Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have designed a new system that, when fully developed, would use fusion to eliminate most of the transuranic waste produced by nuclear power plants. The compact Fusion-Fission Hybrid employs the idea that fusion can be used to burn nuclear waste, producing energy and getting rid of much of the long-lived waste generated by nuclear reactors. "We have created a way to use fusion to relatively inexpensively destroy the waste from nuclear fission," says Mike Kotschenreuther, senior research scientist with the Institute for Fusion Studies (IFS). Toxic nuclear waste is stored at sites around the U.S., and construction of a large-scale storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is underway. The capacity of Yucca Mountain, which is not expected to open until 2020, is 77,000 tons, while the nuclear waste generated by the U.S. will exceed this amount by 2010.
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