Can a Plasma Gas Furnace destroy low grade nuclear waste without creating a radioactive residue hazard?

Question

Or could the PGF process at least condense the amount of waste so existing storage facilities would be able to handle the expected volume of low-grade waste now that nuclear energy may be coming back in vogue.

I've been doing a variety of casual research on Plasma Gas Waste disposal systems in my search for answers about environmental problems. I had a "eureka" moment when I considered the synergy of the PGF and the enormous amount of residual slightly radioactive waste from the Medical & research world. ã

Answer 1

You can't destroy nuclear material with any chemical fire -- you need enough energy (like that found inside the sun) to transmute the radioactive elements into non-radioactive isotopes either by fission, spallation, or fusion. No chemical-based fire has that much power.

If there is other burnable non-radioactive waste associated with the radioactive elements (even in trace amounts), then burning would reduce the volume, but it would not remove the radioactivity -- it would just concentrate it, like you want to do, possibly making it more dangerous.

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Answer 2

Stark seems to use Palladium isotope from his missiles as the reactor's fuel. Once the reaction starts, the energy harnessed is enourmous at 3 GJ/s or equivalent to 3 GW. (That's more than twice energy required for time-travelling (which needed only 1.21 GW of power) in Back to the Future films). This power can be used to power up his suit for a long time for his enhanced reactor, not the first one. To make this extremely efficient power supply, I believe we can. And I believe it is possible. But I think that it can be done only in a few hundred years. The movie is purely fictional and I believe that the writer are just fantasizing about the perfect energy source. (Dreams mostly become true eventually). If we are living in 19th century, people won't believe you if you can send sound wave and pictures accross the globe. Now, it's possible. So what makes an arc reactor impossible? It can be done. But not in recent time.