That’s short-sighted, said Bernard Laponche, a physicist who co-signed Greenpeace’s report this year on nuclear waste and who opposes any plan to put the toxic material deep in the ground. The Single Cycle Laser SYLOS uses technology that ‘transmutes’ nuclear waste by bombarding atoms, and is being developed by 2018 Nobel Physics Prize co-winner, Professor Gerard Mourou. On 2 October, French physicist and Professor Emeritus Gérard Mourou received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on lasers. A research profile of Prof. Gérard Mourou and other ECE scientists talks about the future of lasers, from transmuting nuclear waste to shooting space junk. “It would be the Holy Grail,” said Christian Chardonnet, head of infrastructure for major projects at the French ministry of research. One of the possible applications of his work is to considerably reduce the lifespan of nuclear waste. Although Mourou, 74, is quick to say that the laser option for nuclear waste that he and Irvine, California-based Professor Toshiki Tajima are working on may be years away, its promise has created a flurry of excitement for the sector in France. Born: 22 June 1944, Albertville, France Two Lithuanian companies and a Nobel Prize-winning professor have created and demonstrated a laser powerful enough to reduce nuclear waste decay from hundreds of years to just a few hours. At least another 25 billion euros ($28 billion) is set to be plowed into an underground maze of tunnels near the village of Bure in northeastern France that could be the final resting place for the highly toxic waste starting in 2025. Prof. Mourou replied, “Without any question it will be the transmutation of nuclear waste. But every possible way must be opened and we stand ready to fund it if necessary.”. Mourou believes that it may be possible to transmute nuclear waste into a safer form. Enter Gerard Mourou, the Nobel Prize-winning subject of a fascinating new Bloomberg profile. Mourou shared the 2018 Nobel Prize for physics with Donna Stickland for their work on “chirped pulse amplification” (CPA), a technique for producing high energy laser pulses which do not … https://futurism.com/the-byte/nobel-prize-lasers-destroy-nuclear-waste Like with other deep storage sites in place, under construction or being considered in countries including the U.S., Japan, Finland and Sweden, the Bure plan has drawn protests. I dream of the idea, but we will have to wait and see what happens in the years to come.”. Even cutting the life of nuclear waste down on any scale will be a huge feat. Nuclear Waste. Nuclear waste is one of the biggest challenges in the mission for safer nuclear energy, but Nobel Laureate Gérard Mourou has an ingenious solution that could be a game-changer for the industry That’s like…how long it … “It’s far-off, but why not?”. Nuclear power can provide inexpensive electricity with little in the way of emissions, but there’s a catch: it produces horrifying radioactive waste that can remain deadly for thousands of years. Because that will make nuclear energy more clearly available. Photographer: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images, Sources: World Nuclear Association Reactor Database, Andra, Many European countries rely on nuclear for their electricity generation, The site in Bure is being studied for suitability for storing radioactive waste, A replica nuclear waste cannister stands beside a dormant storage borehole at the Cigeo laboratory. Although Mourou, 74, is quick to say that the laser option for nuclear waste that he and Irvine, California-based Professor Toshiki Tajima are working on may be years away, its promise has created a flurry of excitement for the sector in France. But no country can claim to have a comprehensive solution for dealing with its toxic waste. Nuclear energy has its advocates—it spews little by way of emissions and is produced relatively cheaply. Enter Gerard Mourou, the Nobel Prize-winning subject of a fascinating new Bloomberg profile. Three of InnoEnergy France’s partners under the spotlight thanks to Gérard Mourou’s Nobel Prize in Physics. “Nuclear energy is maybe the best candidate for the future, but we are still left with a lot of dangerous junk,” he said. Perhaps in the future, this surplus of nuclear waste we all have lying around will be no more. A 2015 report by GE-Hitachi put the cost of disposing nuclear waste—outside of China, Russia and India—at well over $100 billion. Next, Mourou presented several applications of chirped pulse amplification, his area of focus. Gérard Mourou has already won a Nobel for his work with fast laser pulses. Gerard Mourou—one of the three winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics—claims that the lifespan of radioactive waste could potentially be cut to minutes from thousands of years. And although only a fraction of that is highly toxic, more than 60 years after getting into nuclear energy, the country still has no definitive way to cope with it. Transmutation research has been going on for three decades, with efforts in the U.K., Germany, Belgium, U.S. and Japan either failing or in various stages of study. Waste to be stored 500m underground in Callovo- Oxfordien claystone, Service wells for transferring staff, materials and extracting air, Descent passage to disposal tunnels from waste receiving zone. A physics professor who looks a little like Doc from the “Back to the Future” movies has captured the imagination of France’s nuclear industry. Environmental group Greenpeace estimates that there’s a global stockpile of about 250,000 tons of toxic spent fuel spread across 14 