This PDF is a must read IMHO? it was written on the 26/3/2016 and is based on earlier work done in this field back around 2005.
Laser induced nuclear waste transmutation
Charles Hirlimann
IPCMS Unistra-‐CNRS UMR
75004, 23 rue du Loess, BP 43 F-‐67034 Strasbourg cedex2
This document is the proposal for a study that was supported in 2002 by University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, exploring the feasibility of a new way for taking care of nuclear waste using lasers.
This work has been performed by a multidisciplinary r-‐team:
Marie-‐Paule Baumann and Gérard Rudolf, nuclear physicists, Isabelle Billard
and Klaus Lutzenkirchen, nuclear chemists, and Olivier Crégut and I, laser
physicists.
I have been leading this team from 2000 to 2003.
This text appears in: “Lasers et Technologies Femtosecondes”, M. Sentis and O.
Utéza Ed., (Publications de l’Université de Saint-‐ Etienne), p. 69-‐80 (2005).
Nuclear Waste
When producing electricity that collects the mass energy that is available at the
time of the induced disintegration of radioactive elements, other unstable elements are produced with half-‐life1 span durations ranging from less than
one second to hundreds of thousands of years and which are considered as
waste.
Managing nuclear waste with a half-‐life of less than 30 years is an easy
task, as our societies clearly know how to keep buildings safe for more than
a century2, the time it takes for the activity to be divided by a factor of 8.
High-‐activity, long-‐lasting waste that can last for thousands of years or even
longer, up to geological time laps, cannot be taken care of for such long durations.
Therefore, these types of waste are socially unacceptable; nobody wants to
leave a polluted planet to descendants.
Note added at the time of the translation (March 2016):
The general idea sustaining this work is that it would be safer to keep the nuclear
waste confided inside the nuclear plants where it is generated.
In this way, nuclear plants should add two more facilities: one for isotope separation and a large laser one.
The first part of this statement above was what GEH has intended with their PRISM set up, where two smaller reactors and an Advanced Recycling Center were installed next to an existing reactor/s, but the addition of the large laser is interesting to say the least? would that be for U235 Separation and also another laser for Transmutation of some of the more harmful actinides or just the latter?
Laser_induced_nuclear_waste_transmutation.pdf
(20min delay)