source it would exceed by much the energy output of the nuclear reactor.
A single gamma photon may indeed cause indirectly more than one nuclear reaction, but the mechanism does not matter. Only the initial and final products matter, which determine the energy consumption for waste treatment.
At the end of the article, it says they want to "shrink the distance a light beam has to travel to transmute atoms by a further 10,000 times". So, which is it: faster or nearer-by?
> I wasted my time reading this article, it explains nothing.
had you previously heard of the idea to process radioactive material this way? That was the point of the article, and they relayed that a physicist with credentials in the relevant area thinks it's a good idea.
I think the article succeeded in its goal, I don't think it aspired to be a physics paper.
>If no solution is found, we're already stuck with some 22,000 cubic meters of long-lasting hazardous waste.
Not trying to be glib, but 20,000 cubic meters isn't a significant amount of space. Obviously this isn't the same as storing paper plates or pillows, but the physical size of it all is something that would fit in a small grocery store. 2,000 m^3 or 2,000,000 m^3, the size of it really isn't the attribute that's the problem.
> 20,000 cubic meters isn't a significant amount of space
20,000 m3 of water is not the same as 20,000 m3 material that is seriously toxic to the cellular bonds that form life in one teaspoon of material.. each teaspoon of material can be further subdivided into .. the air in your lungs, the fresh water that frogs depend on, or the bio-accumulating food chain of vegetable-deer-predator
Most of the material isn’t readily water soluble and a lot of the radiation is alpha particles which aren’t very dangerous. The really dangerous stuff has a half life on the order of minutes/days/months. It’s also hard to breath in the particles unless they’re attached to something like smoke. Uranium miners in the 50s who didn’t smoke had cancer rates no higher than the general population.
Consider the vastly larger quantities of naturally-occurring arsenic, lead, mercury, etc. in the world, and how - in spite of our seeming efforts to expose billions of people to them in their most dangerous forms - they aren't exactly wiping out humanity.
"Although heavy metals are naturally occurring elements that are found throughout the earth’s crust, most environmental contamination and human exposure result from anthropogenic activities such as mining and smelting operations, industrial production and use, and domestic and agricultural use of metals and metal-containing compounds"
why? because previous to life as we know it today, the Earth's geologic evolution included phases that were literally toxic heavy metals-filled oceans, air and land surface. It was only after millennia of "encasement" that basic modern life forms could start to evolve. Modern humans have famously reversed that encasement process, first and foremost with fossil fuel activity.
Ever-more powerful sources of energy are readily found in ever-more powerfully toxic compounds occurring within that encasement, with enriched Uranium as a crown-royalty member of that club. Why do few care? because few have experienced real poisoning, or prolonged poisoning through the reproduction cycle that they know of.
The amount of "powerfully toxic substances" necessary to power the world off of uranium fission is many orders of magnitude lower than whatever we're producing now off of fossil fuels alone. Few should care because in the grand scheme of things mining, refining, and storing spent nuclear fuel is really not a big deal.
> and would never meaningfully interact with humans ever again.
Four years ago, you let your keys sit for a few hours. Where was that? The problem with this half of your statement is that it is entirely unknowable. If you can't remember where your keys were four years ago, what makes you think our species will remember any event occurring within the last 50 years 2000 years from now? 10,000 years from now? 5M years from now?
> If you can't remember where your keys were four years ago, what makes you think our species will remember any event occurring within the last 50 years 2000 years from now?
I also don't remember what I had for breakfast, so by your logic our spieces can't remember an event that happened last week?
Nuclear waste repository is not an event, it's a building - have we ever lost the Pyramids or great wall of China? Has ancient rome dissapeared from the maps?
Nuclear waste is stored underground in solid rock, if civilisations collapses, hunter-gatherers of medieval peasants can't get to it. It is likely that anyone digging kilometers underground into worthless rock probably knows what radiation is.
Radiation sources decrease their radioactivity significantly as they decay. The more radioactive, the more rapidly they decay. Some elements have significant energy in their decay chains, but those also tend to stabilize after awhile or be so valuable it’s pretty ridiculous making them ‘waste’ instead of fuel. They also aren’t a large volume of these wastes. The amount of actual plutonium in this waste is small, for instance.
You can see this even around Chernobyl, where before the recent war it was fine giving tours. The trinity test site has given tours for decades.
I’m not downplaying everything here as being fine - you wouldn’t want to lick it. And, like the area surrounding a lead smelter, maybe don’t do camping trips with the kids or build a house outside Chernobyl for awhile. But if someone builds more houses there in a couple hundred years, it’s VERY unlikely to be a problem.
The scale of the problem is minuscule compared to the scale of mercury poisoning and toxic waste from mining even a tiny fraction of the stuff used for equivalent energy production.
The amount of toxic airborne mercury released from cement production (baking the cement) to build the buildings for the reactors almost certainly has killed more people than any nuclear accidents.
I’m saying the idea that even 100 years from now it will be some kind of dangerous glowing mass is fantasy. Even the elephants foot is likely to be safe to approach with basic safeguards (like washing your hands afterwards) pretty soon.
The story that 10k years from now a society will be wiped out because they dug up some huge ball of nasty nuclear waste is much more likely to be a story about how people built a society in an area around an old lead smelter and all their kids got lead poisoning, or mercury poisoning from built up metallic mercury, or any number of other problems.
