Converting nuclear waste into energy.

Ten thousand years from now, radioactive wastes from today's nuclear power plants still will be around, barely affected by the march of time. Nations with standing nuclear arsenals will continue to be storing and guarding at great expense the tons of plutonium kept for use in the warheads of outdated or scuttled atomic weapons.

"That doesn't have to be the case," maintains John C. Courtney of Louisiana State University's Nuclear Science Center. "These wastes can be converted into materials that need to be stored and secured for only a few [hundred) years, rather than for the millennia. With new technology, we can reduce the amount of these potentially hazardous materials and at the same time convert them into useful energy."

Courtney is conducting tests with other scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in Idaho on a novel experimental nuclear reactor that burns radioactive wastes to make electricity. The Integral Fast Reactor's technology place's on tomorrow's horizon a new generation of electrical power plants that could take wastes out of storage and burn them.

"What comes out at the other end would be short-lived wastes--200- to 400-year problem, rather than one spanning tens or even hundreds of thousands of years," Courtney explains. "The waste-burning plants would be a revolutionary way of generating power in the nuclear fuel cycle. As an approach to nuclear waste management, it's like recycling trash to produce energy, but without the smoke and the pollution," he indicates.

Of particular concern since the end of the Cold War "is what to do with the huge weapons reserve of plutonium--some 220,000 pounds of it when nuclear warheads are eventually scuttled. People here and in Russia are very concerned about the plutonium possibly getting into the wrong hands. Libya's Moammar Qadhafi would love to get just a hundred pounds of it. I could think of a few others Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim II Sung."

The Integral Fast Reactor's fuel cycle is the first one capable of taking actinides such as neptunium, americium, and plutonium and automatically putting them back--integrating them quickly and automatically--into the nuclear fuel stream. The secret to the reactor's technology lies in using neutrons at high energy levels. Understanding how neutrons react played an important role in opening the way for the development of atomic energy. Neutrons penetrate the atom's nucleus and tear it apart, producing tremendous energy. In the Integral Fast Reactor, high-energy neutrons work to form a minimum amount of actinide wastes.

Currently, Courtney sees no profit incentive on the part of industry to build plants that burn actinides. Even though the fuel would be cheap, nuclear power facilities are tremendously more expensive to build than those using fossil fuels. "But there will come a day when nuclear power will be cheaper, environmentally safer--and the next generation of power plants will be actinide burners."