Nuclear waste: a new company wants to recycle 96% of it, solving the problem
An American nuclear start-up, Curio , wants to develop a new type of reactor intended for a completely new business, recycling nuclear waste to make it still usable and dramatically reduce its volume.
Let's give an idea of the scale of the problem: the United States generates about 2,000 metric tons of new nuclear waste per year, on top of the approximately 86,000 tons already produced. Reprocessing nuclear waste is one way to make it less radioactive, but there is only enough capacity in the world to reprocess 2,400 tons per year, most of which is in France (1,700 tons) and Russia (400 tons ).
The ten-person startup is still in the early stages of a long-term, capital-intensive construction. Founding the company are Ed McGinnis, who has worked for the Department of Energy for years in nuclear waste management, and the Yechezkeland brothers Yehudah Moskowitz, McGinnis told CNBC that the goal is to have a pilot plant in operation by six years and a commercial nuclear waste reprocessing facility by 2035.
Curio's commercial plant will have a capacity of 4,000 metric tons when fully built. Its construction will cost $ 5 billion and will be the size of an American football stadium. According to McGinnis, calling the fuel coming out of conventional reactors "waste" is a misnomer, because only 4% of the potential energy value has been used, but it is a dangerous material, with enough radiation to harm humans for about a million years.
Curio has developed a chemical process called NuCycle to transform nuclear waste into usable products, such as fuel for advanced nuclear reactors, and into isotopes that can be used for other functions, such as generating ingredients to produce energy sources for space missions and energy sources for small batteries.
The process reduces the amount of radioactive waste to less than 4% of the initial ones. McGinnis also told CNBC that the waste only requires about 300 years of storage, a short time compared to normal nuclear waste. This means that 96% of waste can be reused and useful again.
Nuclear technology is constantly evolving to solve the problems that have hitherto held back the development of atomic energy. Closing your eyes and ignoring it risks being stupid and expensive.
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The article Nuclear waste: a new company wants to recycle them at 96%, solving the problem comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/rifiuti-nucleari-una-nuova-azienda-vuole-riciclarli-al-96-risolvendo-il-problema/ on Sat, 20 Aug 2022 09:00:52 +0000.