Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from “a million years to 30 minutes,” says Nobel laureate

Physicist plans to karate-chop them with super-fast blasts of light.

(Oleksiy Mark/Borys Magierowski/Shutterstock/Big Think)

Whatever one thinks of nuclear energy, the process results in tons of radioactive, toxic waste no one quite knows what to do with. As a result, it’s tucked away as safely as possible in underground storage areas where it’s meant to remain a long, long time: The worst of it, uranium 235 and plutonium 239, have a half life of 24,000 years. That’s the reason eyebrows were raised in Europe — where more countries depend onnuclear energy than anywhere else — when physicist Gérard Mourou mentioned in his wide-ranging Nobel acceptance speech that lasers could cut the lifespan of nuclear waste from “a million years to 30 minutes,” as he put it in a followup interview with The Conversation.

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