World’s Most Powerful Laser Beams to Zap Nuclear Waste

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/world-s-most-powerful-laser-beams-to-zap-nuclear-waste.html

The European Union will spend about 700 million euros ($900 million) to build the world’s most powerful lasers, technology that could destroy nuclear waste and provide new cancer treatments.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure project has obtained funding for two lasers to be built in the Czech Republic and Romania, Shirin Wheeler, spokeswoman for the European Commission on regional policy, said in a phone interview. A third research center will be in Hungary.

The lasers are 10 times more powerful than any yet built and will be strong enough to create subatomic particles in a vacuum, similar to conditions that may have followed the start of the universe. Eventually, the power of the light beams could be used to deteriorate the radioactivity of nuclear waste in just a few seconds and target cancerous tumors, the projects’s Romanian coordinator Nicolae-Victor Zamfir said in an interview.

“We can’t find in nature any phenomenon with such an intense power like the one that will be generated with this laser,” Zamfir said in a phone interview from Romania. “We expect to see the first results of our research in one or two years after the centre becomes operational.”

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. What could be the un-intended consequences of these lasers?

[xchrom]

2. i wish i understood this stuff better.

i know you want to get rid on nuke waste -- is this a good idea?
i haven't the foggiest.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Since matter cannot be created or destroyed....

just changed...
"this could be heaven, this could be hell"

[caraher]

6. What you say is true only if you consider energy the same as matter

You can transform energy into matter and vice versa, in amounts governed by the famous E=mc^2 formula.

The kinds of processes the laser would induce don't appreciably change the masses of the substances involved. Indeed, the whole point is rearrangement - radioactive nuclei decay because their constituents form energetically unstable structures, and rearranging them into stable configurations would make them non-radioactive.

From that stage, the consequences are those predicted by chemistry. At least in terms of the science...

[wtmusic]

4. Headline = typical overreach

From "World’s Most Powerful Laser Beams to Zap Nuclear Waste"
to "technology that could destroy nuclear waste..."

The "could" part is where it gets thorny.

From the project's website, it seems fairly certain that high-powered lasers will be have the power to fission nuclei - break down large unstable ones like those of plutonium - into those of relatively benign materials. The question is whether it will be practical to do it to thousands of tons of waste.

http://www.extreme-light-infrastructure.eu/what-is-eli.php

[caraher]

5. Don't count on it

I do know a fair amount about these kinds of laser systems... from a physics perspective, much of the buzz is their use as an alternative to large accelerator facilities. In principle, you can reach much higher energies in much shorter distances accelerating charged particles with these kinds of lasers than with the methods in use at places like CERN. The downside is you generally can't accelerate large numbers of particles at a time.

So when it comes to nuclear waste, we already can in principle transmute various nuclides using accelerators in essentially the same way - we'd just be using a laser in place of cyclotrons and synchrotrons. A laser scheme faces all the challenges of an accelerator scheme with the additional challenge of advancing the laser technology to increase the flux of high-energy particles.

So maybe after a few decades of development, this technology might start being able to go beyond "proof of principle" experiments. I'd bet against it. The potential to "neutralize" radioactive waste exists, but is just one item on a long list of scientific and technological goals touted to promote a big project.

[wtmusic]

7. It seems, intuitively, it would take an enormous amount of energy

to transmute a tiny amount of material. In essence, the juice ain't worth the squeeze.

But that's a back of napkin guesstimate, and a dirty napkin at that.

[caraher]

8. The laser might make the exchange more favorable

but I suspect the biggest troubles really lie in the reaction cross-sections (it doesn't take too much energy per particle to give the nucleus the right nudge, but you have way more "misses" than "hits&quot and the heterogeneity of real-life waste (it's one thing to take a pure sample of anything and bombard it to get a desired result, and another to hit a witches brew in a way that lets you "de-activate" some nuclei without also making other isotopes transmute into something hotter than what you started with).