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RE: Upgrading nuclear and medical waste to dark matter detectors
I wrote a comment and lost it before I hit 'submit', so here I go again.
I'm not a fan of nuclear energy for at least 3 reasons:
- Chernobyl/Fukushima syndrome (catastrophic failure)
- Pollution of surrounding area (see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201991/)
- And the half-life character of nuclear material that makes it relatively immortal
Feeding nuclear waste to dark matter takes care of objection #3. However, a nagging thought, which probably reflects my profound ignorance:
Do we want energized dark matter? Doesn't dark matter gobble up everything in its path. Do we want to supercharge this entity?
Thank you for making theoretical physics accessible. There was a time when I would see the words 'dark matter' and hurry off because it had nothing to do with me. Now I feel much more comfortable with the 'matter' :)
I do not think nuclear energy is the future as well. However, with climate changes and our way of living (as humans on the planet), this is currently the only way. What is missing is definitely a lot of funding to develop more efficient and clean alternative source of energies, and get ideas on what to do with nuclear waste.
In my post, I depict an idea to give waste a second life. However, only a tiny fraction of the isomers will de-excite through this 'dark matter portal' as this consists in super rare events (a few per year at most).
Therefore, this does not really solve the problem. This is anyways another debate (tagging @apsu just in case he wants to take part to this discussion).
Finally, note that concerning the pollution of the areas surrounding the nuclear plats, I am not sure this is really worse than what happens close to coal plants. In any case, we end up with the same conclusions of what I quoted above: we need more funding for the appropriate research to be able to find the good solutions.
The potential dark matter particles that can interact with the excited isomers are those that are not energetic enough to leave tracks in current dark matter direct detection experiments.
Giving dark matter a little boost (we do not talk about large amounts of energy) would then make it visible in those experiments. One needs however to keep it mind that dark matter very rarely interacts with anything (regardless its energy). Therefore, this will solely increase by a little (as visible in the last image of the post) the chances to observe it.
Feel free to ask any further clarifications!
PS: in my next post (end of next week probably), I will discuss both dark matter and black holes; I could however go back to colliders later on (I will probably skip any writing in French at the moment, due to the impressive amount of comments I got in my last French post ;) ).
Thank you for entertaining my freestyle commentary. It's your fault...you make us comfortable with physics. It's a wonderful thing. I almost regret skipping the subject in high school. But then, there was entirely too much homework overall and I did (still do) enjoy my quiet time.
So you see, I learn from you now. I did not need to use up my peaceful evenings all those years back with onerous assignments :))
Looking forward to the next gentle foray into the arcane mysteries of theoretical physics.
I am happy to do this. I feel like physics being a little bit under-represented in SteemSTEM and I am trying to compensate ;)
Note that discussing about what has been done and doing the actual calculations is a different story. However, there is always a way to discuss things nicely enough to motivate students to start with the computations. Even at high school or below (my son, who is now 8, was explaining quantum mechanics to his friends when he was 6 :D ).
In any case, thanks for your very nice words. They are very appreciated!
🙂