[Land-speed] Alternative Fuels>From>Jim McNaul

[drmayf]

Excuse me but you are wrong. I worked at Oak Ridge. K25 was the 
enrichment palnt for all nuclear fuel. Power plant or bomb except that 
bombs  all now use plutonium which is the by product of fast burning of 
uranium fuel.  Oak Ridge has mor e reactor ready materials for nuke 
plants than can be used in a hundred years. Why? It was too costly to 
shut down.  As to 3 mile Island, yeah we were protecte but just barely. 
And at that there were serious problems. The fuel had fractured and was 
in the process of becoming the china syndrome before humans got enough 
water on it to cool it down. I spent quite a lot of time in a nuke spent 
fuel plant looking over the designs to assure safety. There is on eheck 
of a lot of liquid wastes that have to go somewhere (nitric acid is one 
of the liquids).  Part of the bad rap on nukes is the unbelieveable 
costs involved with building one. And them maintaining it. And then 
decommissioning it when it's useful life ahs completed.  I did a lot of 
work for the US Senate regarding spent fuel, nuclear waste, storage and 
reprocessing. Then I spent a lot of time in oak ridge designing new and 
improved methods of enriching uranium. I ahve some back f=ground here 
and your data just does not fly.

mayf
joseph lance wrote:

> Mayf;
>
> The problem with Chernoble was not "cheapness"---it was an asinine design
> (positive reactivity feedback and inherently unstable) and the 
> incompetent
> operating crew had to violate their own safety regulations to cause the
> accident.
>
> Nobody, except the Russians, has ever used Chernoble type reactors to
> generate electricity. Our reactors have negative reactivity feedback 
> and are
> inherently stable. At Three Mile Island the initiating cause was a leaky
> valve which was ignored but the safety systems worked and the public was
> protected.
>
> The Oak Ridge electricity usage doesn't count---that was used to make 
> 90 % +
> enriched Uranium for bombs. The Uranium for civilian reactors requires 
> only
> 5 % enrichment which is not "bomb grade" and centrifuges can do that--the
> old Oak Ridge electrical method is not used.
>
> Uranium mining and processing and nuclear waste disposal may be 
> "dirty" but
> are much smaller in scale than that of coal usage. And since coal 
> contains a
> small amount of Uranium, the public gets a bigger radiation dose from 
> a coal
> fired power plant than it does from a nuclear plant.
>
> The amount of Uranium mining could be reduced significantly if we 
> recycled
> spent reactor fuel (which would reduce the amount of nuclear waste 
> stored in
> Nevada by a factor of ten)-- presently it's not economically 
> attractive but
> it will be in the future.
>
> Nuclear plants get a bad rap politically primarily because the fear 
> mongers
> play on the public's fear of radiation ---while all of us live in a 
> sea of
> natural radiation which is hundreds of times more intense.
>
> Lance