While Australia has made some amazing technological breakthrough - the Cochlear implant, WiFi sort of, and cask wine - none of those combined the two most techno-awesome creations of the 20th century: nuclear power and lasers. But that's about to change.
An Aussie company called Silex Systems worked up at Lucas Heights to create a technology with the unbelievably appropriate acronym of SILEX - which stands for Separation of Isotopes by Laser EXtraction - has done just that. Separated isotopes of uranium using lasers. Possibly frikking lasers.
A quick reminder: uranium-based fission reactors need so-called "enriched" uranium that has a higher than normal amount of the U-235 isotope in order to achieve and sustain "criticality", or a chain reaction. At the moment, uranium is spun in centrifuges to achieve this.
SILEX's laser process sounds like something from a Star Trek episode: uranium hexaflouride is vaporised and the gas is exposed to a laser beam that preferentially excites the 235-UF6 isotope, which enables the separation of natural uranium into enriched and depleted uranium. That should allow us to take down the Borg cube without... wait, where was I?
Back in the real world, this new tech is potentially more efficient than the current centrifuge enrichment system and uses 100% more LASERS.
For the Aussie inventors, Dr Michael Goldsworthy and Dr Horst Struve it's been a long road from concept to reality: they thought up the system back in 1988. In 2006 SILEX licensed it to a consortium that includes GE and the US Department of Energy, and a commercial enrichment facility could being construction soon.
No, not at Lucas Heights, in Paducah, Kentucky. Which is a shame really. I'd love to be driving down Menai way and have someone point out a building, and I'd say: "That? Oh, that's just our nuclear laser factory."
