Climate Change and Nuclear Waste: Solve both with one stroke!

A new perspective on nuclear power is long overdue in the environmental movement and James Hansen's recent talk at U.C. Berkeley points the way ( see video of his presentation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ctTxZHosI). The urgency of developing a new energy infrastructure to replace the coal and oil based technology is understood, how to do it is the open question.

What most folks don't know today is that the current generation of nuclear power generation plants don't efficiently burn the nuclear fuel, and they depend on a continuous supply of new Uranium. The main reason that they only extract a tiny fraction of the available energy from the fuel is concerns over proliferation and technical limits that are intrinsic to the first three generations of nuclear plants. Current plants generate what is labeled as "waste" but it's really a resource that can power the planet for the next 1000 years, enough to heal the earth from the blast of heat we are just beginning to experience from the burning of fossil fuel.

With the current nuclear power systems, we must store the waste for 24000 years or more and are committed to something that just isn't realistic. The current systems produce waste that has long decay times and it's been known for a long time though not discussed in public very much that the storage of nuclear waste for the long term isn't likely to be a viable solution. The more practical solution is to transmute the waste into a less harmful and shorter lived form, extracting the energy locked up in the process. We have enough waste now to provide power for our civilization for 1000 years-long enough for the excess CO2 to come out of the atmosphere.

The key to extracting the energy from what we now call nuclear waste is the development of subcritical fast neutron reactors such as the systems proposed by the Nobel laureate Carlos Rubbia ( see for example: http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2008/07/nobelists_talk_energy.html or a more technical talk : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8) or the more recent Lawrence Livermore proposal with the market ready acronym of "LIFE" : https://lasers.llnl.gov/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/how_life_works.php)

We will need to invest in the Research and Development that will make practical the recycling of our present harvest of nuclear "waste" and the recent impasse on the construction of a nuclear waste respository gives us an opening to rationalize our policy, and to solve one of humanities biggest challenges.

The use of the new generation of fast neutron sources growing out of the laser fusion and the z-pinch fusion programs makes it possible to both extract useful energy from the waste that we now store at each nuclear power station, and to reduce the volume of the waste that will need long term storage and to do so in a proliferation resistent way.

Our current generation of environmental activists are repeating slogans, and not grappling with the scientific realities, stuck in an old paridigm that obscures the real potential of this avenue to restore the viability of human civilization without giving up the precious aspects of our society and to get back to living in harmony with the natural world.

We can develop energy sources that reduce the potential for toxic pollution now present in every nuclear station through reprocessing of the waste, and it's important to do so before the thousands of tons of waste now stored deteriorates and poisons the environment and the possiblity of making use of this precious energy source.

The US and the world scientific community should immediately launch a project to develop the family of reactors that we know are possible. Several tracks are necessary including laser and z pinch fusion neutron sources, Thorium energy amplifiers, liquid flouride fast reactors, and the engineering studies and test facilities that can bring this technology to the point where we can build thousands of modular power stations within the next 30 years.

I think that with leadership from the Obama administration, and a clear vision from the scientific community combined with public education we can do this!