countries, based on data from the International Atomic Energy Agency. But Mourou accepted that it might take decades before this “extreme light” solution could be deployed to destroy nuclear waste on an industrial scale. Mourou has been in huddles with the CEA, the French parliament’s committee for scientific choices and the state’s energy and research ministries even though he maintains it’s very early days. Articles, Nuclear October 2, 2019 Nuclear, a waste of time? He shared half the Nobel prize with Donna Strickland for their invention of a technique called Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) that pushes the envelope of laser physics.. “The research remains at the laboratory level and the prospect of seeing transmutation used at an industrial level is complex and expensive,” said Emmanuel Touron, who heads research on future fuel disposal at the CEA. Now garnering thousands of hits online, the clip from 2010 shows Gérard Mourou performing alongside scantily clad women in a promotional video … Leveraging years of research on high-energy lasers, we realized that the route to reach peak power beyond 10 PW was not to increase pulse energy—an increasingly costly endeavor—but rather to decrease the pulse duration to the attosecond-zeptosecond time scale.1In this way, exawatt power can be reached with a simple joule of energy. It’s science and lasers. The initial idea that lasers of this kind could potentially solve the nuclear waste disposal problem was raised by Gérard Mourou, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018. https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/laser-nuclear-waste?rebelltitem=2 And that doesn’t include atomic material generated by the military and medical sectors. He noted that three related conferences have been held and a … With almost 72 percent of its electricity coming from nuclear energy—the most in the world—it generates 2 kilograms of radioactive waste per person each year. On April 17, France opens its third national debate on nuclear waste, bringing together policy makers, advocacy groups and scientists to discuss handling an estimated 10,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste collectively produced by the country’s 58 reactors over their lifespan. If anyone could make this work, it’s Mourou. Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from "a million years to 30 minutes," says Nobel laureate Physicist plans to karate-chop them with super-fast blasts of light. Nobel Prize winners talk research, Nobel ceremony, and are remembered by U-M colleagues. What you have to do is to change the makeup of the nucleus.”. One, Ted Norris, is now the Gérard Mourou Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering. Mourou shared half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics with Donna Strickland. Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-nuclear-waste-storage-france The most toxic parts are stored right now in short-term facilities in La Hague in Normandy, in Marcoule and Cadarache in southern France and in Valduc, near Dijon. A radionuclide is an atom that has excess nuclear energy, making it unstable. Nobel laureate Gérard Mourou is using his notoriety to call attention to an interesting solution. This isn’t medieval alchemy, though. Right now there is no way that we can maintain the rate of the world’s energy consumption. One kilogram of Uranium 235 generates the same amount of energy derived from the combustion of 2 million kilograms of coal. Photographer: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg, Gerard Mourou in his laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique. Gérard Albert Mourou (French: [ʒeʁaʁ muʁu]; born 22 June 1944) is a French scientist and pioneer in the field of electrical engineering and lasers.He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, along with Donna Strickland, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification, a technique later used to create ultrashort-pulse, very high-intensity laser pulses. Mourou believes that it may be possible to transmute nuclear waste into a … Gérard Mourou of École polytechnique who leads the consortium says: “One important application demonstrated today has been the possibility to accelerate particles to high energy over very short distances measured in centimeters rather than kilometers … “Even if it means waiting for many more years, dozens of years, we should wait,” he said in an interview. Nobel Prize in physics in 2018 and professor emeritus at the École polytechnique, Gérard Mourou is a scientist that nothing can stop. After revolutionizing ophthalmic surgery with the invention of a new laser technique, the physicist launched a challenging scientific project, which only a researchers of this fame could imagine: the transmutation of radioactive waste by high-power laser. The storage and disposal of radioactive waste is regulated by government agencies in order to protect human health and the environment. “Nuclear energy is certainly the best, but you have one problem, of course,” Mourou said. Nuclear power can provide inexpensive electricity with little in the way of emissions, but there’s a catch: it produces horrifying radioactive waste that can remain deadly for thousands of years. If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level. With the discovery of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) and later optical parametric CPA (OPCPA), we have seen a considerable jump in laser pulse peak power by 6–8 orders o… Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 was awarded “for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics” with