The long term dangers tend to get exaggerated by many folks for their own reasons (including the planners for long term retention/storage and politicians), but aren’t really realistic.
Edit: also, unlike my car keys, if the waste IS actually radioactive, it’s easy to find even in microscopic quantities using technology and skills available to any high schooler. It’s VERY unlikely that humanity would forget how to build a cloud chamber detector if this was even a passing concern.
Unlike say dioxin contamination, or any of a dozen types of long lived industrial poisoning/contamination you’ll find near any major population centers or industrial areas literally right now that are a bigger risk.
Your argument, which is, apparently, that radioactive waste becomes inert over time thus it isn't an issue, supported by hyperbolically inflating the alleged original concern to an extinction level event, is flawed (in many ways but also) because not all radioactive waste becomes inert over human timescales. Transuranic waste will still be quite deadly 1000 years from now. No one, anywhere, ever, had any anxiety about nuclear waste causing human extinction. The problem really is as inconsequential to human existence as a large elementary school being built in 3409 on top of a leaking toxic nuclear waste dump and no one noticing until 3430, by which time, over the decades, quite a lot of kids got sick. It's no less horrifying even if the species is not really at risk of anything.
I don’t think I’m the one doing the hyperbole here?
Transuranic waste won’t be as deadly 1000 years from now as it would be today (for the same waste). Any actinides with dangerous enough levels of radiation to kill someone quickly will have notably decayed by then, even if they are still present in detectable quantities. Some of the middlin’ ones will still be around, but they are almost never in notable enough quantities to cause problems unless someone literally eats a significant amount of it directly.
If it is still deadly for someone depends entirely on dose, exposure, composition, and concentration. Same as a chunk of lead, dioxins, PCBs, methyl mercury, non-organic pesticides, etc.
And unlike all those other dangers, it’s pretty easy to detect radioactive waste as….
It’s radioactive.
It’s pretty unlikely it’s going to be a problem big enough to kill any notable number of people AND folks somehow forgot how to detect radiation (you literally can buy a pretty decent Geiger counter on Amazon for $20, or build a cloud chamber yourself), AND no one is doing any of the detecting.
And considering how little actual waste there is compared to the far worse (by real life impact) industrial waste we still produce, this is not the problem it always gets made out to be.
Like in the Chernobyl thread awhile ago where folks where breathlessly talking about how the soldiers were in grave danger from the radiation (which some spikes were notable, but were small spikes), when said soldiers are getting blown up with Javelins, mines, and shot by Ukranians at a level currently several orders of magnitude worse than even the highest theoretical estimation of radiation problems could predict.
Trying to step close enough to the line to make it questionable is part of the fun. Poe's law etc. I suppose on a large forum there will always be someone that misses it, purely stochastically. Happened to me recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30614766#30618068
Can spent nuclear fuel not spontaneously reach criticality (uncontrolled fission) given dense enough storage? Not highly enriched enough? I know weapons-grade uranyl nitrate can.
It is not only the density, but also the purity of Uranium which makes a difference. Weapons grade uranium is 99.3% pure U235 or more by mass. Reactor grade uranium could be between 90-94% at most (the last I had read). It isn't worth economically to enrich further. If the purpose is to reach sustained criticality, this purity is enough to heat the fuel-rods.
Although it may not seem a lot, the 6% impurity is enough to act as a neutron damper (for runaway chain reactions). Consequently, you need an order or two higher density with reactor grade Uranium to make it go supercritical & have uncontrolled fission - something that does not happen in normal circumstances.
These numbers are way off. Power reactors run with a few percent enrichment at most. 90% enrichment is deep in weapons territory.
Reactors use slow neutrons that have thermalized in moderators. Due to the much higher fission cross section at low neutron velocities, they reach criticality at much lower 235U densities compared to nuclear weapons. In fact, this is a serious danger in nuclear fuel production. In 1999 there was a criticality accident in a nuclear fuel production facility in Japan that killed two workers [1].
Your numbers appear to be way off. Commercial reactor grade Uranium is enriched to less than 20% (typically about 5%) while weapons grade Uranium is closer to 90% (the first U-235 bomb was enriched to 80%). Some specialized reactors do use highly enriched Uranium however.
Yes, my bad. I confused this with something I read a long while back (~10Y). Energy production uses enrichment in ~20% range. Thank you for generously correcting my answer. As for a follow-up, I genuinely mixed up with something on the general ballpark of '90-94%' -> Is it something about Thorium-based breeder reactors? What kind of processes use high enrichment in this range
Most waste is actually from other things, not fuel. Anything your nuclear material comes into contact with is treated as waste. But obviously due to this there's drastically different levels of radioactivity in waste (but everyone acts like it's all fuel waste)
Very much so, spent fuel contains almost as much uranium and in the same U235:U238 ratio as natural uranium it doesn’t need any special handling on it’s own. The issue is everything else in the fuel.
After chemical separating the uranium you still have all the other nasty bits that make nuclear waste such an issue to deal with. Plus all the contaminated machinery you used to do the repressing.
Not the way it’s normally described, U238 is relatively worthless outside of being used in bullets etc.
What we currently care about is the 235 which is actually burned up by the reactor down to close to the ratio in natural fuel. Reprocessing for current designs would result in most of the fuel being discarded as depleted uranium the same way the normal enrichment process works.
