Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2004 | 11:16 a.m.
Some UNLV researchers are trying to be the modern equivalent of alchemists, but instead of seeking a cost effective way to turn lead into gold they are searching for an efficient way to change high-level radioactive waste into low-level waste so that it is less dangerous.
The technology could eliminate the nation's need to bury nuclear waste in deep geological repositories such as the Yucca Mountain site, researchers said.
The problem is that it will take a lot of gold -- billions of dollars -- to "transmute" nuclear waste on a large scale, said Anthony Hechanova, director of UNLV's Transmutation Research Program.
The federal government currently funds transmutation research at about $60 million a year, Hechanova said, and at the current rate, large-scale facilities to try to transform the waste will not be online until 2030. Yucca Mountain is scheduled to begin accepting waste by 2010.
"Right now, the Department of Energy's interest in the (research) program is to avoid building a second repository," Hechanova said. "If we stay at the current level (of producing nuclear waste), every 20 years we would need to build a new Yucca Mountain."
As researchers at the lead university in the national transmutation research program, Hechanova and other UNLV researchers are meeting with scientists from around the world this week to discuss advances in nuclear partitioning and transmutation that may make the process easier.
This week's international conference, one of a handful the university hosts on the topic each year, has brought experts on nuclear fuel and transmutation from 22 countries to UNLV's Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies.
Hosting the conference greatly increases UNLV's prestige as a scientific research university while allowing professors to discuss their ideas on transmutation with some of the best in the field, Gary Cerefice, deputy director of UNLV's Transmutation Research Group, said.
UNLV has been at the forefront of the nation's efforts to find ways to change nuclear waste since Congress first funded the research in 2001, Hechanova said. Spurred by the possibility of playing host to the nation's nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada's congressional delegation helped fight for both the national funding and UNLV's initial $3 million allocation to research transmutation and radiochemistry.
To date, the university has received about $15 million in federal money in the past four years to pay for student and faculty research projects, equipment and infrastructure support and international collaborations that advance transmutation research.
That's more money than all of the other participating universities have received combined, Hechanova said, and allows UNLV to train both undergraduate and graduate students to be the future experts on an issue that has uniquely impacted Nevadans with the proposed Yucca Mountain site. It's also allowed UNLV to bring on five new professors from such top universities as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"What does that say about UNLV that people are coming here from MIT for our academic program," Hechanova said. "I predict that in about five years UNLV will have the No. 1 actinide program in the nation, if not the world.
"It makes sense for UNLV to lead this research because if they do move forward with Yucca Mountain, we want to have experts here ... who are independent from federal government."
UNLV researchers are studying 27 different issues related to nuclear partitioning and transmutation, including actinide chemistry, which includes the study of how radioactive metals react with other materials over time. A new actinide laboratory being finished this week will allow students and faculty to work with plutonium.
Nuclear partitioning is the separation of the nuclear waste into its individual elements. It allows scientists to significantly reduce the amount of waste that has to be classified as high-level waste, Hechanova said. Only about two percent of used nuclear fuel is extremely radioactive and the rest of the waste can, if separated out, be classified as low-level or non-radioactive waste.
Some of the elements, such as plutonium, can also be recycled to produce more nuclear fuel, Hechanova said. In the future, other elements of nuclear waste may be recycled for use in other industries, such as medicine.
Once spent nuclear fuel is reduced to its individual elements, highly radioactive particles can then be changed into low-level waste, Hechanova said. The transmutation rate can reduce the waste's radioactive life down to 100 to 300 years as opposed to the 100,000 years scientists predict the waste will be toxic if left untreated, Hechanova said.
In predicting the safety of Yucca Mountain, "scientists have a lot of confidence in how geology materials act over 100 years but we don't over 100,000 years," Hechnova said.
With the continued advancement of the technology, Hechanova said it's possible to completely eliminate the need for geological repositories as all nuclear waste will be able to be recycled or reduced to such a low-level toxicity that certified landfills could accept it.
The Nevada Test Site and several other landfills throughout the country already accept low-level waste, Hechanova said.
The UNLV research program works involves students and faculty in six departments across three different colleges, including students studying mechanical and electrical engineering, chemistry, geoscience, physics and health physics, Hechanova said.
Students and faculty also benefit from partnerships with leading nuclear research institutions such as Los Alamos in New Mexico, and through international collaborations with Russia, the Republic of Georgia, France, Israel and Canada, as well as the European community at large, Cerefice said.
The research program has also allowed the university to build eight new laboratories and bring in equipment such as a transmission electron microscope that students in several scientific disciplines can use.
With the capacity to magnify an image up to 1.3 million times, the transmission electron microscope is a $1.3 million investment the university could never have made on its own, Hechanova and Cerefice said.
"We're picking up infrastructure that would take us years to develop," Cerefice said.
The research program supported more than 35 researchers and more than 70 students in its first three years, producing 23 master's degree graduates and one Ph.D graduate, Cerefice said.
"We're training people who will be the decision makers for the next 50 years."
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