one half to Arthur Ashkin “for the optical tweezers and their application to biological systems”, the other half jointly to Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland “for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses” “What Mourou is really after is the accelerator that the laser creates,” he said. Thanks to Krish for sending a link to an article posted on the Extremetech website hereherehere which discusses the idea of Nobel laureate Gérard Mourou to use lasers to make nuclear waste safe. “The idea is to transmute this nuclear waste into new forms of atoms which don’t have the problem of radioactivity. Which is why nuclear scientists paid such close attention when physicist Gérard Mourou said this in his wide-ranging Nobel Prize acceptance speech: Lasers could cut the lifespan of nuclear waste from tends of thousands of years to 30 minutes. Mourou and Tajima want to create a high-speed laser-driven accelerator to produce a beam of protons that can penetrate atoms. “Nuclear energy is maybe the best candidate for the future, but we are still left with a lot of dangerous junk,” he said during his Nobel Lecture in December. Gérard Mourou Institut de la Lumière Extrëme, Paris, France For its 50th anniversary, scientists have selected Romania to build the first laser infrastructure capable of investigating for the first time matter at the nuclear level. ‘No reliable method’ State-controlled nuclear entities Electricite de France SA and Orano SA, charged with nuclear waste management, and CEA, France’s Atomic Energy Agency, have spent billions on the toxic material. A new development could bring the world one step closer to safely managing and even utilizing nuclear waste as energy. “I can imagine that the physics might work, but the transmutation of high-level nuclear waste requires a number of challenging steps, such as the separation of individual radionuclides, the fabrication of targets on a large scale, and finally, their irradiation and disposal,” said Rodney C. Ewing, a professor in nuclear security and geological sciences at Stanford University. Orano doesn’t want to wait around. Gérard Albert Mourou, a French physicist, was one of three laureates who won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics. “We must give science a chance.”, Elevator shaft at the Cigeo project in Bure, France. Nobel laureate Gérard Mourou is using his notoriety to call attention to an interesting solution. “Gerard is a gifted and very enthusiastic scientist, and he didn’t realize the hopes the words in his Nobel speech would create. At the facility in La Hague, an hour’s drive from the D-Day beaches, specially designed robots cast the most radioactive nuclear waste into glass casings before putting them in inox containers. When Mourou moved to U-M, some students from the University of Rochester followed. Greenpeace has pointed to several risks, not least of which being the chance of the toxic material seeping into the groundwater or a fire releasing radioactive gases. It wants to push ahead with its Bure deep-storage project, saying “many more years will be required before any industry-scale application” can emerge from Mourou’s work. Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material.Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons reprocessing. For Cedric Villani, a French lawmaker and the winner of the Fields Medal—the Nobel Prize equivalent for mathematics—that’s no reason to give up. Of that, 22,000 cubic meters—roughly equivalent to a three-meter tall building covering an area the size of a soccer pitch—is hazardous, according to the IAEA. It will represent a renaissance for Nuclear physics, for Romania and for the world. “I think about what it could mean all the time,” the scientist said in an interview at the Ecole Polytechnique, France’s most prestigious engineering school, near Paris, where he teaches. A research profile of Prof. Gérard Mourou and other ECE scientists talks about the future of lasers, from transmuting nuclear waste to shooting space junk. He said chirped pulse amplification can be used in fission reactions that stabilize nuclear waste, again using neutrons. “I don’t overlook the difficulties that lie ahead. Enlarge Laser technology has advanced to the point that some particle accelerators are now small enough to fit on a table – and that is clearing the way for new research and discovery. Continued research at U-M with the Hercules laser revealed previously unknown properties such as the creation of “filaments” that help the beam cohere. by Robby Berman. Mourou is the first to admit that his work, which would use powerful lasers to break down radioactive waste into less harmful material at the atomic level, could be decades off. France produces more nuclear waste per-capita than any other country. Handling nuclear waste such as spent fuel will be central to the policy, and physics Nobel laureate Gerard Mourou has proposed a solution, he said, adding that several international organisations were working together in this field. With some material already being able to go through irridation process with these lasers, who knows what the future could hold. Already the world’s largest facility for processing atomic waste, it is constantly being expanded—making a long-term solution urgent. Gérard Mourou The Nobel Prize in Physics 2018. He says that high-intensity lasers could one day render nuclear waste harmless in just a few minutes — a concept which, if realized, could make nuclear power a vastly more appealing energy option. 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