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Laser alchemy



The October 2003 issue of CERN Courier has a short
item (on page 11) entitled "Laser alchemy could burn
nuclear waste." Each laser pulse delivers 350 J of
energy in 0.7 picosecond to a gold target. The beam
is highly focused and the irradiance (they call it intensity)
is 5*10^20 W/cm^2. Electrons from hot plasma, formed in
that way, have relativistic energies. The bremsstrahlung
gamma rays are produced by them in gold.

"The team used these gamma rays to irradiate a sample
prepared with waste solution from a fuel processing plant.
They found that the irradiation changed iodine 129 into
iodine 128. While both of these isotopes are radioactive,
the change is important because it corresponds to swapping
a half-life of 15.7 million years for one of 25 minutes."

Will photonuclear (gamma-n, gamma-2n, etc.) reactions
induced by lasers play a role in getting rid of radioactive
waste in the future? They might. And who knows, this
approach may turn out to be more desirable than older
proposals based on large accelerators. The accelerator
based approaches are described on my web site:

http://blake.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/waste

Ludwik Kowalski