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What if you could help solve the nuclear waste problem and at the same time give fusion research a new raison d'être? A trio of physicists at the University of Texas at Austin have dreamed up a trick to pair nuclear fusion and fission in a way they think could open more promising futures for both technologies.
Their idea is to surround a compact, circular tokamak fusion reactor they have devised with a ring containing the most noxious waste products from nuclear power plants. Neutrons emanating from the fusion reactor would break down long-lived transuranic radio active waste from spent fuel and turn them into much shorter-lived elements.
The net effect would be to convert high-level radio active wastes containing elements like americium and curium, which need to be stored safely for 100,000 years or more—a problem that has derailed big storage projects like Yucca Mountain—into fission products, such as barium, that fully decay in hundreds of years.
At the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE), the KSTAR tokamak recommenced operations in December after a major upgrade to replace the…
KSTAR aims for longer plasmas
At the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE), the KSTAR tokamak recommenced operations in December after a major upgrade to replace the device's carbon divertor with a tungsten divertor.
According to an on the KFE website, the original carbon divertors could take a thermal load of 5MW/m², whereas the tungsten divertor can take 10MW/m². The upgrade is critical to the goal of sustaining a 100-million-degree plasma for 300 seconds by 2026. Data from the operational campaign will be directly relevant to °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¸ßÊÖ, which will operate a tungsten divertor under similar plasma conditions in terms of shape and structure.
This testing campaign will continue through February 2024. Read more about the plans in this in English on the KFE website, or in Korean in the .