Concept:

The United States of America has been using energy for the betterment of the lives of the people since the very founding of this nation. One of the ways that we have been generating the energy we all need is through nuclear power plants. All of which produce waste products that must be stored for thousands of years in areas that we all hope will be safe to leave such deadly materials until the radio-activity of the waste products has gone away. This idea is for a device that will decrease the time for how long the radioactive materials will be as deadly by forcing or inducing the decrease in the half-life of the radioactive materials.

Problem:

There are many sites in the world that nuclear waste is stored. Many of these sites are leaking and have the potential of becoming disasters. The problem for all of the storage sites is how long they must be perfectly sealed against radioactivity and the constantly changing chemistry of materials as they all go through the radioactive decay process that can and does take thousands of years. If a way can be found to force or induce the decrease of the half-life of the waste products, or in some cases, completely neutralize the radioactivity of the material, then the waste products would be far less likely to get out of the storage containers and into the environment.

Idea:

There is a technology being used today in the medical field called a Magnetic Resonance Imager, MRI for short. The MRI causes the nucleus of the hydrogen atom to spin, and through that spinning action, causes fluctuations in the magnetic field that can be detected and used to produce images of what is going on inside the body or inside a structure. See Figure 1. The spinning action on the nucleus of the atom is an action I believe is what can be used to cause radioactive decay to be accelerated due the unnatural movement of spinning, shaking, or unnatural forces that the nucleus of the atom could be made to see. See Figure 2. See Figure 3 for the possible signal to the coils in Figure 2.

Market:

Every nuclear power plant in the world could use one or more of these devices to decrease the half-life of the waste materials taken from their reactors.

Development and Production:

The development of this device would be done at many of the universities around the United States and the world. And, there are many companies that are making magnetic devices that could be experimented with for this development

Conclusion:

The Radioactive Decay Accelerator will help people world-wide in dealing with the decreasing energy resources by increasing the usable materials used for nuclear reactors and decreasing the pollution generated by those reactors. Public safety would be vastly improved by not having materials that are so deadly and last so long.

Bob Niemeyer