The evaluation of transmutation of hazardous nuclear waste of 90Sr, into valuable nuclear medicine of 89Sr by ultraintense lasers

Abstract

AbstractThe analytical evaluation of the capability of Bremsstrahlung highly directional energetic γ-beam to induce photo transmutation of 90Sr (γ,n) 89Sr is presented. Photo transmutation of hazardous nuclear waste of 90Sr, one of the two main sources of heat and radioactivity in spent fuel into valuable nuclear medicine radioisotope of 89Sr is explained. Based on the calculations, a fairly decent fraction of gamma rays in this range are used in transmuting of 90Sr into 89Sr where according to the available experimental data it is shown that by irradiating a 1-cm thick 90Sr sample with lasers of intensity of 1021 W/cm2 and repletion rate of 100 Hz for an hour, the reaction activity would be 1.45 kBq. It is shown that there is not a linear relationship between the growth of the activity and increasing the laser intensity, but there is a dramatic increase in the growth rate especially between 1020and 1021 W/cm2. In this work, the advantage of photonuclear transmutation over the neutron capture transmutation for 90Sr isotope is also discussed.