New fusion reactor: Hybrid fission-fusion!:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127131654.htm
This uses a tokamak to generate a bunch of neutrons to kick apart the nasty byproducts of a regular fission reactor, getting rid of more than 99% of the fission waste at the same time extracting more energy from the leftover stuff. One fusion reactor can suck up the waste of 10 fission plants!

There are already techniques that recycle nuclear waste, but perhaps this one is more efficient or safer.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
There are already techniques that recycle nuclear waste, but perhaps this one is more efficient or safer.

Considering it gets rid of 99% of the nasty stuff, it has to be safer. What surprises me is they could actually mix plutonium/uranium whatever, stuff in with a plasma and still get it up to 100 mil like that, I mean the regular tokamaks have enough trouble getting to 100 million with a pure plasma so what are they doing differently? My guess is they use a pure plasma constantly replentished and feed some of it to an ionized heavy ion plasma and let the two mix outside the actual tokamak chamber, kind of like a particle accelerator slamming to parts together. I don't see how they could possibly make a stable plasma with U238 and such mixed in. It is only the neutrons that allow the uranium byproducts to be burned, the plasma itself would never do the trick, remember, fusion poops out at iron and above and fission poops out at iron and below so they could never work in sync, they would have to be separated. It seems iron must be star poop🙂

Originally posted by sonhouse
Considering it gets rid of 99% of the nasty stuff, it has to be safer. What surprises me is they could actually mix plutonium/uranium whatever, stuff in with a plasma and still get it up to 100 mil like that, I mean the regular tokamaks have enough trouble getting to 100 million with a pure plasma so what are they doing differently? My guess is they use a p ...[text shortened]... ey could never work in sync, they would have to be separated. It seems iron must be star poop🙂

The nuclear waste is almost certainly not in the tokamak. There will be a separate chamber for the nuclear waste, The walls of the reactor will be to all intents and purposes transparent to the neutron flux.

Originally posted by DeepThought
The nuclear waste is almost certainly not in the tokamak. There will be a separate chamber for the nuclear waste, The walls of the reactor will be to all intents and purposes transparent to the neutron flux.

That would be the only way it could work, seems to me. You couldn't just mix U238 gas into the fusion plasma, it would just quench it out.