Why did a proven technology to remediate nuclear waste get blocked?

A US citizen discovered a brilliant technology that was independently proved over 11 years and confirmed by the US Department of Energy that could play a pivotal role in solving existential risks to the planet like climate change (by enabling fission to be used without resulting in waste) or the poisoning of the Earth by Fukashima - so why would the US government, happy to support technologies that make weapons, not permit this technology to be developed for peaceful purposes?

This is a partial transcript of a clearly exasperated David Yurth describing the challenges facing researchers in the US.

Full Transcript Audio on SoundCloud

David's personal story starts at 17:07

Between 1994 and 2002 a bunch of people in Salt Lake City, Utah, put together a laboratory - used a very specific technology called high density charged clusters, invented by a guy named Ken Shoulders, he got patent for it 1991 - got six more patents after that - but the idea of a high density charged cluster is that in under the right conditions if you use the right kind of a probe and the right kind of power supply in the right kind of environment you can shoot electrons out the end of a spark generator and those electrons instead of dispersing away from each other like black bees in a windstorm, like you'd expect them to do, actually create little donuts, little torus of a very specific diameter.

When that torus is then guided by a magnetic field through a proton rich environment, something like deuterium gas - deuteride gas, which is chock-a-block full of free protons, the little torus, because it's made of electrons - highly negatively charged in the center, attracts protons into the center of this little, little torus. It actually picks them up and carries them into a target.

When they impact the target, because the protons have such high relative mass - at about ten percent light speed - there's enough energy kinetic energy like a bullet or a bowling ball, there's enough energy when those things strike the nuclei of the target material that they disrupt it temporarily, not catastrophically, like a high speed neutron, not like a rifle bullet into an ice cube, but more like a ping-pong ball, shot out of a marshmallow gun into jello. And what it does is, temporarily disrupt the nuclear structure, you get some neutrons coming off, you get some protons coming off, you get some… a LOT of electrons freed up because the orbitals are disrupted, you get gamma - and then they come back together, but when they come back together, the half-life is cut by fifty percent.

So cesium 137 bombarded by high density charged clusters in a deuterium environment, you reduce in one bombardment, you reduce the half-life from 30 years to 15 years and then to seven and a half and then to three and three quarters and then whatever. And so over successive iterations of this stuff, just by using the right kind of high-powered pulsed electrical current in the right kind of an environment, you can take that stuff - feed it through a tube - blast it with electricity and eliminate, ABSOLUTELY ELIMINATE RADIOACTIVE EMISSIONS RIGHT DOWN TO AMBIENT BACKGROUND LEVELS you have an inert material.

We did that we did it for 11 years and we made it work in both solid and liquid nuclear waste under controlled conditions we were good scientists we had a good thesis we had good apparatus we took good notes we conducted our experiments under controlled conditions we took all the information put it into our records and then one day we got an invitation from the Department of Energy to share our data with them. We thought rock and roll baby now they're finally starting to pay attention.

So we packaged all of our stuff up, put a nice cover on it, it passed the federal weight test and we sent it to the Department of Energy - and they turned around and sent it to some government labs and a year later we were informed that the government laboratories had independently verified not only our results but our technique.

And so we thought we were going to be invited to participate in a process of actually implementing the design engineering prototyping testing and deployment of alpha and beta additions for on-site field testing to remediate nuclear waste. That's what they told this was going to happen and they lied.

In 2005 in October I got a phone call from the guy at DOE who's responsible, by law under charter he's responsible for directing the department who specifically charged with solving this problem. He screamed so loud, that I had to hold the phone away from my head. Spencer Abraham the Secretary of the Department of Energy had called him on the phone took him into his office, sat him down and informed him in no uncertain terms, that unless he got our stuff out of their files and stopped us from engaging in doing our research, the guy was going to lose his job - three PHDs - he'd been there 31 years.

So under threat of professional assassination from within the agency, he called and screamed at me and when I told him to go pound sand, then he told me that, if I persisted, I and my cohorts, would be arrested under FISA and imprisoned without representation. And further, unless we agreed to desist, they were going to serve us with national secrecy orders.