The actual way around this is to directly use natural uranium without enrichment via CANDU or similar design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor No need for enrichment or reprocessing.
Molten salt fuel cycles where waste products may be separated from the liquid fuel through more conventional chemical separation methods seem like a simpler solution. It's too bad about the negative public view on nuclear. I think next gen fission power research deserves greater funding.
I feel like I've posted this comment too many times already but here goes....
Materials with long half lives are LESS radioactive than those with short half lives. Things with short half lives are what we make bombs out of and what fuel these reactors (EDIT: This is wrong, read the comment chain). All materials have a half life (probably/maybe, looking at you protons[2]), the longer it is, the safer they are.
No, quite the opposite. Bombs and reactors use fissile materials with long half lifes, i.e. 235U (700 million years) and 239Pu (24 thousand years). Isotopes with short half lifes are very difficult to handle since they produce a lot of heat and emit high levels of dangerous radiation.
I was definitely _technically_ wrong and I appreciate the correction but, practically, nuclear fuel stored in any density has an effective half life lower than that of it's individual constituents because it's capable of spontaneous fission and sustaining a chain reaction.
It is more radioactive when used as fuel but not when handled responsibly. Which is it's attractiveness as fuel.
The sweet spot would be a fissile material that can sustain a chain reaction but is not radioactive at all. Unfortunately, such an isotope does not exist. 235U and 239Pu are the next best thing.
Not at all, plutonium is essentially safe enough to eat. Fissile isotopes require free neutrons to undergo fission. The dangerous components of radioactive waste are the fission products. When I break apart a large nucleus in fission, I get random configurations of protons and neutrons as a result. These rnadom configurations are very likely to themselves be unstable.
Plutonium is definitely not safe enough to eat, it’s chemically highly toxic. A nearly immediately lethal dose is estimated at around half a gram, though that is mostly due to the radiation effects.
The Canadian Shield is, afaik, stable, deep, plutonic rock. I don’t understand why we aren’t drilling miles-deep holes and excavating storage chambers down there. Seems ideal for a storage facility.
Started looking ten years ago. Construction itself will take ten years. And years away from selecting and expropriating the site. There’s no good excuse to not be halfway there by now. It’s a make-work project. Some small organization is dragging this out because it pays well to never finish.
Edit: sorry, it’s that this sort of never-ending government project is all too common in Canada. Military procurement is an especially sore point right now, atrociously delayed.
> If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level.
The great thing about articles like this is that it reminds me to go rewatch the the video "Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great?"[1], which neatly summarizes so much of the breathless excitement of vague, detail-free scientific and entrepreneurial claims.
Is nuclear waste still an issue now that we can recycle the waste back into the power plant for more energy?
Asking as a total novice on the topic. I want to act as a proponent for nuclear energy but it’s difficult to know what’s propaganda and what’s legitimate.
Rough answer - processes which are good for recycling the "spent" fuel back into "fresh" reactor fuel...those processes are also good for recycling "spent" fuel into nuclear bomb material. The latter aspect is rather damaging to their popularity.
(In either case, the recycling process also separates out all sorts of really nasty, short-half-life fission daughter isotopes & such. Which could make it pretty unpopular, even if the mere chemical aspects of the process were non-toxic. Which they aren't...)
We have been able to reprocess nuclear fuel since the 40s or something. So if anything it's gen IV "propaganda/marketing". Gen IV is not just one reactor type so some of the advantages that one reactor type has are not valid for another type. They tend to be thrown onto one big pile of advantages so you have to be on your guard when reading about this.
Long half-life (thousands of years) products are usually not too worrisome because they are not very radioactive. That's the reason why they are long half-life.
Short half-life (days) products are very radioactive and dangerous, but because they are quickly depleted, they are manageable.
The worst are medium half-life (decades) products. Short enough to be dangerously radioactive, and long enough to be a long term problem. These are the ones that make Chernobyl inhospitable.
I'm not an expert either, but just to explain a little bit- long half life means there's not much activity going on, and not much radiation emitted. Short half life means there's lots going on, and lots being emitted.
So an article equating long half life with danger isn't trying really hard to be accurate and precise.
I'm saying that, all other factors being equal, that stuff with a long half-life is less dangerous than stuff with a short half-life.
To put it another way, "half-life of infinity" = "not radioactive at all".
Now, there are other factors involved (type of radiation emitted, what fission products appear further down the decay chain, etc.), but none of them are made worse by a long half-life per se.
It's easier to store a highly dangerous thing for a decade than a slightly dangerous thing for millennia, though.
Chernobyl and Fukushima have been interesting studies in what low-dose long-term radiation can do to ecosystems (not much? things seem to adapt ok), but we should still take what precautions we can and not just irradiate things willy-nilly...
The thing is, the "slightly dangerous thing" (i.e., uranium with all its associated breakdown products) occurs naturally in vast and totally uncontrolled ore bodies, sometimes right in contact with the water table. Yet somehow we're not worried about that (except in a very few cases where the concentration is extremely high). Why not?
It's like the way that no one gives a crap about the natural oil seeps off the coast of Southern California, which dump about 5 million gallons per year right into the ocean, then they have a panic reaction when a boat accident dumps a couple of hundred.
