US particle accelerators turn nuclear waste into electricity, cut radioactive li

[Marlin]

US particle accelerators turn nuclear waste into electricity, cut radioactive life by 99.7%

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/us-particle-accelerators-turn-nuclear-waste-into-electricity-cut-radioactive-life-by-99-7/ar-AA1WFWAV

[Mounder]

you can't just hit radioactive material with a particle accelerator and magically lower decay times (and you'll be running it forever and getting little done). You can split atoms with it.  It says there's a lot of heat produced. I'm sure there is a lot of energy released. It also uses a ton of electrical power. What it doesn't say in the article is that they're going to hit "fissionable elements" with it. Maybe they'll pick and choose some smaller activated stuff on the periodic chart.

[Marlin]

you can't just hit radioactive material with a particle accelerator and magically lower decay times (and you'll be running it forever and getting little done). You can split atoms with it.  It says there's a lot of heat produced. I'm sure there is a lot of energy released. It also uses a ton of electrical power. What it doesn't say in the article is that they're going to hit "fissionable elements" with it. Maybe they'll pick and choose some smaller activated stuff on the periodic chart.

It makes some sense to me that a high neutron flux would burn transuranics lowering half-life. They are still working on it.

[Mounder]

"The technology can effectively "burn" the most hazardous components."  That's such an exaggeration of what high neutron flux is. It's just concentrated neutrons.  It's still neutrons hitting a nucleus and splitting or reordering.

[Marlin]

"The technology can effectively "burn" the most hazardous components."  That's such an exaggeration of what high neutron flux is. It's just concentrated neutrons.  It's still neutrons hitting a nucleus and splitting or reordering.

I disagree and the people with the big brains and big degrees seem to disagree and say you can transmute the longer-lived isotopes. Happens in commercial reactors that produce plutonium then burn it to produce a fraction of the plants power.

"Instead of having a lifetime of 100,000 years in storage, for example, you can shorten the storage years down to 300," said Rongli Geng, head of SRF Science & Technology at Jefferson Lab and principal investigator for both projects."

https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power-plant/nuclear-fuel/plutonium/plutonium-pwr/