Nuclear waste can be recycled into rare isotopes required for nuclear fusion, and in theory could produce almost infinite amounts of clean energy, says one scientist.
Radioactive versions of hydrogen, called Tritium, are not easily available naturally on Earth, are expensive to produce, and can be made in limited quantities. At this week’s fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Terence Tarnowski, a physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, suggested that tritium can be harvested from the byproducts of nuclear fission that drive existing nuclear reactors.
Nuclear fusion is the process of combining atoms to release heat. While some fusion reactions can theoretically generate forces, one more common reaction is to fuse tritium with another isotope of hydrogen, deuterium, to produce helium.
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However, for now, fusion is not possible on a commercial scale, as scientists still don’t understand how to achieve large-scale ignition.
But another major barrier is the cost of fuels like tritium.
“Fusion can provide abundant energy without emissions,” Tarnowsky told Live Science. “However, tritium currently has limited availability and high cost, which presents a barrier to technology success.”
Produces tritium efficiently
First generation fusion reactors that contribute to the power grid are likely to rely on reactions that require tritium, Tarnowsky said. Other fusion reactions, such as the fusion of deuterium and helium-3, can theoretically be utilized to generate electricity, but work requires much higher temperatures and therefore are more expensive and less practical.
However, collecting large amounts of tritium causes problems. Isotopes are radioactive and have a very short half-life. The collection of tritium collapse increases by 5.5% per year. “So, like any other energy source, you can’t get all the excess tritium in a bank and get it in 50 years,” Tarnowsky says.
Related: The world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor is finally completed. But it won’t run for another 15 years.
To succeed in future fusion plants, Tarnowsky said, will require new and inexpensive ways to produce tritium. “This feature must already be up and running.”
Today’s nuclear power plants rely on nuclear fission, during which atoms are split and energy is released. However, fission results in a significant amount of long-lived nuclear waste. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, it consists of the fuel that once powered the fission – unusable uranium and plutonium, and fission products such as strontium and iodine isotopes.
Tarnowsky proposes to generate tritium from a huge amount of stationary nuclear waste by using a particle accelerator to divide the atoms of its waste. The splitting atoms undergo a series of reactions that eventually produce tritium. The leftovers of this process are as dangerous as the starting material, so this process does not eliminate nuclear waste, but is used further from this by-product.
Tarnowsky said in an ACS statement that although the fundamental principles of design are not new, recent technological advances could make this method of generating Tritium more efficient.
Tarnowsky’s early calculations estimate that using one gigawatt of energy (which costs at least tens of millions of dollars), the system can produce 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of tritium in a year. That amount of tritium can move tens of thousands of homes in the United States for a year, if used for nuclear fusion.
Tarnowsky predicts that this design can use the same amount of power to generate more than 10 times more isotopes than other methods.
“A very big paradigm shift”
Currently, the US does not have a stable, predictable, inexpensive tritium supply, which costs around $15 million per pound ($33 million per kilogram). On the other hand, there are thousands of tons of nuclear waste, which are expensive to store and potentially harmful to the surrounding environment.
“This technology is possible today,” he told Live Science. “That will be a huge paradigm shift when it comes to using nuclear fuel that we already owned by the government.”
There are still many details to be resolved before Tarnowsky can create a full suggestion on how this works.
But Tarnowsky is excited that his designs are being received actively now, given that nuclear accidents like the three-mile island and Chernobyl made nuclear power a taboo topic decades ago. “Times have changed,” he told Live Science.
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