Nuclear waste?
ADS: “An Accelerator-Driven nuclear waste transmutation System would consist of three major sub-systems:
- a proton accelerator (like ESS) with very high power (5 MW for a demonstrator, up to ~50 MW for an industrial burner);
- a burner reactor where spallation and transmutation would occur;
- a processing plant in which short-lived isotopes that could not undergo further transmutation would be removed for secure disposal, and where other isotopes could be recycled into new fuel assemblies for the burner reactor.
So the the global industry is already planning to build in Lund the first of the three components necessery for a transmutation plant. Are they planning more facilities? Why would they tell us if they were? No gain in that.
Olof Karlsson, physicist and chairman of Sweden’s alternative energy organizations (SERO):
”The fact that the accelerator may be the first step towards a new prototype reactor (which was first imagined by Carlo Rubbia) on Swedish ground – this is something that nobody wants to talk about. But if you know something about nuclear physics, you should realize that the size and effect of ESS is meant for transmutation experiments on a large scale – not just as occasional experiments.
ESS could be the first phase in developing a full scale, scary Rubbia reactor – accompanied with the necessary reprocessing plants.
The municipality (Lund) which is expected to give territory to establish the European Spallation Source project, should get legal guaranties, that transmutation of nuclear waste is not part of what ESS is going to be used for!”
Since the theory of ”transmuting” nuclear waste automatically means more reprocessing plants, this would only multiply our problems of radioactive contamination.
Radioactivity can kill people, or make them – or our children – seriously sick (cancers, mutations, deformaties).
