The flow of ultra-fast particles makes it possible to burn the waste and produce energy. A thorium reactor could also be powered by nuclear waste from existing nuclear power plants. The by-products of thorium fission cannot be used to make an atomic bomb, he says.īut that's not all. The thorium cycle would also have the advantage of preventing nuclear proliferation. “We are talking about a few kilograms instead of tons,” says Carminati.įederico Carminati specialises in computer simulation of nuclear systems. The radioactive decay time of thorium by-products is much shorter than that of uranium - 300 years instead of 300,000. The amount of hazardous waste would also be significantly reduced. There are many advantages to a thorium reactor with a particle accelerator, according to Carminati. This function would have prevented the deadly accident at Chernobyl in 1986. Once the flow of neutrons is interrupted, the reactor shuts down immediately. This means that, unlike conventional reactors, the plant is incapable of sustaining a chain reaction. Thorium is fissioned inside a reactor kept in a sub-critical state and fed neutrons via a particle accelerator. Most of the uranium used as nuclear fuel is extracted from mines in Kazakhstan, Australia and Canada. “It is much more democratic than uranium,” says Carminati. Thorium is a weakly radioactive metal that occurs abundantly in rocks in almost the entire Earth’s crust. Transmutex's solution is to use thorium instead of uranium and to combine it with a particle accelerator. However, it generates radioactive waste that most countries, including Switzerland, do not yet know where to store permanently. > The short animation below illustrates what happens during nuclear fission:Ī nuclear power station produces electricity continuously and in large quantities without emitting greenhouse gases. The generated heat is then used to produce steam and eventually electricity. As the atoms split, they release energy and more neutrons, resulting in a chain reaction. In a conventional reactor, neutrons collide with fuel atoms – usually uranium or plutonium. In a nuclear power plant, heat is produced by splitting atoms – a process called nuclear fission. Their aim was to “reinvent” nuclear power altogether. In 2019, he founded the start-up Transmutex together with a French entrepreneur Franklin Servan-Schreiber. For Carminati, it was time to dust off Rubbia's project. Nuclear energy has shown its limits, notably when it comes to waste and safety. Some thirty years later, times have changed. The nuclear industry had little interest in innovation and the problem of storing radioactive waste was not yet pressing. There was a lot of euphoria surrounding the project, but in the end, the idea of a thorium reactor combined with a particle accelerator ended up in a drawer. Rubbia asked me to participate in the development of a new type of nuclear reactor," Carminati remembers. "It was 1990 and I was a young employee at CERN. Federico Carminati, a nuclear scientist and founder of Swiss startup Transmutex, vividly recalls the phone call he received from Carlo Rubbia, who was then the director of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) based in Geneva. "When a Nobel Prize winner asks you to work with him, it's hard to say no”. Italiano (it) Una start-up svizzera vuole reinventare l'energia nucleare (original).Français (fr) Une start-up suisse s’ingénie à réinventer l’énergie nucléaire.Português (pt) Um startup suíça quer reinventar a energia nuclear.Español (es) Una empresa suiza pretende reinventar la energía nuclear.Deutsch (de) Schweizer Startup will die Atomenergie neu erfinden.
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