Nuclear Transmutation Energy Research

NUTRECK Nuclear Transmutation Energy Research Center of Korea... 

The production of electricity fiom nuclear fission energy is accompanied by formation of radioactive waste, of which the larger hazard is the presence of long-lived transuranium isotopes. The problems associated with this waste are still debated, but if the transuranium isotopes could be removed by exhaustive reprocessing and transmuted in special nuclear devices, the hazard of the waste would be drastically reduced (Chapter 12). This may require new selective extractants and diluents as well as new process schemes. Research in this field is very active. 

This misuse of the word radioactivity causes many people to incorrectly think of radioactivity as something one can get by being near radioactive materials. There is only one process which behaves anything like that, and it is called artificially induced radioactivity, a process mainly carried out in research laboratories. When some materials are bombarded with protons, neutrons, or other nuclear particles of appropriate energy, their nuclei may be transmuted, creating unstable isotopes which are radioactive. 

Report to Congress on Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative The Future Path for Advanced Spent fuel Treatment and Transmutation Research (2003) U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy, Science, and Technology. 

Nuclear chemistry (radiochemistry) has now become a large and very important branch of science. Over four hundred radioactive isotopes have been made in the laboratory, whereas only about three hundred stable isotopes have been detected in nature. Three elements —technetium (43), astatine (85), and promethium (61), as well as some trans-uranium elements, seem not to occur in nature, and are available only as products of artificial transmutation. The use of radioactive isotopes as tracers has become a valuable technique in scientific and medical research. The controlled release of nuclear energy promises to lead us into a new world, in which the achievement of man is no longer limited by the supply of energy available to him. 

Following the decline of nuclear energy, the AMSBs could remain and act as neutron sources for transmutation (incineration) of the remaining nuclear materials, for materials research and development, and for medical use (proton irradiation). The same goals are being pursued by the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) project in the USA or the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) project in Japan, which are the projects of experimental facilities of intense spallation neutron sources driven by proton accelerators. 

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