Scientists Say They've Figured Out a Way to Turn Nuclear Waste Into a Powerful Fuel

Scientists say they've developed a way to salvage nuclear waste from fission reactors — and turn it into a potent fuel for fusion reactors instead.

As Gizmodo reports, it's an exciting prospect that could give fusion — which has remained elusive despite decades of research, though many scientists believe it could mature into a viable grid-scale power source — a chance of one day becoming a viable source of clean and safe energy.

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have been scouring for a reliable source of tritium, a hydrogen isotope that, alongside deuterium, is used in current test fusion reactors to simulate the process that takes place inside stars like our own Sun.

To prevent future shortages of tritium, Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear physicist Terence Tarnowsky suggested that nuclear waste may be the answer. At least on paper, it's an elegant solution that could simultaneously help break down radioactive waste, which is extremely expensive to store long term.

"There are only tens of kilograms [of tritium] — both natural and artificial — on the entire planet," Tarnowsky told Gizmodo. "So, where is this tritium supposed to come from?"

As detailed in research to be presented later this year at a conference, Tarnowsky hopes to extract tritium from nuclear waste by beaming it with a superconducting linear accelerator while surrounded by molten lithium. The result, besides accelerating the decay of uranium and plutonium atoms, would be the production of tritium.

The physicist suggested that the method could "produce more than ten times as much tritium as a fusion reactor at the same thermal power."

But critics argue that Tarnowsky might be putting the cart before the horse. Despite widespread enthusiasm — especially from the private sector, which has been looking for ways to meet the seemingly insatiable power demands of AI — nuclear fusion as a widespread source of energy production is still likely many years out.

Scientists have only recently begun to eke more power out of highly energy-intensive fusion reactions than they had to put in. Scaling up the operations to produce a meaningful net positive amount of electricity could pose further challenges. For one, containing plasma at extreme temperatures and pressures, which is a requirement for conventional tokamak-shaped fusion reactors, has proven exceptionally difficult.

In short, finding a long-term and sustainable form of tritium fuel is only one small part of an immensely complex engineering challenge — and scientists still have a lot to prove.

More on nuclear fusion: Satellite Images Show China Building What Appears to Be a Huge Fusion Facility