[…] The American Chemical Society on Monday shared preliminary findings from Los Alamos physicist Terence Tarnowsky, who has uncovered evidence – albeit from simulations – that the waste from traditional nuclear reactors could be further refined into tritium, turning more than 90,000 metric tons of useless and deadly garbage into a valuable resource.
And by valuable, we mean valuable.
“Right now, the value of commercial tritium is about $15 million per pound [$33 million per kilogram], and the US doesn’t have any domestic capability to create it,” Tarnowsky told the ACS for the announcement of his research, which has yet to be published. According to an abstract of his paper shared with the press release, a 1 GW(th) deuterium–tritium fusion plant would require more than 55 kg of tritium per year.
[…]
According to Tarnowsky’s simulations, all one would need is a particle accelerator to “jump-start atom-splitting reactions” in the waste that would “ultimately produce tritium after a series of other nuclear reactions.”
The idea isn’t new, Tarnowsky admitted, but modern tech finally makes it practical.
According to his research – all simulated thus far, mind you – an accelerator-driven system running at about a gigawatt of thermal power could produce around 2 kilograms of tritium per year, roughly matching the annual commercial output of Canada’s CANDU reactors.
That’s all well and good, but ACS fails to mention some things in the preliminary bit of information it shared ahead of Tarnowsky’s presentation at its Fall expo this week. It’s not clear what the ratio of nuclear waste input to tritium output is, for example. ACS also didn’t mention if there are other byproducts of the process that could be harmful. The org noted in its release that efficiency calculations are the next step Tarnowsky has planned for his ongoing project, and the group didn’t respond to questions before publication.
[…]
Source: Physicist simulates turning nuclear waste into fusion fuel • The Register
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