My knowledge about school level physics is admittedly not that fleshed out, but we were told that it is possible to convert mass to energy. My google-fu has sadly left me for my question here 🙁
So why can’t we just take e.g. nuclear waste and convert it to energy? After that so is my understanding it wouldn’t simply exist as matter anymore and wouldn’t require to store dangerous trash if you can convert it all to energy.
In: 77
Mass is converted to energy in all exothermic reactions.
Nuclear reactions are just a special kind of exothermic reaction. Fissile material goes in and fission products (radioactive) and energy comes out. When you burn hydrocarbons, fuel and oxygen go in and water and CO2 and energy comes out.
To turn mass into energy, we have to select a source that has stored energy it can release by reducing it’s mass.
Fission products have already had a decent amount of their mass removed, radiation from the fission products is also a mass to energy conversion process that happens spontaneously. Eventually all the fission products will decay into stable isotopes. Iron has no spare nuclear energy.
We can “speed up” the fission product decay by bombarding them with other particles. This makes them more radioactive (short term) so they reach a stable state more quickly. This is call “nuclear waste transmutation”. It can be done with another reactor producing a neutron source, or it can be done with an accelerator (which can create a variety of particles that can result in nuclear reactions that transmute the waste). This isn’t particularly effective but there are lots of papers on this.
Latest Answers