Power Magazine seems to be the sole remaining trade rag of the power industry now that Electrical World is gone, and might be of some interest to some here - good source of news on both nuke and renewable.
Glen
We did some work on a laser-based isotope separation project somewhere in the northwest, Hanford maybe; I can't remember the project name. The idea was that a laser can ionize specific isotopes and then electrostatically separate them, or something. The project didn't get past pilot stage.
Oh yeah, it was AVLIS.
Interesting. There was an attempt to commercialize per your link:
"In the largest technology transfer in U.S. government history, in 1994 the AVLIS process was transferred to the United States Enrichment Corporation (now Centrus) for commercialization. However, on 9 June 1999 after a $100 million investment, USEC cancelled its AVLIS program."
Looks like they stuck with centrifuges:
"In October 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a report to Congress which evaluated options to resume U.S.-technology enrichment operations to meet U.S. national security mission needs. The report concluded that Centrus’ AC100 centrifuge technology was “the most technically advanced and lowest-risk option.”[15]"
Whatever the method, getting the transuranic isotopes out of the waste stream and using them as fuel is the only way of reducing the long term hazard of used fuel disposal, which is essential for public acceptance of increased reliance on fission power. Public acceptance is tough; they would generally rather continue with coal, responsible for an estimated
200k to 400k excess deaths per year from lung disease alone (estimates vary widely), plus huge amounts of pollution of air and water, than risk converting to nuclear, responsible for some hundreds of deaths total. Mostly because of Three Mile Island, an accident which killed no one.
It's not just the transuranic elements in the nuclear waste that create long term hazards - admittedly Pu-239 can be used to made atomic bombs which is a particular hazard. The fragments of the U-235 produced by fission are also radioactive
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