A shrinking plan for nuke waste

Monday, Dec. 7, 1998 | 11:02 a.m.

The idea of shrinking 70,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste down to a couple hundred pounds sounds too good to be true.

For a handful of physicists at UNLV, however, reducing thousands of tons of radioactive materials to 230 pounds makes sense. It would put an end to the federal government's need for a nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain or anywhere else.

Most Nevadans oppose becoming the nation's nuclear garbage can, but there is no alternative under consideration.

"There is no voodoo technology here," nuclear physicist Anthony Hechanova said.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, Hechanova works at the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies and is proposing to use university expertise to develop a contingency plan if Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, fails to meet scientific tests that would qualify it as the nation's repository for high-level nuclear waste.

The physicists are proposing a way to transform the irradiated commercial nuclear reactor fuel, which have very long radioactive lives -- some in the millions of years -- into harmless elements. The process is known as transmutation.

When transmutation occurs, one element changes into another.

Unlike the dream of alchemists of old who tried to turn lead into gold, physicists know nuclear transmutation works.

The Department of Energy's national laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., has been working on transforming matter for years, Hechanova said.

The process is called accelerator-driven transmutation technology. It can reduce the waste at the reactor sites and also can produce enough heat to generate steam to turn a turbine and produce electricity.

After the Cold War ended, Los Alamos physicists discovered a process under study by Russian scientists that uses liquid lead bismuth to provide the trigger to transform matter in the form of neutrons. The neutrons bombard the radioactive materials and change them into harmless elements.

There are advantages to using lead bismuth. It does not react violently with air and water, and it cools the hot elements and shields the environment from radiation, Hechanova said. It is much safer than other transmutation processes.

The trouble with this solution is U.S. policy for managing nuclear waste.

Currently, the Department of Energy plans to place the entire suite of radioactive elements inside Yucca Mountain. "They plan to bury everything under the sun there," Hechanova said. By 2015, Yucca Mountain would be full and the government would have to expand it or build a second repository.

The government is working from a plan that is outdated and outmoded, he said.

"First of all, let's stop calling it nuclear waste," said Larry Chase, a retired scientist from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency that will have to license a repository eventually.

"We're really talking about spent nuclear fuel," Hechanova said. Radioactive elements produced in the transformation could be used in medicine or in research, he said. And transmutation can be done at reactor sites.

The transmutation process could destroy the bad actors of the mix, such as plutonium, neptunium and technetium, he said. Those elements have radioactive lives in the millions of years.

Another problem with transmutation is the lack of a working machine. Congress cut a $15 million request for further research to $4 million in the 1999 budget. Hechanova said that the research and development might cost about $150 million, a far cry from the $3 billion already spent on Yucca Mountain.

With a change in policy, Hechanova said, a working model could be ready in five to 10 years. That's sooner than Yucca Mountain would be ready, if the site is ever proved scientifically safe.