Laser can shorten nuclear waste disposal time from '1 million years to 30 minutes'

That is the claim of Gérard Mourou, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on fast laser pulses.

No matter how powerful one might think about nuclear energy, it is undeniable that creating nuclear power means releasing tons of radioactive waste, extremely toxic without We still don't know how to deal with it completely. As such, it is usually buried as securely as possible in underground storage areas. The worst wastes, uranium 235 and plutonium 239, have a half-life of 24,000 years. It is also a headache for authorities in Europe, where more countries depend on nuclear energy than anywhere else.

So when physicist Gérard Mourou mentioned in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that lasers could cut the life of nuclear waste from 'one million years to 30 minutes', people were interested in the field. Nuclear waste was delighted.

Gérard Mourou, together with Donna Strickland, have just shared the Nobel Prize for their development on the topic of Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) at the University of Rochester. In his speech, he mentioned his 'fascination with intense light'. CPA produces ultra-short, high-intensity optical pulses that contain a tremendous amount of power. Mourou and Strickland's goal was to develop a means of making useful, high-precision cuts in medical and industrial settings.

There's also another benefit to CPA, which is equally important. Its attosecond pulses are so fast that it illuminates surfaces that cause unobservable reactions, such as those that take place within individual atoms and in chemical reactions. This ability is exactly what Mourou hoped for, giving the CPA the opportunity to neutralize nuclear waste.

Mourou explains: "Take the nucleus of an atom. It's made up of protons and neutrons. If we add or remove a neutron, it completely changes everything. It's not the same atom anymore, and its properties will completely change. The lifespan of nuclear waste has fundamentally changed, and we can cut this time from a million years to 30 minutes. irradiating large amounts of material in one go with a high-powered laser, so the technique is completely applicable, and in theory there's nothing stopping us from scaling it up to the industrial level. This is a project that I'm working on in partnership with the Commission on Atomic and Alternative Energy, or CEA, in France. We think in 10 or 15 years we'll have a something that we can prove.This is what really allows me to dream, think about all the future uses of our invention."

While 15 years may seem like a long time to wait, compared to dealing with the half-life of nuclear waste it is a blink of an eye.

Greenpeace estimates that there is about 250,000 tons of nuclear waste in 14 countries around the world.

Although nuclear power is struggling to be accepted as an energy source in the US following a series of disturbing incidents, as well as the emergence of alternative sources such as solar and wind power, Many European countries have adopted it.

France relies on nuclear power for 71% of its energy needs. Ukraine is the most dependent country with 56%, followed by Slovakia, then Belgium, Hungary, Sweden, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. None of these countries have a good plan for nuclear waste, other than storing it somewhere and hoping for a final solution. Or leave it for thousands of years and expect it to lie still, not escaping into the water or air supply.

Greenpeace estimates there are about 250,000 tons of it in 14 countries around the world. Of that, about 22,000 cubic meters are dangerous. According to GE-Hitachi, the cost of storing it all is more than $100 billion (excluding China, Russia, and India).

Nuclear energy may be the best candidate for the future.

The process that Mourou is investigating is called "transformation". Nuclear power may be the best candidate for the future, but we still have many other dangers lurking. The idea here is to convert this nuclear waste into new forms of atoms without the problem of radioactivity, what you have to do is change the structure of the nucleus. Mourou talks about his plans for lasers and waste more clearly: 'It's like karate - you create a very strong force for a very, very short moment.'

The idea of ​​this transformation is also not new, it has been studied for the past 30 years in the UK, Belgium, Germany, Japan and the US. Some efforts continue. Some have given up. Stanford's Rodney C. Ewing says physics might work, but converting high-level nuclear waste poses a number of challenges, such as separating individual radionuclides, creating targets on a large scale, and ultimately irradiate and process them.

Mourou and Tajima hope to be able to bridge the distance a beam of light must travel to transform an atom by 10,000 times. They always think about that, and do not underestimate the difficulties that lie ahead.