I dunno, maybe the localized increase over background levels? As they say, "dilution is the solution to pollution"... a little oil or radiation here and there will be reabsorbed by the ecosystem without much incident. Seemed like Fukushima was basically dumped into the sea and we didn't end up with Godzilla (too bad, really).
Likewise, some slow underwater seepage probably just gets washed away? But if you add a whole bunch of oil on a seashore that normally doesn't have much, it'll kill a bunch of cute animals and make your PR team have to work weekends.
If you drastically increase the background radiation near a suburb by piling spent fuel near it, the residents won't scientifically analyze the risk, they'll just try to keep you away. If you try to build a new plant, every politician within bribing distance of some special interest goes haywire.
Yucca Mountain might've been an option but that got shot down too.
A mix of precaution and NIMBYism, some of which is good science, some of which is just junk politics, and much of which is just people being primates. We're not evolutionarily equipped to make these sort of large scale long term decisions, only to live and die by our tiny, intimate lives.
I am continually amused that disposing nuclear waste is still such a hot (!) topic.
There is simple and effective way of disposing the most dangerous types of nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel) -- dig a deep hole in an ancient, stable, solid rock and bury it there forever. The place needs to be selected carefully but we know of a number of places that are perfect from geological point of view.
The only problem is that nobody wants that in their vicinity because of an irrational fear.
Assuming fission in, what mW of power is generated to make x units of waste, and what mW of power is needed to speed up decay/transmutation to shrink the half-life.
how does a nuclear reactor create waste? is this radioactive material not mined from the earth its self? does the reactor make it more radioactive then it was before we extracted it?
1. Waste from extraction of uranium ores. This part is relatively insignifcant;
2. Enrichment waste. Most (all?) power-generating nuclear power plants use U235 as fuel. Mined uranium is primarily U238 with low amounts of U235. This metal needs to be enriched, which is to say the percentage of U235 needs to be made higher. This is really the only difference between reactor-grade Uranium and weapons-grade Uranium (ie the percentage of U235). These are isotopes so are chemically identical. So how do we do it? We convert it to a gas and put them through a series of centrifuges. These centrifuges will effectively increase the concentration of U235. How we do this is with Uranium Hexaflouride (UF6).
UF6 is a significant waste byproduct that requires storage. There are processes to make this less toxic (eg UF6 -> UF4) but they aren't really economic, at least not yet; and
3. The reactor fuel itself creates waste in the form of radioactive fissile products and fuel decay products. Every now and again the fuel rods need replacing. This is an expensive and highly-skilled process done by the NRC. Those byproducts need to be stored or disposed of. This article is talking about this form of waste, specifically.
Btw, most waste is from #2 and not #2. #2 is where the dangerous waste is from but that's also only ~3% of the total waste. One of the issues is people report the total waste and treat it as if it's all the same.
Basically nuclear waste include anything used at nuclear plant or fuel processing. Some of it is nasty and problematic stuff like fuel and all the transmutated elements and fission products. Some of the other is comparable to fire alarm in your ceiling...
Nuclear fuels such as U235 are radioactive but very slightly so, U235 specifically having a half life of roughly 700 million years. The various fission products produced by splitting these atoms in a reactor may have much shorter half lives and as such are more radioactive. In the operation of a reactor, some atoms inevitably absorb neutrons as well, which increases their mass number. Through subsequent beta decay whereby a neutron is converted into a proton, their atomic numbers may also increase, producing transuranic elements such as plutonium which account for some of the nastiest nuclear waste products.
The fuel going into the reactor is also radioactive. It isn’t radioactive waste, but that’s because it isn’t waste. The stuff in a reactor is orders of magnitude more concentrated than what we pull out of the ground.
Also yes many of the byproducts are more radioactive than the fuel. The stuff in the dirt tends to be comparatively stable - the unstable stuff decayed long ago. Stuff coming out of a reactor is like a year old.
The fuel going into a reactor has a tiny amount of radioactivity. The technicians handling fresh fuel bundles don't need lead lined protective gear, just some gloves and clean room procedures to keep the technician's greasy grubby paws off the highly refined and expensive fuel bundles.
That technician probably works with nuclear fuel every day and he's exposed to far less occupational radioactivity than a flight attendant because at higher altitudes there's less atmosphere to attenuate cosmic radiation. Even orders of magnitude more concentrated doesn't lead to some extreme amount of radiation. If it hasn't gone critical then the radiation hazard is negligible outside your body. In fact, if you were to finely grind up some Uranium and chemically process it into some biologically absorbable form and ingest a lethal amount the heavy metal poisoning would be lethal before the radioactivity.
>Also yes many of the byproducts are more radioactive than the fuel.
That's the understatement of the year. The fission products are extremely radioactive and are responsible for the massive amounts of shielding and care needed around high level nuclear waste.
>The stuff in the dirt tends to be comparatively stable - the unstable stuff decayed long ago.
Also not true, the stuff in the dirt has been constantly decaying and building up to a steady state decay chain in proportion to the half life of each isotope and the production rate of it. Fresh fuel is basically entirely Uranium with almost no decay products whereas all the radon that seeps up in basements all comes from radioactive decay of unstable isotopes underground. "The stuff in the dirt" is responsible for around 21,000 lung cancer deaths every year in the United States.
yea i guess i don't understand how its possible for these elements to be safe before we extract it but unsafe to put it back in a depleted form? and if its not depleted why can't we keep using it until it is?
