“World’s Most Powerful Laser Beams To Zap Nuclear Waste.”

That Bloomberg Businessweek headline got our attention. We were imagining the explosion that might result.

But as it turns out, the zapping “could destroy nuclear waste and provide new cancer treatments,” according to the story.

Businessweek’s piece is an update on news that’s been around for a couple years — that the Extreme Light Infrastructure European Project is developing lasers that are “10 times more powerful than any yet built and will be strong enough to create subatomic particles in a vacuum, similar to conditions that may have followed the start of the universe.”

The lasers, to be built in the Czech Republic and Romania (and possibly Hungary), will cost about $900 million. It’s hoped they’ll be online by 2015. According to Businessweek, researchers believe “the power of the light beams could be used to deteriorate the radioactivity of nuclear waste in just a few seconds and target cancerous tumors, the projects’s Romanian coordinator Nicolae-Victor Zamfir said in an interview.”

(H/T to NPR.org’s Wright Bryan.)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/26/163717432/zapping-nuclear-waste-with-laser-beams-could-actually-be-a-great-idea

Extreme light infrastructure European project

ELI will be the gateway to new regimes in physics. At the same time, it will also promote new technologies such as Relativistic Microelectronic with the development of compact laser-accelerators delivering particles and photon sources with extremely high energies (more than 100 GeV).
ELI will have a large societal benefit in medicine with new radiography and hadron therapy methods. It will also considerably contribute to material science with the possibility to unravel and slow down the aging process in nuclear reactors and in the environment by offering new ways to treat nuclear wastes.

Timeline

The Preparatory Phase (PP) of the ELI project started in November 2008 and will last till November 2010. This design study is foreseen to be followed by a five year construction period.

More here

http://www.extreme-light-infrastructure.eu/what-is-eli.php

Scientific Advisory Committee: Report on the ELI Science

Some quotes from their conclusions;

“..The employment of the technology of DPSSL for beam-lines that use higher repetition rate is a
wise design, for which beam brightness and particle fluence etc. count for these classes of
experiments. Meanwhile this technology remains quite expensive, one may not be able to afford
to sweep with this completely….”

“..The optics with this tremendous power may suffer, for example, heating and smallscale self-focusing etc., which could distort the phase and amplitude of the amplified laser. Even a relatively minute distortion can accumulate a fatigue and defects in the optics, which in turn could lead to damage. This can be dangerous and expensive….”

“..Even with these, it is still not quite sure if we can all control possible distortion of phase front distortion of laser, say by a defect in crystal or some other impurities and fluctuations. This may pose a considerable risk. Many of these issues are common in other projects with high power lasers such as in fusion..”

“…Similarly, the final amplification stage takes multiple lines and one needs to coherently superpose them, as many as 10 or so at the highest power. This is a challenge that the world has never encountered nor has been carried out at this level…”

“…Committee members commented that they felt that an advisory committee to assist the technical
development may be needed here. This is because of such high challenge. Exactly what type of
technical assistance and / or review is most appropriate is not a trivial question…”

“…Committee members felt that some of the targeted specifications of the laser are not sufficiently
clear. Some felt that what constitutes ‘success’ is not sufficiently clearly stated. These questions
are of both technical nature and managerial one. Considering the philosophy of the ELI being a
broad facility for a mountain of Grand Challenges (as discussed in (1)), a breadth and flexibility
may be allowed for room to maneuver and grow out of a challenge. Nonetheless, a clearer table
of parameters is helpful….”

“..The facility will produce unprecedented high energy photons and other particles of unique
nature. This quickly brings in a severe problem of the issue of heavy radiation shield. It may
cause a serious restriction of usage of solid targets. New thinking on how to reduce radiation
and dosage may be needed….”

“..The spherical focusing onto nm scale interference patterns is casually described. Since it is
intriguing but not well tested, we recommend such a method to be tested on a more
conventional laser facility for a proof-of-principle, before it is introduced to ELI…”

“..Some recurrent comments were to define the machine parameters more clearly as well as definition
for success more clearly to help the management and funding agencies to handle the progress of
matrix more transparently. This is a delicate matter, we realize….”

