Scientists at the private fission company Transmutex have developed a new method to reduce radioactivity in nuclear waste by up to 80%. The technology, based in Switzerland, has been evaluated over the past few months by Nagra, the country’s nuclear waste management agency, as reported by Interesting Engineering on May 27.
Unlike uranium used in nuclear power plants today, the newly created uranium does not produce plutonium or other highly radioactive waste. This breakthrough technology was proposed by Carlo Rubbia, former general director of the physics laboratory at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Building particle accelerators near each nuclear power plant can be quite expensive and opposition to nuclear technology is also a challenge. However, if governments can be convinced of its benefits, Transmutex’s technology can save nuclear power plants.
Transmutex has called for private investment for the new technology and Nagra’s assessment has helped boost the project. According to Nagra, Transmutex’s technology can reduce the amount of nuclear waste by 80% and reduce the duration of radioactivity to less than 500 years. More importantly, it can be applied to 99% of today’s nuclear waste. In terms of operational safety, a nuclear facility using Transmutex technology can stop operating in just 2 milliseconds.
While operational safety is often a focus of attention when it comes to fission reactors, spent fuel requires more attention as it remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years even after all energy has been extracted from it. Last year at COP28 conference, countries decided to triple nuclear power output in the next 25 years but did not draw up a plan for long-term storage of used fuel. However, as countries continue to increase their production of nuclear power, facilities like those developed by Transmutex will become increasingly necessary unless technological breakthroughs are made like this one that could revolutionize how we handle spent fuel in our future energy systems.