We do use it - in nuclear weapons and certain kinds of solid-state power devices.
Why not in reactors? Because they rely on a certain kind of subatomic process (nuclear fission) to produce energy that can only happen once in the controlled environment of a nuclear reactor.
But you idea that "being more radioactive" makes a better nuclear fuel is wrong. A good nuclear fuel is one that produces lots of energy for little input energy, is easy to mine and process, can be controlled easily, and can be disposed of safely.
That waste is fuel, and in human history, zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste.
This obsession with nuclear waste is ridiculous. We produce less of it than any other kind of energy waste by four orders of magnitude, and it's far less radioactive than the waste that's being belched into the atmosphere to cause global warming.
This ridiculous hand-wringing is why we're shutting nuclear reactors down during a fuel shortage crisis in the middle of climate change.
We have *got* to stop pretending this is real work.
This disagrees with your assertion that “…in human history, zero people have been harmed by nuclear waste.” The page lists waste incidents going back to the 50s.
This seems to be a very broad definition of 'nuclear waste'. When I search for "waste" on that page, I find one incident, involving a waste furnace explosion (not the waste itself) and a second one in Russia in 1957 where a large amount of waste was released with no immediate fatalities, but possibly 200 later excess deaths. And, as the page points out, coal burning power plants emit (with little or no long-term "containment") 100-times as much radioactive waste.
The argument against nuclear power is safe disposal of the "waste", but, as the OP pointed out, it is hard to find any examples of deaths because of nuclear waste (there certainly have been more deaths because of accidents, but even here, coal mining/burning/waste disposal clearly is much higher risk, even ignoring CO2 output).
Which accident are you referring to? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster refers a source that claims 8015 deaths and no comparison to coal-fired power plants. Of course, one could argue that the accident was related to processing spent fuel into nuclear weapons material and would not have happened if it had just been buried. Or that it is should not be called waste if it's treated as raw material to something else.
I agree that's a pretty strong statement to make but most of the accidents didn't have anything to do with the "waste" and more with the fuel and reactors. I would argue we're not talking about a lot of people though, compared to the billions that climate change is going to affect not to mention the millions that are already affected by pollution and other carbon-based energy production effects.
As far as I can see, there isn't a single waste incident anywhere in that list.
It kind of looks like you googled for something, didn't read it, and started arguing.
Looks like the only thing even mentioned there is that in the 1950s, there was an incident, and someone who isn't a doctor made an estimate that some cancer deaths might have happened later. Amusingly, it's the same person who predicted 20 million deaths from Chernobyl, and still insists they happened and are being covered up.
Can you tell me which specific disagreement you see there? I'd like to think you're not listening to the guy who says there were three secret holocausts worth of death in the 1990s.
Typical anti-nuke: pretends they've found contrary evidence, hasn't
Three different people in this thread told me to ignore the physicists, the history, and the real world evidence, and to pretend that what we were waiting on was the half-life of uranium
It's really embarrassing that HN isn't able to reject these things successfully. This is anti-vax level thinking
So significant amount of nuclear waste has been produced for what, 50 years? We know it's very dangerous and we now need to make sure it's safely contained on a time scale which if it ended today would start during stone age. And this is no problem because during the last 50 years no one has been harmed?
First, yes I agree that nuclear waste is an important issue that should be getting more attention than it does. However, this should not be thought of as a 10,000 or more year problem. Think back on the incredible expansion of knowledge in the last 100 years. Do we really believe that in another 100 years or so we won't have a way to safely reprocess this waste? This is a one or two hundred year problem at most. Can we not safely store two or three warehouses of material for 100 years? Thinking of this as a ten or fifty thousand year problem expresses a tremendous pessimism in the human ability to innovate.
> Thinking of this as a ten or fifty thousand year problem expresses a tremendous pessimism in the human ability to innovate.
It’s quite fatalistic. The arguments are usually about protecting some future Stone Age human society from it. Seems like the assumption is civilization will crumble and human intelligence will decline so much that they wouldn’t be able to figure out or notice that some ancient waste they dug up is killing them.
> Do we really believe that in another 100 years or so we won't have a way to safely reprocess this waste?
I have no idea. People were supposed to transport themselves to work by the use of flying cars today. If you think that you can predict the future then please wait a minute while I laugh.
I suppose that parent comment is trying to say that given our history with nuclear waste, especially with the increasing caution, it hasn't caused any (significant) incident by the waste
Yes? But given that our history with nuclear waste is a blip and we have to make sure it continue to works throughout wars, dictatorships and so on for the next 10 000 years, then how is the current track record relevant?
It's akin to saying it's safe to eat led because I did it 5 minutes ago and so far I'm feeling perfectly fine. It's an argument which either is some form or propaganda or just stupid.
I believe the argument is that it may be the lesser of many evils, not that it's harmless. I think it's a matter of evaluating our remaining realistic alternatives. Like:
1) Re-embrace nuclear power, do our best to safeguard the waste, knowing that someday (50? 100? 10,000 years?) from now, it will be an issue we'd have to deal with. It may be at a local, national, or global scale... hard to say. Could leak naturally, from unexpected disasters, terrorism, warfare, whatever. But it buys us some time, and can help slow down climatic impacts so the world has a few more years to adapt. It still won't be pretty.
