LASERS COULD CUT LIFESPAN OF NUCLEAR WASTE FROM “A MILLION YEARS TO 30 MINUTES,” SAYS NOBEL LAUREATE

-Gérard Mourou has already won a Nobel for his work with fast laser pulses.
-If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level.
-If no solution is found, we’re already stuck with some 22,000 cubic meters of long-lasting hazardous waste.

Whatever one thinks of nuclear energy, the process results in tons of radioactive, toxic waste no one quite knows what to do with. As a result, it’s tucked away as safely as possible in underground storage areas where it’s meant to remain a long, long time: The worst of it, uranium 235 and plutonium 239, have a half life of 24,000 years. That’s the reason eyebrows were raised in Europe — where more countries depend on nuclear energy than anywhere else — when physicist Gérard Mourou mentioned in his wide-ranging Nobel acceptance speech that lasers could cut the lifespan of nuclear waste from “a million years to 30 minutes,” as he put it in a followup interview with The Conversation.