Green Energy from Nuclear Power? Texas A&M Physicist Says Yes

Recent research from a Texas A&M University physicist could lead, not only a green energy solution to provide the power demands of the future, to a solution to the problem of how to dispose of radioactive waste left over from current Nuclear power plants.

According to a recent press release, Texas A&M’s Peter McIntyre is developing the technology capable of destroying the hazardous waste from spent Nuclear reactor fuel rods, while at the same time, producing safe nuclear power which could power to world for thousands of years to come.

The key to McIntyre’s plan is the ability to remove what are known as transuranics from spent fuel rods. The rods are the waste product of nuclear fission and the transuranics are the hazardous chemical elements, created within the fuel rods during fission process, and are what make the spent fuel rods such a waste disposal nightmare. Current estimates are that the amount of spent nuclear fuel, being housed in pools at nuclear facilities until a better option is found, currently stands at 65,000 tons.

“In my opinion, the only way to properly deal with transuranics is to destroy them,” McIntyre said. “They are an unthinkable hazard if they ever get into the biosphere. There has long been discussion that we could find a site like Yucca Mountain that’s so isolated from groundwater and so stable geologically that we could say with confidence it will be the same 100,000 years from now as it is today, and that burying fuel there, closing the door and forgetting it is something we can responsibly do. I don’t buy those arguments.”


“In the same process by which we extract the transuranics from the spent fuel, we also extract the uranium so it can be re-used as an ongoing energy resource to provide nuclear energy for the next several thousand years,” McIntyre said.

If it works, McIntyre’s plan would destroy the transuranics in the spent fuel rods, and at the same time it would recover useful uranium to be used in further nuclear fission to produce power. The design is known as ADSMS which stands for accelerator-driven subcritical fission in a molten salt core. In simplistic terms, the process chops up the spent fuel rods, dissolves them in molten salts, and then uses subcritical nuclear fission to extract and destroy the transuranics.

“In the same process by which we extract the transuranics from the spent fuel, we also extract the uranium so it can be re-used as an ongoing energy resource to provide nuclear energy for the next several thousand years,” McIntyre said.

“We are preparing a proposal to the DOE to build and put into operation a first model of this strong-focusing cyclotron,” McIntyre said. “It would be quite an advance in the field of accelerator physics unto itself. But most particularly, for the first time, it will make it feasible to drive a subcritical fission core capable of destroying transuranics at the same rate they are made in a power reactor.”

The complete article can be found online at the Texas A&M University web site. Also, more information about McIntyre and his research is available at: http://people.physics.tamu.edu/mcintyre/.