Argonne National Laboratory

Congratulations!!

gratz

Not impossible - it's about time the gov started taking another look at nuclear!!

Spent Nuclear fuel is too valuable to be Nuclear Waste.

The very low current price for uranium has supported the “one pass through" fuel cycle that America uses to produce nuclear power. Somewhere down the line America will decide that a 3% fuel efficiency for utilization of nuclear fuel is no more acceptable than it would be for a 3% fuel efficiency for a family car burning gasoline. The research performed by Dr. Regalbuto and her talented Argonne team will be very valuable for extracting more of the energy available in nuclear fuel from the resource.
There is an alternate reactor technology developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Molten Salt Reactors, that can routinely achieve very high nuclear fuel utilization by dissolving U-235 in molten fluoride salts. Limitations in accumulation of fission products and neutron poisons are averted using a fluid fuel approach over solid fuel rods. ORNL proved the molten salt reactor technology worked, but, for largely non-technical reasons the technology has been allowed to languish on the sidelines for four long decades. Hard neutron spectrum versions of molten salt reactors can actually consume spent nuclear fuel and produce energy and fission products. Long lived Minor Actinides normally requiring ~25,000 years to decay can be burned in a Fast Spectrum Reactor through a process of Separation and Transmutation. This converts a Minor Actinide nuclear waste problem that would require sequestration for ~25,000 years to a problem of storing fission product waste for ~400 years until the fission products decay to the level of the natural background.
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AMSTER (Actinides Molten Salt Transmuter) Reactor proposed by J. Vergnes, D. Lecarpentier of Le Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie de Grenoble (LPSC)
http://www.nea.fr/html/pt/docs/iem/madrid00/Proceedings/Paper17.pdf