Darren Orf reported in early March 2026 that a Virginia-based Jefferson Lab is leading a project to transform nuclear waste into usable electricity while also drastically reducing its radioactive life.
While nuclear power has the potential to help cut humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, scientists are still working on how to deal with its radioactive leftovers.
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility received more than $8 million this month to develop technologies that can drastically reduce radioactivity and spent fuel, producing usable electricity in the process. The facility relies on superconducting radiofrequency and a pure niobium cavity to accelerate a proton beam that knocks neutrons loose from a target material, and interacts with nuclear waste that converts into more more manageable isotopes.
It’s a new era for nuclear energy. As the looming threat of climate change darkens over the horizon, countries around the world are re-investing in nuclear fission to cut back on carbon emissions as much as possible. One big problem, however, is that nuclear energy comes with its own environmental concerns in the form of nuclear waste.
But in recent years, scientists have had a rethink regarding whether or not this spent fuel could be repurposed into something useful. Last year, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico announced that it was looking into ways to produce commercial tritium (a vital fuel for future fusion reactors) from nuclear waste, and the U.K. is investigating how to transform waste graphite (typically used to harvest radioactive carbon) into long-lasting diamond batteries.
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