2) Pretend like the world is suddenly going to get behind renewables and clean energy and drastically cut emissions AND recapture much of the carbon we emitted already. One, this isn't going to happen, and two, it's already too late. Best case, this makes the future decades a bit better for first world countries, but it's already too late for most of the rest of the world.
3) Do nothing: The mostly likely outcome, with or without more nuclear power. Life carries on, many humans will perish from climate change domino effects (draught, floods, desertification, habitat loss, whatever) and the resulting international instability. Many more other species will perish. The remaining life will adapt and carry on, and the world keeps going, but it's gonna be a painful few decades/centuries and our kids will hate us, but on the plus side, we've been saying that for decades now so it's already an intergenerational norm. Each generation leaves the world a little worse for the next, until enough humans die off, the planet recovers a little, and we do it all over again.
Arguably embracing nuclear power is the least evil of these realistic remaining options, though it's highly unlikely enough people and nations could be convinced. People in the aggregate are phenomenally bad at evaluating risk, especially long-term, whether it's nuclear or climate impacts, so absolutely nothing will get done.
But the advocacy isn't wrong in and of itself... nuclear is a measure of last resort, especially now that the IPCC has proven completely ineffective at persuading countries to take other meaningful measures. Nuclear can't save us, but it can lessen the pain to come a little bit, kinda like hospice for the planet.
> I believe the argument is that it may be the lesser of many evils, not that it's harmless.
If it's not harmless, perhaps you can point me to some legitimate harm it caused?
Everyone, at this point, defers to predictions someone made decades ago that never panned out.
If the reactor saves thousands of lives a year, and kills on average less than one half of one person in its operating span, then it's better than harmless, it causes negative harm
Yes, nuclear power actually is better than harmless, statistically speaking
Safeguarding the waste is neurotic nonsense that's talked about by people with no medical backgrounds who want to show how wise they are.
People bathe in the stuff with no harm, to show how safe it is.
If you can't name a single human being who's ever been harmed by it, then it's time to stop safeguarding it. The safety theater has extremely serious negative effects.
All this fake safety discussion is why nuclear power didn't solve climate change in the 1980s.
Really, genuinely, stop pretending a risk exists. Not a small one, not a comparative one, nothing.
It really does not.
I know it can be hard to accept, but you literally cannot show a single person in human history being harmed by this stuff.
It's safer than bread.
It's time to stop the theater. The planet is dying. Put down the fake wisdom.
Are you kidding me?
Homo sapiens exists since 300,000 years, nuclear waste since 80 years, uranium 235 as a half time of 700 million years.
The mentioning of human history is pretty useless and misleading because nuclear waste only exists for 0.03% of human history but it will exists more than 2,000 times longer than mankind exists so far.
That's plenty of time for things going wrong.
It's like falling out of a window on the 100th floor and free-falling after 3 floors and saying: "everything has gone well so far".
We already can't get a grip on climate change and plastic waste, let alone waste that has to be stored safely for 700 million years.
> We already can't get a grip on climate change and plastic waste, let alone waste that has to be stored safely for 700 million years.
Please stop it with the physics theater. This stuff doesn't need to be stored for 70 years, let alone 700 million.
Nuclear waste from a modern reactor is touch-safe. Not touch-safe in 50 years. Not touch-safe next week. It comes out of the reactor touch-safe. You just have to wait for it to cool down to room temperature.
It's eat-safe in under ten years.
I have no idea why anyone would look at someone saying "700 million years" and not be reduced to peals of laughter. Did you just look up the half-life of uranium 235 or something?
The goal isn't to get rid of the uranium
Why would you need that? There's uranium all over your house, right now. You know you eat tiny pieces of your plates constantly, right? I sure hope you don't own any Fiestaware. Uranium is perfectly safe, and in lots of your consumer products. Stop learning safety from Marvel movies.
In 700 million years, if you actually had a dangerous energy source, life would have evolved to make it food by then. You know, like the black mold did with the space station in under a hundred, from a zillion miles away?
The ultra-hot stuff that you're taught to fear never actually comes out of the reactor.
The French glass their waste and put it in the floor, as a tourist attraction. They walk on top of it, no metal cladding, five foot gap. They've been doing it 40 years.
Just how radioactive do you think this stuff is?
Do you understand that hot springs like Yellowstone are way more radioactive than radioactive waste?
Do you understand that we go bathing in those? (They're actually pretty nice, once you get used to the smell of sulfur.)
Are you about to give me some mess about the kind of radiation? You going to try to teach me about roentegens vs grays? Look it up first. It's not going to play out the way you expect.
Holy shit, man, look at the numbers.
Like. Have ... have you ever looked at how much radiation you get from a TV tower? Have you ever checked where the closest TV tower is to you?
The same people that are terrified of nuclear waste think there's nothing wrong with cell phone radiation. It's baffling to me. You get *so* *much* more radiation from a pair of bluetooth headphones than you ever will from nuclear waste
I've got like ten bluetooth transponders around me just because I find cables annoying, and a cell phone in my pocket right now
You know that football field of nuclear waste barrels that doesn't exist on the entire planet, but that John Oliver keeps pretending is a lot to save the entire planet?
Go on, find it. Move one barrel out of the middle. Sit there. Bring your iPhone and a radiometer.
