Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Switzerland has endorsed a long-sought technology known as “nuclear transmutation” to dramatically reduce the amount of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.
Nagra, the Swiss national agency that manages nuclear waste, said it had spent several months investigating the method proposed by Geneva-based start-up Transmutex and concluded that the technology could reduce the amount of high-level radioactive waste by 80 percent .
Storing highly radioactive material has always been a major and expensive problem for the nuclear industry for hundreds of thousands of years.
While more than 20 countries, including the US, France, Britain and South Korea, agreed at last year’s UN COP28 climate negotiations to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, no long-term storage site is currently in operation.
Finland is building the world’s first such facility, which it says will safely store waste for 100,000 years.
“Transmutex is trying to solve the problem we’ve had with nuclear power for a long time, which is actually not safety, it’s waste,” said Albert Wenger, an investor at Union Square Ventures, which is funding the startup.
Nuclear transmutation is the conversion of one element into another form, known as an isotope, or a different element entirely. Transmutation has been a concept of fascination since the days when alchemists tried unsuccessfully to convert base metals into gold.
The idea of using this technique for nuclear waste management has been a topic of interest for decades. According to the intergovernmental OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency, several countries have launched major programs to explore transmutation.
Transmutex proposes using a particle accelerator linked to a reactor to combine subatomic neutron particles with thorium, a mildly radioactive metal. This creates a uranium isotope that then fissions, releasing energy. Unlike uranium, thorium does not produce plutonium or other highly radioactive waste.
“If it can be shown to work, you basically get the best of both worlds,” says Jack Henderson, chairman of the nuclear physics group at the UK Institute of Physics and a researcher at the University of Surrey. “You can reduce the level of radioactivity produced by burning some of the longer-lived isotopes produced in your reactor – and you get energy out of it at the same time.”
Transmutex CEO Franklin Servan-Schreiber said transmutation was the “first technology taken seriously by a nuclear waste agency to reduce the amount of nuclear waste.”
He said it could be used for 99 percent of the world’s nuclear waste and would reduce the time it remains radioactive to “less than 500 years.”
“This is very important because you can guarantee watertight storage for 1,000 years,” he said. He added that the process also reduced waste by 80 percent.
Servan-Schreiber said the idea behind the process was conceived by Carlo Rubbia, the former director general of Cern’s particle physics laboratory.
A potential obstacle to the viability of transmutation is the cost of setup. The price of building a reactor coupled with a particle accelerator is unclear, but the Large Hadron Collider at Cern cost about $4.75 billion.
The research by Nagra and Transmutex found that the technology “could dramatically reduce the amount of high-grade radioactive waste and enormously shorten the lifespan of a very significant part of that waste category,” said Matthias Braun, head of Nagra.
Switzerland voted in a 2017 referendum not to replace its existing four nuclear reactors, but Servan-Schreiber said the results “made this technology credible for other countries,” adding that he was in talks with at least three countries about a possible deal .