Description of capability
An engineering process by which nuclear waste is vitrified for long-term disposal.
Daniel R Cohn and InEnTec hold a patent where you heat the surface (the “cap”) of the waste in the melter using High-power RF microwave heating, which could significantly increase the throughput of vitrification of nuclear waste by 2-3x. So instead of having the nuclear waste in casks that will only last ~100 years, why not encase it in glass, which may last ~1000 years or more.
The secret sauce of the technology is using microwaves to heat the coal cap (which is better than plasmas, because they are less controllable, so you could be accidentally vaporize radioactive materials like Technetium).
Dan and his partner at InEnTec have also been interested in better melter design. You mix radioactive material and glass. But some of the nuclear waste contains fissile material. You don’t want to accidentally get critical. So one idea would be to have a shallower design that prevents criticality.
What gets vitrified, exactly? Plutonium for weapons was produced by the PUREX process. There’s a mess of waste. Mostly tanks that are slowly leaking. It’s the high level waste that came out of the PUREX process. This could be an add-on to existing vitrification facilities.
The third thing is a portable melter for nuclear accidents. Somebody explodes a dirty bomb. The material is scattered all around. So the cleanup crew collects the debris, scrapes off, encases it in glass on the spot.
Key people
Technology Readiness Level (1-9)
2
Needs that this could potentially address
Nuclear fission waste remediation, e.g. at the Hanford nuclear site and in any Nuclear fission plant in the long term
Note: Scott Kemp argues that vitrification of nuclear waste does not have a big future beyond from cleaning up old nuclear-weapons program waste
because no reactor in the United States uses reprocessing as a matter of course, and no realistic reactor will do so for the next 30+ years. Where do I get the date? Well, consider that the AP1000 reactors being finished at Vogtle now started their design life in 1985, and the EPR reactors being finished now started their design life in 1991, so the average time between having an established reactor concept (in those examples, the PWR) but no commercial design and a commercial reactor being completed is about 30-40 years. The GenIV concepts that envisage recycling as routine are at least that far away—if they ever manifest at all (lots of unsolved engineering there). Hence, I feel the business prospects are limited to cleaning up weapons programs. Hanford is the obvious customer here. In theory there are also customers in UK, France, Russia, China, India, but you have to contend with the problem of selling technology to foreign military entities and the fact that the isotopic compassion of military-reprocessing tailings can be classified information. In short, it’s a up-hill market development concept as I understand it.
Tech specs
Estimated time & cost to commercialize
Outstanding risks
- According to AIman Khan and Minhaj Malik, vitrification is not the largest bottleneck in dealing with commercial fission reactor waste.
- Is this serving a flat-to-declining fission market that it is also hard to break into?
References
- In terms of the vitrification, Ian Pegg is the big name according to Haruko M Wainwright. He has a mock-up facility for the Hanford facility.