Nuclear Energy Company Proposes a New Reactor to Take Care of the Waste Problem

Transmutex, a Swiss company, states on its website that it is “reinventing nuclear energy from first principles” by using a process that uses radioactive waste as a fuel source.

Its transmitter is a particle accelerator that produces nuclear energy with fewer contaminants than any reactor on the market today. The technology represents a valuable tool in the transition to intermittent renewables by providing baseload energy-producing alternatives to fossil-fuel thermal power stations.

The particle accelerator rather than the radioactive fuel creates a controlled nuclear reaction. Turn off the particle beam and the reaction stops immediately. The technology is designed to use a wide range of nuclear fuels including the radioactive waste from existing reactors.

The company’s fuel of choice would be thorium which can be sourced from coal ash. It is five times more abundant than uranium and can be mixed with radioactive waste from spent fuel. On its website, Transmutex describes the technology as “engineered to be subcritical which makes a runaway thermal reaction impossible by design.”

A Reactor That Can Help Solve the Nuclear Waste Problem

Radioactive waste is one of the long-term objections environmentalists and others raise about the future use of nuclear reactors to address climate change. The Transmutex technology provides an answer two ways.

1. The technology uses thorium and radioactive waste materials from other nuclear reactors as fuel. This means it can reduce the amount of radioactive waste from spent cores. The spent fuels it can use include those containing plutonium, neptunium and americium, the most common nuclear waste in storage at operating and decommissioned nuclear power plants today. The residual waste produced is 100 times less than conventional nuclear power plants. And unlike the latter with spent fuels having a half-life of 200,000 years, Transmutex needs a much smaller storage footprint and its radioactive waste lifespan is 500 years.
2. The technology can be implemented at decommissioned nuclear power plants to both generate power and eliminate the on-site radioactive waste. One Transmutex reactor can eliminate the radioactive waste from three conventional nuclear power plants.

Thorium Versus Uranium Fuel

Thorium-powered reactors have been part of the nuclear energy conversation for years. Why?  Because this radioactive metal is readily sourced from many sites around the world and can be extracted from coal ash found at existing thermal electric power plants. China, France, and India have been working on thorium reactor technology for almost a decade. Unlike uranium-powered reactors, one using thorium never will experience a meltdown and won’t produce fissile bomb-making materials as a byproduct.

Why a Particle Accelerator

Particle accelerators are used today in diagnostic and interventional medicine today. But this will be the first time the technology is being used to generate energy on a commercial scale. Because the nuclear reaction only occurs when the accelerator’s beam is activated, the threat of a nuclear accident like the ones that happened at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three-Mile Island, is impossible. In addition, the system operates in near normal atmospheric pressure with a passive mechanism used to remove excess heat. Savings occur at all levels of implementing this type of reactor. And it is cheaper to construct, and operate.

The novel use here ends up replacing the controlled chain reaction that is used by today’s nuclear power technologies. The accelerator fires positively charged particles at a target to initiate a process called spalliation, a reaction that occurs when high-energy particles such as neutrons or protons strike the nucleus of atoms to release protons, neutrons and other particles as well as enormous amounts of heat energy. The heat is used to turn water to steam which then drives turbines and generators.

Transmutex is using a cyclotron particle accelerator rather than a linear one because the form factor is suitable for insertion into a variety of industrial footprints including decommissioned nuclear power plants.