The greening of spent nuclear waste

May 6, 2013 | By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

Despite decades of discussion, the issue of nuclear waste has not seen a viable solution. Most recently in 2010, federal authorities scrapped a plan to create a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada to store the nationwide spent nuclear fuel capacity that now stands at 65,000 tons.

Texas A&M University is developing the technology that is capable of destroying radiotoxic spent nuclear waste while at the same time potentially providing safe nuclear power for thousands of years to come.

Physicist Peter McIntyre and his research team are developing a new form of green nuclear power that would extract 10 times more energy from spent nuclear fuel rods than currently obtained in the first use, as well as destroy the transuranics -- the chemical elements beyond uranium in the periodic table -- within the hazardous toxic waste of used nuclear fuel.

"In my opinion, the only way to properly deal with transuranics is to destroy them," McIntyre said. "They are an unthinkable hazard if they ever get into the biosphere."

To destroy the transuranics, the researchers have developed a conceptual design for accelerator-driven subcritical fission in a molten salt core (ADSMS). With this technology, the transuranics are extracted into molten salt using a process called pyroprocessing, in which the spent fuel pins are chopped up and loaded into a basket, which is placed in a pot of molten salt. The oxide fuel inside the pins dissolves in the molten salt so that all of the remaining fuel -- along with all of the transuranics -- is extracted into the molten salt. The transuranics could then be destroyed through subcritical nuclear fission, which is driven by a beam of energetic protons within the custom-built, high-efficiency accelerator he envisions.

McIntyre's design builds on work at Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory as well as the PRIDE facility in South Korea, which demonstrated the process for extracting the fuel and separating the transuranic elements and fission products in molten salt. Scientists from those teams are collaborating with Texas A&M in the new development.

The research has received $750,000 in seed funding from Texas A&M University and $500,000 from the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation. A proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy will seek the large-scale funding needed to take the research further.

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http://www.fierceenergy.com/story/greening-spent-nuclear-waste/2013-05-06