What is Nuclear Energy?

Many people around the world, even those in the scientific community, believe that the world’s energy problems could one day be solved by nuclear energy. Nuclear energy gives us a way to produce large amounts of clean energy due to the fact that nuclear reactors produce zero greenhouse gases while operating. Nuclear reactors work by shooting a neutron directly at an atom causing it to split into smaller atoms. This process, known as fission, generates very large amounts of energy in the form of heat which the reactors then convert into electricity. Although nuclear power seems great on the surface, there is one primary factor that currently makes nuclear energy not as popular as one would expect. The main issue with nuclear energy comes in the form of nuclear waste.

Nuclear waste is the radioactive byproduct that is produced by nuclear reactors. This waste remains in a radioactive state for thousands of years which is the main hurdle for mass adoption of nuclear energy. This problem with nuclear energy production, however, may finally have a viable solution that could one day make nuclear energy our go-to power source.

Lasers For Waste Management

When discussing nuclear reactors the most commonly used argument against them usually points out the vast amount of nuclear waste that they produce. French physicist Gerard Mourou (alongside American physicist Arthur Ashkin and Canadian physicist Donna Strickland) believes that he may have found a solution to this problem and even won a Nobel Prize in 2018 for his work on this subject. Mourou and his team claim that they can use high-intensity lasers to help eliminate the radioactive nature of nuclear waste.

While this technology is still years away from being fully functional, this could eventually reduce the longevity of nuclear waste from thousands of years to just minutes. Mourou calls this process transmutation because it will transform the atoms of nuclear waste into different non-radioactive atoms. This works by hitting the nuclear waste with quick, short bursts of high-intensity lasers using a technique called Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA). CPA technology gives us the ability to produce laser pulses that can reach up to 1 PetaWatt (PW) of power. According to Plymouth Grating Labratory, “When tightly focused, pulses with peak powers greater than 1 PW can produce … resulting electromagnetic fields that are much stronger than the fields that bind electrons to atomic nuclei.” Once this technology is fully researched and readily available governments around the world may start to embrace nuclear power as the energy source of the future.

Sources

https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-energy.html

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gerard-Mourou

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-nuclear-waste-storage-france/

https://www.plymouthgrating.com/applications/chirped-pulse-amplification-cpa/