At 05:30 PM 6/16/2008, you wrote:
>http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12801015
>
>Using nuclear to generate electricity which then, in turn, can be used
>to produce hydrogen or charge batteries is a way of avoiding the use of
>fossil fuels for transportation. Yeah, I know it is expensive and that
>there is a conspiracy against it and that there is the waste issue, but
>someone IS paying attention.
>Tod
Once upon a time, in my former life, I was a Nuke Engineer with
GE. Some of the work I was involved with pertained to a process know
as Plutonium Recycle. This was a process that disassembled spent
(used) nuclear fuel bundles and reclaimed the remaining fissile
uranium and the plutonium that was created during the period the fuel
was in the power reactor making steam and eventually
electricity. This process was well beyond theory and plants were
designed and built to accomplish this task. The process reduced the
volume of the high level nuclear waste and as a byproduct, was able
to separate out the reusable nuclear fuel known as mixed oxide,
uranium and plutonium. It was especially fortuitous because the
energy in the recovered fuel had more energy remaining than the
original fuel it was recovered from, a net gain in available energy.
Alas, the people of the US of A elected a Peanut Farmer, ex-Nuclear
Navy Engineer to be President. He was staunchly against this Program
basing his decisions on the "potential" risk of the dreaded
Plutonium. So the whole US commercial industry and DOE research
plans were shelved and essentially forgotten. Only France went ahead
with significant research on this and high level radioactive waste
processing. The nuclear business environment was so toxic from my
perspective that I walked away from the industry mid career and
opened my own non nuclear business.
Tom Hall
ModTiger Engineering LLC
www.tigerengineering.net
_______________________________________________
Support Team.Net http://www.team.net/donate.html
Tigers@autox.team.net
http://autox.team.net/mailman/listinfo/tigers
http://www.team.net/archive
|