In a twist on the proverb “Set a thief to catch a thief,” physicists at the University of Texas at Austin have designed a system to facilitate the disposal of spent nuclear fuel that combines nuclear fission with fusion. The hybrid system will destroy 99% of the spent fuel, and the waste that remains will be less toxic than the spent fuel now accumulating in storage at nuclear powerplants around the country, the researchers say.
President Barack Obama’s decision to halt further development of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada and “devise a new strategy toward nuclear-waste disposal” has pushed the issue back into the “urgent” pile. Contracts signed with nuclear utilities under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 required the Dept. of Energy to begin receiving spent fuel for permanent storage in 1998. Since the deadline passed, the utilities have successfully sued DOE for failure to perform and have won damages to compensate them for the cost of storing the waste at their plant sites. Yucca Mountain is not expected to be ready until 2017.