Is it possible to reduce 80% of existing radioactive waste? Carlo Rubbia says yes

Carlo Rubbia, winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the W and Z bosons and Director General of CERN from 1989 to 1993, may revolutionize nuclear fission with a new type of reactor that would reduce 80% of radioactive waste.

The management and storage of radioactive waste have been an argument against the use of nuclear technology because of its radioactivity for thousands of years. However, it is curious that most of society is unaware that, during the operation of a power plant, only 5% of the fuel in the reactor is used and the waste that is extracted still has a large amount of energy that could be used. For this reason, countries such as Finland, Sweden, and Spain are investing in the construction of deep geological repositories to store them as an energy resource.

What Carlo Rubbia is proposing, and which the Swiss company Transmutex will try to commercialize, is to combine a particle accelerator with a subcritical nuclear reactor to use a slightly radioactive element as fission fuel, i.e. to use the particle accelerator to transmute thorium into a uranium isotope that can be processed immediately, without producing plutonium or other highly radioactive waste.

Transmutex's technology was reviewed by Nagra, the Swiss national body that manages nuclear waste, and confirmed that it can reduce the volume of nuclear waste by 80%, as well as the time it is radioactive from hundreds of thousands of years to 500 years.

The most interesting aspect of the transmutation technique is that it could be applied to 99% of existing nuclear waste, which would have a global impact on its management while minimizing the proliferation of new waste.

In terms of operational safety, the particle accelerator allows an immediate stop of the transmutation reaction within two milliseconds, and the cooling of the liquid lead used in the reactor has the property of self-cooling in the event of a malfunction.

Both the Swiss government and private entities have given a big push to this Transmutex technology. However, it has to overcome two major obstacles: on the one hand, opposition to nuclear fission from countries such as Germany and Spain closing their nuclear power plants and, on the other hand, the high cost of the project itself.