Nuclear transmutation tech gets a seal of approval: Geneva-based start-up Transmutex ’s nuclear transmutation technology — said to cut highly radioactive waste from nuclear plants by 80% — has gained backing from Switzerland’s nuclear waste management body Nagra, The Financial Times reports. The tech aims to tackle the persistent challenge of safely storing radioactive material, which remains hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.

More about the tech:Nuclear transmutation involves converting an element to another form or into a different element. Transmutex's approach uses a particle accelerator and a reactor to produce energy without generating highly radioactive waste like plutonium. If successful, this could reduce the radioactivity of nuclear waste to less than 500 years, allowing for safer storage solutions, CEO Franklin Servan-Schreiber told FT. “This is very significant because you can guarantee waterproof storage for 1k years,” he said.

Not everyone is on board: Despite the promise of particle accelerators, the cost of implementation is a significant concern, with similar projects like the Large Hadron Collider costing USD 4.75 bn. Particle colliders are the most expensive physics experiments there are, and critics argue that the money could be used to better research climate change.

Why is this important? Led by the US, over 20 countries inked a declaration to triple the world’s nuclear energy production by 2050. The declaration — endorsed by countries including France, Britain, Japan, and South Korea — calls for major investments to ramp up the world’s nuclear power capacity which currently stands at 370 GW.

And regional players want in on the action: Egypt completed the first level of the internal containment vessel of its 4.8 GW Dabaa nuclear power plant last week, and construction is set to be completed by 2028. Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman also signed an energy cooperation roadmap with US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm earlier this month, which includes a nuclear energy pact among the three cornerstone agreements. Algeria’s Ministry of Energy and Mines also signed an agreement with Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom last April to partner on the use of nuclear energy for the next two years.

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