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Its been on the news now and again for several years the idea of building a nuclear waste disposal facility in utah, and accepting waste from european countries imported here.  I don’t think I have to tell you that the only people who aren’t against it are 1 the european countries, and 2 the people who stand to make the money.  Absolutely nobody wants nuclear waste in their backyard or even in their state.  Why this ever even became a possibility begs the question “What are we letting our politicians get away with?”

It isn’t a big surprise to me that I see things differently from everyone else.  I’ve always known that my mind is a little off from what other people call normal.  I think most of the people around me would agree.  It is this ability to see things in a little bit different light that enabled me to come up with the idea that I’m going to give to the world today.  This is not the first time I’ve told someone about my idea mind you.  In fact I’ve been laughed at or scorned several times when I’ve stated my thoughts.  Maybe I’m ahead of my time, or maybe I’m just plain nuts.  Either way, I’ve decided to put the idea down in writing for the whole world to see, and just maybe someone will be able to actually use it. 

To really understand the idea a bit of a primer is in order.  First you need to understand exactly what nuclear power and nuclear waste is really all about.  You see pretty much everyone has the idea that nuclear waste is this aweful byproduct of nuclear power production.  Most people don’t know why it exists or what it really is in essence.  The first part of this article is to explain what nuclear waste really is.

To put it into terms that everyone should understand, think about building a fire in your fireplace.  You toss in some wood, a bit of kindling, maybe some paper, and light it up.  As the wood breaks down in a reaction with the fire, energy is released in the form of heat and light.  The remnants of the burned fuel become the ash and charcoal left when the fire is extinguished.  A nuclear reaction generates scary amounts of power, but in its basest form it is the equivalent of a fire in your fireplace.  You start a really hot fire under intense pressure and burn uranium fuel rods.  The energy release is so intense that you melt the atoms that make up the uranium.  The matter that the fuel rods are made of melts down into energy which is captured as heat.  From there on its handled the same way a steam engine works.  The heat boils water to turn turbines and produce electricity. 

A fuel rod is made up of uranium fuel surrounded by carbon in the form of graphite.  As the uranium melts away the graphite balances the heat and prevents a meltdown.  As the atoms break down and the intense energy is released there is so much energy produced that it radiates at virtually every frequency.  Energy comes out as ultraviolet light, Violet light, Heat, electricity, and probably some other forms that we don’t even know how to measure or quantify. 

As you are putting gasoline in your car, you may or may not realize, but not all of the gasoline you burn actually turns into energy and moves your car foreward.  The fact is that less than ten percent of the energy in the fuel is ever utilized in the internal combustion engine.  The whole process is terribly inefficient.  A nuclear reaction is somewhat the same.  I don’t know how much of the energy we are actually able to capture, but it isn’t anywhere near one hundred percent.  Where does that extra energy go?  In your car, that energy is lost as heat and as pollution out your tailpipe.  In a nuclear reaction that extra energy is radiated out and absorbed into the graphite bars.  The graphite bars become radioactive because they are so infused with energy that it is litterally bleading out slowly.  Energy will continue to “radiate” from these graphite bars for at least 50 years at intense enough levels to make you sick just coming near it.  It will continue to leak out at lower levels for hundreds more.

So now you know what nuclear waste is you can probably can infer why its such nasty stuff.  What is the key element that everyone is missing.  In nuclear waste we have a massive amount of unharnessed energy captured into a compact substance trapped in a barrel and coated with thick layers of lead to keep any of it from escaping.  Can anyone describe what a common everyday battery you use to power your mp3 player or smoke detector is?  Two poles separated by a barrier of material which has been infused with latent energy wrapped in a metal can…  The components that make up a battery and a barrel of nuclear waste are pretty similar no?

So now you have the foundation for my idea, what is the missing element that would turn a nuclear waste disposal facility that nobody wants into a powerplant that will produce massive amounts of electricity with virtually no labor or environmental impact?  The key here is photovoltaic cells.  Over the last thirty or so years we have been working hard to harness the ability of photvoltaics so that we can produce electricity from the sun’s energy.  Thousands of variances in dopants, spacing between NP junctions, ect have been tried in the manufacture of PV cells to find a combination that can utilize and convert most of the energy that hits the cell.    Still Like gasoline in your car, most of that energy is lost. 

The inherant problem with solar panels is that as the sun hits them one freqency of energy converts into eletricity and the thousand of other frequencies are reflected back off the surface of the panel into the atmosphere.  They don’t hurt the environment, but they don’t do a very efficient job of harnessing energy.  You need a whole field full of panels to power a typical home.

So what do we need to do?  Stick one of these solar panels into a tub of nuclear waste and gather the energy that hits it.  Any energy that reflects just goes back into the waste barrel to be bounced around until it hits the panel again, and again, and again for the next fifty years.  Now the idea at this stage is oversimplified.  Just sticking an off the shelf panel into a barrel of waste is not going to be efficient enough.  The same testing that has been done to optimize PV arrays for solar energy capture needs to be done again to reoptimize them for capture of low level nuclear radiaion. 

There are hurdles that need to be overcome and they aren’t the kind of hurdles that I or probably you can overcome.  The people who posess and control the flow of nuclear waste can’t exactly hand out a barrel to anyone who wants to expiriment.  The people who have access to the semiconductor fabrication laboratory equiptment probably don’t have barrels of nuclear waste at their disposal.  I don’t imagine the would want them.  In order to bring this into the realm of possibility it is going to take a funded government project with an aim to actually make this work. 

Anyhow, now that I’ve put the idea out there I hope someone gets the chance to see it and maybe someday after I’m long dead I’ll get the credit for an idea that really will change the world.  I was thinking about the whole concept of importing nuclear waste into utah for storage.  It would be really ironic if someday eighty percent of the worlds nuclear waste was stored in my back yard, and all of a sudden a barrel of nuclear waste became more valuable than a hundred barrels of oil.  I know enriched uranium isn’t exactly commonplace.  As a fuel I’m sure its more scarce than anything you or I could buy.  The fact that most of the world is willing to give us the half burnt fuel for free could be a blessing in disguise.

Related articles by: Washington post, gregornot.wordpress.com, Wastewatcher.com, Utah planners corner, kotterreport.blogspot.com, breitbart.com, outside.in, senatesite.com, utahamicus, Starrynightlights