Come on, the Bevatron could do this. You are getting all worked up over nothing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Heavy ion colliders are built to much higher energy than this would require. Your sense of scale may be off. And, keeping a lid on the rate of transmutation keeps away from a meltdown. Seems like 30 years in better than 100,000 years.

Coal ash has the same uranium concentration as dirt. And neither have associated fission products unless the dirt has been contaminated by the Chernobyl accident or something like that. You can call natural uranium nuclear waste, but since we don't allow reprocessing of nuclear waste, you are stuck with CANDU reactors if you want to use it as fuel. I think you are being silly. Coal use actually reduces radiation exposure through dilution of carbon-14 in our diet. Not a good reason to burn coal of course.

OK maybe he is just not clear that leaving it alone means ending our use of fossil fuel. Sounded like he expected that to end when we do.

So unmined uranium is nuclear waste?

And yet it works. http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r... Perhaps this a forest and trees issue for you.

You've made an error there. http://www.engineering.com/Ele... But why must we run the accelerator when the sun isn't shining? Low cost solar power takes the edge off this.

That is precisely what I am suggesting. Your proposal still risks meltdown while the accelerator controlled system may avoid that. But it does not get all the fission products. For those, further fission through proton collision will do the trick. And yes, that costs energy. Notice we are not looking at neutron cross sections here. Heck, we could accelerate the fission products themselves and have them as both bullet and target. There's a smashing solution to the nuclear waste problem.

You claim uranium is nuclear waste?

Nuclear power is on the way out. It just can't get costs down and alternatives are getting cheaper and they will remain cheaper. The money to deal with the waste needs to be stockpiled now while there is still some revenue to tap. Just the opposite is happening however.

Nuke nuts are blinded by their strange love for nuclear power so they end up saying a lot of ridiculous things. That was one of them.

Yes, nuclear power was a mistake that must be paid for. Luckily, much cheaper energy will be available to do the repayment than was generated originally and it will continue to be available after the clean up job is done for fun things like space catapults, another kind of accelerator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Stop burning coal today and aside from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the ecosystem will have forgotten the effects. That is not the case with Chernobyl or Fukushima or the nuclear waste releases the NRC is promoting with this new rule.

An accelerator can disrupt the fission products directly. You are thinking of the transuranics with your spallation target. http://large.stanford.edu/cour... But, the fission products can themselves be proton targets and be disrupted right down to hydrogen.

I understand that you have a strange love for nuclear power. But for those of us who see it realistically, your love of power is a classic of mythology which always ends badly. Nuclear power has its place in naval propulsion, but in a civilian context it is a very poor choice. It is time to clean up your mess.

No, avoid transportation, do it on site. There are a number of possible crowbar approaches. The accelerator driven sub-critical reactor gets the transuranics and laser induced gamma rays may transmute some fission products, but ultimately the sledgehammer approach may be needed. Everything has a large proton cross section at high energy so the radioactive fission products may be disrupted into light elements. In the limit, a high energy proton beam can convert everything to hydrogen, which is not radioactive. Since renewable will be making energy abundant and cheap, getting this done in under sixty years seem feasible.