“..As discussed in several different places, the management needs to bridge to, stimulate
collaborative and complimentary relationship with neighboring disciplines, such as accelerator physics
community, X-ray free electron laser (Xfel, while the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser is called
XFEL) community, etc. In order to enhance broad community’s involvement, such an idea of Virtual
Institute may be useful….”

http://www.extreme-light-infrastructure.eu/docs/Brochure-and-Communication/ELI-SAC-report-id357.pdf

Laser enrichment could cut cost of nuclear power

“..Dr Goldsworthy hopes that in 20 years the laser technology could be enriching a third of the world’s power station uranium, returning “handsome royalty streams” to Australia…”

By Richard Macey
May 27, 2006

NUCLEAR power could become significantly cheaper thanks to world-leading laser technology being developed in Sydney.

A team of about 25 scientists, engineers and technicians at Lucas Heights, home of Australia’s only atomic reactor, has succeeded where other nations, with budgets stretching into billions of dollars, have failed.

After a decade of work they have tested a new way to process, or enrich, the uranium needed to drive power plants.

The technology, said Michael Goldsworthy, a nuclear scientist and leader of the project, may halve enrichment costs, which he estimated accounted for 30 per cent of the price of nuclear fuel.

Power stations are fuelled by a specific blend of two types of uranium. About 5 per cent must be uranium 235, with the rest made from uranium 238. But natural uranium is 0.7 per cent U-235 and 99.3 per cent U-238.

There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix. One, called diffusion, involves forcing uranium through filters. Being lighter, U-235 passes through more easily and is thus separated from its heavier counterpart. The second method, widely adopted in the 1970s, uses centrifuges to spin the heavier and lighter atoms apart.

Both, said Dr Goldsworthy, are “very crude. You have to repeat the process over and over,” consuming enormous amounts of electricity. The spinning method requires “thousands and thousands of centrifuges”.

The Lucas Heights team, working for Dr Goldsworthy’s research company Silex (Separation of Isotopes by Laser Excitation), is the only one in the world developing a third technique that involves streaming uranium through lasers tuned to a frequency that only “sees” the U-235 atoms.

The lasers electrically charge the atoms, which become trapped in an electromagnetic field and drawn to a metal plate for collection. “It’s absolutely cutting-edge technology, incredibly difficult to develop,” Dr Goldsworthy said.

During the 1980s and ’90s the US, France, Britain, Germany, South Africa and Japan attempted to develop laser-enrichment technology, but all failed. One US effort involving 500 scientists gave up after spending $2 billion.

“By world standards, we have worked on a shoestring budget,” Dr Goldsworthy said, estimating the “more elegant and sophisticated” Australian concept at about $65 million.

This week Silex, which has no government funding, signed a deal giving General Electric the rights to commercialise the technology. The first laser-enrichment plant will be built in the US, but others could follow in Australia.

Dr Goldsworthy hopes that in 20 years the laser technology could be enriching a third of the world’s power station uranium, returning “handsome royalty streams” to Australia.

Asked if the Federal Government, which this week speculated Australia could “value-add” mined uranium through enrichment, was aware of his team’s progress, Dr Goldsworthy said that, due to regulation, “we report to the Government regularly”.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/laser-enrichment-could-cut-cost-of-nuclear-power/2006/05/26/1148524888448.html

Some aspects of a nuclear safety of a laser system
pumped with a twin-core fast burst reactor

Figure 1. Nuclear pumped amplifier.
1 – active core of burst reactor, 2 – laser module,
3 – external neutron reflector, 4 – laser-active elements, 5 – internal neutron reflector.

Conclusions

The conclusions reached from the analysis of the calculation results are as follows:

• the nuclear safety of the coupled system (twin-core pulse reactor with a laser module) is considerably enhanced by the use of fast reactivity control rods);
• the presence of a high power level internal neutron source prevents an accidental explosion of the fuel and also controls the power parameters of the pulses;
• The addition of the internal neutron reflector in the laser module serves the purpose of reducing the system reactivity exceed by a factor greater than two;
• to enhance the nuclear safety of the system, the reactivity input rate shell be limited to 10$/s.http://www.ippe.ru/podr/tpl/pub/html/3/ref3a.htmlSo they want to connect 10 of the above reactor cores together… should be interesting..