So when your heads in the lion's mouth, what do - you do - you know, you try to find a way to back out. And so for five years, we dropped that ball and walked away from that project and did nothing more.

And then, in 2010, I got a phone call, it was a new administration, Obama was now the president Dr. Yu was now the Secretary of the Department of Energy, change of mind, change of heart, change of plan. Yucca Mountain no longer officially, the agency agenda, although it has nevertheless continued to be developed at an unabated rate. Got a phone call, went to Washington, sat down with a guy who's the perennial career bureaucrat, personal private assistant to each new secretary, from the private sector, who comes in to run the bureau. I'm not going to give you his name because he's a friend of mine.

He said look, I heard what happened to you, I told him the story, I showed him the documents, I played him a recording of the telephone conversation, he was appalled. He sent me a letter apologized on behalf of the United States government, the Department of Energy - apologized for the way we'd been treated and invited me to put a presentation together, for a private presentation, to all 26 department heads, for the Department of Energy, in their office building in washington DC.

So we worked through the summer, to put this presentation together. Three weeks before the presentation was scheduled to occur, I got an email from him on his private email, expressing his regrets, about the fact, that he had been left no political alternative, but to cancel the conference, because he was getting such extraordinary heat from his department heads, they didn't even want to have the conversation, much less have it be a matter of record in the department that that conversation had even occurred, in 2010.

So, you know the inmates are running the asylum here, private interest and their capital, are protecting their their territory, their economic and political territory, by preventing the technologies that are available from actually being used and getting them into the marketplace and that's not right. That's not right because, not only is not good for us as citizens, but it's not good for the planet we live on. The planet we're living live on is being despoiled permanently, by a kind of waste material that is not justifiable.

So can we solve the problem? Yes we can, we can solve the problem. I know personally, from the work we've done in our laboratories, of four different methods for remediating nuclear waste, that are absolutely effective, that produced no contaminating waste stream and that solved the problem.

Gary Vestmans book, talks about 24 more and the US Patent Office has 60 patents that are addressed to the subject. So don't tell me that we can't solve the problem, we can solve the problem. We understand the physics of it, the way the physics of it is described in the standard physical model is not correct. We know that because our experimental evidence proves it's not correct and we're not the only ones. I've got 15 papers in my archives by scientists from other countries, countries in the European Economic Union and more from the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Russians are way ahead of us on this subject, not only do they know what to do, they know how to do it and they have been doing it. They just finished a project in 2011, published a paper, they totally remediated fifteen hundred cubic meters of high-level radioactive nuclear waste and published the report and you didn't hear about it on the ten o'clock news. In fact they couldn't get it published in the mainstream science scientific organs, so they open sourced their report.

So it's not that the problem can't be solved, it can be solved. What you have to be able to do using whatever technology you bring to bear is this. When you have an unhappy atom and it's spitting off protons and neutrons and electrons and gamma rays and all kinds of stuff, you've got to find a way to relieve the stress. There are lots of ways to do that, we can do it with plasmas, we can do it with magnetic fields, we can do it with cryogenics, we can do it with a variety of different kinds of methods. You got to give it a way to relieve the stress temporarily, so that when the pieces come back together, they can be in a happy steady state and not be reactive.

Well you know this is the 21st century, that's not rocket science, we know exactly what to do. If it were done properly, if we really paid attention and radioactive nuclear waste could be handled real time, as its produced, on site, using a safe and effective method, think about what that would mean for energy production in the world.

David's view on the problems of science funding in United States starts at 48:08

The Chinese government two years ago completed the construction and population of a brand new high-tech research and development facility in Taipei in Taiwan. They spent 22 billion dollars on the facilities and equipment and before they opened the door it was fully populated. They are doing the best research and development on the planet in that facility, with the smartest people, with the most money and the best instrumentation and equipment. And we're sucking gas, because we're not doing R&D unless it can be turned into military weapons. That's where R&D money comes from in this country. So if you're not in the establishment and you're not weaponizing your technology, you can't get money to do good technology development in the private sector, it's gone.