Books lunatics hate

Earl Colby Pottinger wrote:

I don't see what is wrong with just a big concrete structure in the middle of
Death Valley, glassify the waste and store it there.

Glassifying the waste just makes it harder to get at and mixes it up with
a bunch of non radioactive material. Much better to keep it in compact,
relatively pure form under active guard. That way when people finally
figure out how to use it as a feedstock for some useful process it will be
easy to get at.

Even better would be transmutation into high activity short lifetime
isotopes. Once the isotopes decay into something stable (which they will
do in short order) you can either bury them or use them as feedstock for
some industrial process. Since the resulting stable isotopes will tend to
be oddball things which aren't very common there is a good chance of
finding some interesting property or other that is commercially
useful. Transmutation can be accomplished using the neutrons from D-D or
D-T fusion, and the additional heat from the neutron capture and
subsequenct decay of the isotopes gives an additional source of energy
that allows you to run the fusion side at under Q=1, which is nice since
nobody's exceeded Q=1 yet, and probably nobody will for quite a few years.

This is also the best bet for getting fusion out from under the government
funding model (which rewards slow progress towards ill-defined goals) and
into the commercial funding model (which relentlessly drives towards what
works). As it currently stands fusion promises to be a cash cow for
universities and research institutions for the next three decades until
it starts to get commercially viable, at which point someone will notice
the neutrons and the resulting backlash will kill it. The best hope is to
make a virtue out of a necessity (neutrons from the easy reactions) in the
short term, and once we have real experience with running commercial
fusion reactors develop the means to first reduce the neutron flux
(D-He3) and then eliminate them entirely (p-B11).

.......Andrew
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Andrew Case |
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