Technology helps reduce nuclear waste at the plant by 80%.

A scientist at the private fission company Transmutex has developed a new method that can reduce the radioactivity of nuclear waste by up to 80%.

Transmutex reactor model. (Photo: Transmutex).

Based in Switzerland, Transmutex's technology has been evaluated over the past few months by Nagra, the country's nuclear waste management agency, Interesting Engineering reported on May 27. As the name suggests, Transmutex relies on converting an element into its isotope or another element . Alchemists have sought to apply this principle to transform metals into gold in the past. Using a particle accelerator, the team proposed taking a mildly radioactive element like thorium and converting it into an isotope of uranium.

The particle accelerator is connected to a nuclear fission plant, where the newly created uranium can be processed immediately. However, unlike uranium used in nuclear power plants today, this type of uranium does not produce plutonium or other highly radioactive waste. The above breakthrough technology is the idea of ​​Carlo Rubbia, former general director of the physics laboratory at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Building particle accelerators near each nuclear power plant can be quite expensive. For example, CERN spent nearly 5 billion USD to build the Large Hadron Collider. Other challenges are opposition to nuclear technology. If the government can be convinced, Transmutex's technology can save nuclear power plants. Transmutex has called for private investment for the new technology, but Nagra's assessment also helped boost the project. According to Nagra, Transmutex's technology can reduce the amount of nuclear waste by 80% and reduce the duration of radioactivity to less than 500 years. More importantly, the technology can be applied to 99% of today's nuclear waste. In terms of operational safety, a nuclear facility using Transmutex technology can stop operating in 2 milliseconds.

While the operational safety of fission reactors is often the focus of attention, the safety of spent fuel requires more attention. Fission fuel remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, long after all the energy extracted from it has been used up. At last year's COP28 conference, 20 countries decided to triple nuclear power output in the next 25 years but did not draw up a plan for long-term storage of used fuel. However, as countries increase nuclear power production, the need for such facilities will increase unless technological breakthroughs like Transmutex's are applied.