Now hold your iPhone high enough up that the large amount of metal won't block your cell signal.
Check the radiometer.
Do you think you see more energy in the cell phone band, or all the others put together?
Ooooooooh, better protect against that for (checks watch) 700 million years.
And not, you know, the loss of the ecosphere.
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> Are you kidding me?
No, I am not kidding you.
It's never killed anyone and it's never going to, no matter how much public panicing you do.
If you cannot name a single person that's ever been killed by it - if it's safer than making bread flour and safer than skateboards, but it can stop climate change - then it's time to settle down.
You're quoting the half lives of things that aren't even in the barrel, and you want to be taken seriously as some kind of source of knowledge.
Stop.
This is dishonest.
Climate change is real. Solar power doesn't work. Wind power doesn't work.
Nuclear power does work, and has the best safety record of any power system, almost by a factor of ten.
If the most you can do is pretend there will be death someday, by mechanisms you can't describe, involving the wrong numbers and things that aren't present? Then you shouldn't be part of the discussion.
The engineers and physicists do not agree with your future visions.
I'm not willing to watch climate change destroy the planet I live on today, just because you think something bad will happen millions of years from now which the physicists say is wrong.
Climate change is killing millions of people, today, and threatening biodiversity and the continental food supply
We can stop it, but you're sitting here saying "but in millions of years" and you aren't even correct
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> The mentioning of human history is pretty useless and misleading because
It's what really happened.
You're literally saying "ignore reality, ignore history, ignore the scientists, and pay attention to my scary stories."
No; I don't think that I will.
I've taken the relevant classes. They do not teach the things that you are saying.
The second you say "reject the evidence of history," you have condemned any argument you could possibly make
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> but it will exists more than 2,000 times longer than mankind exists so far.
No, it won't. You just don't understand the physics involved. The actual hot products in those barrels don't even make it 10 years. Even the old ones didn't make it 50.
I agree with you about how nuclear has often been unfairly held to a much higher standard than other energy production methods. However, more misinformation isn't the solution to this.
Kyshtym was actually the worst nuclear disaster in history, not the second or third.
Kyshtym was not actually caused by nuclear waste. In reality, the Russians were keeping hot fuel underground, and cooling it with water, a bizarre and wildly inappropriate design.
A pump failed, and one of the water circuits stayed for more than a year.
Eventually there was a steam blast.
It had nothing to do with nuclear waste. It was a cooling system failure. The blast was 100% non-nuclear.
As the worst disaster in nuclear history, the UN estimated death count is still below 80, and the actual known death count is 31.
Trying to hold this up as some kind of serious risk, and playing the "technically correct, the best kind of correct" card, and using extremely heated language like "blatantly false," is just flat out destructive.
Not only is your story incorrect, but even if it was correct, this kind of "disaster" is so small as to be irrelevant. Any major city on Earth has ten death counts like that a year and you can't name a single one in your city.
This is how we stop climate change.
Stop playing technicality fodder. You aren't as correct as you think you are, and even if you were correct, you'd be making the wrong call in the long run.
If the worst disaster the industry has had in history doesn't add up to a bus accident, and it's already 20% of the way done stopping climate change?
Then it's time to stop getting your rocks off to being able to say "but this one time it killed a couple dozen people 75 years ago."
Especially because it absolute did not, and your claim of "blatant falsehood" is just you mis-learning history from HBO.
Be clear: the maple syrup industry has two disasters with a higher death count in the same time frame.
If you aren't calling for a global moratorium on delicious breakfast syrup, which cannot stop climate change, ask yourself why you need to drag out your knowledge of a trivial event 75 years ago, here.
By the numbers, nuclear power is the safest technology of any kind in history.
If you have to go back 75 years to find 50 dead folks, and you don't understand what a magically high quality safety record that is, please let other people handle this discussion.
> Kyshtym was not actually caused by nuclear waste. In reality, the Russians were keeping hot fuel underground, and cooling it with water,
While I am no means an expert in this incident, your explanation contradicts every source I can find on it. Every single one I've found lists it as a "waste storage tank" that exploded. This paper cites three official reports from three different countries that all attribute the incident to stored nuclear waste. [0]
It's possible you are simply confused here as used fuel rods are a type of nuclear waste and are hot. (Though encyclopedia Britannica specifies that it was liquid nuclear waste, not spent fuel rods, though I am not sure what their source for that claim is.)
If you are going to contradict widely accepted information, you should start by providing sources instead of getting upset at being justifiably called out.
> is just you mis-learning history from HBO
I don't watch HBO (or much TV at all). I am a bit of a nuclear history nerd (though no expert) ever since I was got licensed as a reactor operator decades ago.
> It had nothing to do with nuclear waste. It was a cooling system failure. The blast was 100% non-nuclear.
All the energy that caused the explosion came from nuclear decay. The pressure that that causes nuclear explosions is almost always from the heating of non-nuclear material due to the decay of isotopes, the only different was that there was (presumably) no runaway chain reaction so the energy mostly came from the decay of longer lived isotopes. Either way, it's irrelevant because the explosion itself caused no direct casualties, it was the radioactive contamination spread by the explosion.
> ask yourself why you need to drag out your knowledge of a trivial event 75 years ago, here.
