Nuclear waste could be repurposed into a rare isotope necessary for nuclear fusion, which could theoretically produce near-limitless amounts of clean energy, one scientist says.
The radioactive version of hydrogen, called tritium, is not naturally readily available on Earth, is expensive to produce, and can be made in limited quantities. At the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) this week, Terence Tarnowsky, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, suggested that tritium could be harvested from a byproduct of nuclear fission, which powers existing nuclear reactors.