I care about accuracy, which is apparently a vanishing trait these days.
> you have to go back 75 years to find 50 dead folks, and you don't understand what a magically high quality safety record that is, please let other people handle this discussion.
I also agree that nuclear power has a pretty great safety record. I don't believe allowing more misinformation about nuclear power to spread (positive or negative) does anything to help the discussion.
If you are going to change people's minds, I suggest try citing good sources instead of trying to browbeat people like you did in this comment.
Sometimes people argue by habit, because they think they're doing something good in the name of Sweet Lady Evidence, when they're actually just googling things like a flat Earther would then trying to stand on that
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> While I am no means an expert in this incident
And yet here you are, all the same, arguing, based on things you found in a search engine, and tricked yourself into thinking were knowledge.
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> > In reality, the Russians were keeping hot fuel underground, and cooling it with water,
>
> Every single one I've found lists it as a "waste storage tank" that exploded.
Yes. They were keeping hot fuel in storage tanks underground, and cooling them with water, then the water engaged in a steam explosion. This is the same as what I said.
The reason you're confused is that the Russians just use the word "fuel rod" for active fuel or spent fuel, and you're acting on a fifth-hand regurgitated translated piece of material by someone with no training or knowledge in the field, much like yourself.
Science says that the only effective way to discourage this sort of blind argument is to clearly and repeatedly call it out as inappropriate, and why
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> It's possible you are simply confused here
No, I'm not confused here. You just googled translated materials and assumed, incorrectly, that nothing was lost in translation.
In reality, we both told a story about a steam explosion in an underground tank. You haven't found an objection; you found a rephrasing that was missing details.
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> If you are going to contradict widely accepted information
I'm not. You're confusing things you Googled up on the spot for "widely accepted information," in exactly the same way that anti-vaxxers and flat earthers do.
Unlike you, I have college training in these matters, and I don't fake my way through knowledge arguments with search engines.
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> you should start by providing sources
I did.
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> instead of getting upset
I'm not in any way upset at your belligerence.
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> being justifiably called out.
You are not in any way justified.
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> I am a bit of a nuclear history nerd
The flat earthers and anti-vaxxers also describe themselves as "a bit of a nerd" when arguing incorrectly against a credentialled expert, and trying to sound important.
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> ever since I was got licensed as a reactor operator decades ago.
So far, about 40 people have told me that they were licensed as a reactor operator on HN.
Given that there are only 3900 of them in the country, I just don't believe that any of them were actually telling the truth.
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> All the energy that caused the explosion came from nuclear decay.
This comment makes it extremely difficult for me to believe that you are, in fact, a licensed operator. Along with the previous statistical observation.
Look, this is like building a huge dam, letting it burst, then saying water caused the deaths, instead of bad dam engineering.
If you can't even get the proximate cause of the disaster right, there is absolutely no way you were licensed. This is a critical component of that test.
I do not believe you.
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> I care about accuracy, which is apparently a vanishing trait these days.
Cool story. Anyway, if you're asking me to choose between your recounting based on bad translations you found on Google, or the official UN position, please forgive me if I believe the UN over you.
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> I don't believe allowing more misinformation about nuclear power to spread (positive or negative) does anything to help the discussion.
Cool story. Since you haven't actually found any using documented evidence, provided evidence that says that I'm correct, and loudly demanded that I do something I already did while failing to do it yourself and believing you succeeded, then allow me to be the first to loudly shrug at you.
I have no interest in whether you feel that I am helping the discussion. Your emotional attempt to manufacture an error where none exists, then to elect yourself to the fact ministry to control me, while announcing that you've also somehow made me upset, actually has essentially no effect.
I will continue drinking my coffee, and believing my college professors and the United Nations over some rando on HN who is offering evidence that doesn't agree with him, and doesn't appear to understand that
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> If you are going to change people's minds, I suggest try citing good sources
That's nice. Your sources don't agree with you and I have no interest in your suggestions.
Are you trying to sabotage yourself here? Your rant is completely innefectual as a means of communication.
Please try to adhere to the site guidelines and perhaps try citing a single source that backs up any of your claims. Until you learn to discuss this stuff in an constructive manner, I'm done trying to help you.
> Given that there are only 3900 of them in the country, I just don't believe that any of them were actually telling the truth.
I didn't claim to be an active operator. In fact I made in clear I haven't been an active operator in a long time. In addition, I would be absolutely unsurprised to find that a significant number of us are on HN given the type of people who are drawn to that field.
Here is an explanation of chirped pulse amplification: https://www.rp-photonics.com/chirped_pulse_amplification.htm... This technique is for producing optical photons, which will have less than 10 ev of energy. In the same way that you can't focus the sun's light to a point that gets hotter than the surface of the sun (violates second law of thermodynamics), it isn't obvious how low energy laser pulses can be useful for this. The article offers no explanation whatsoever. Maybe the electric field across the nucleus can be made strong enough to induce scission?
In general, if you want to interact with the nucleus you need photons on the order of 1 Mev or more, whose wavelengths are comparable to the size of the nucleus. These are gamma rays, which are not optical photons. There are ways to boost optical photons to those energies (like inverse compton scattering), but the article says nothing about that either. I would think inverse compton scattering of a chirped pulse from an electron packet in an accelerator will completely destroy the sharp timing and reflect the distribution of the electrons instead.