United States is using MOX. No more MOX, please.
New Doubts About Turning Plutonium Into a Fuel
THE VISION A plant being built near Aiken, S.C., would turn weapons-grade plutonium into a fuel called mox.
By JO BECKER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: April 10, 2011 The New York Times
On a tract of government land along the Savannah River in South Carolina, an army of workers is building one of the nation’s most ambitious nuclear enterprises in decades: a plant that aims to safeguard at least 43 tons of weapons-grade plutonium by mixing it into fuel for commercial power reactors.
THE PROBLEMS The cost has soared to nearly $5 billion, and the structure — as big as eight football fields — is half finished.
The project grew out of talks with the Russians to shrink nuclear arsenals after the cold war. The plant at the Savannah River Site, once devoted to making plutonium for weapons, would now turn America’s lethal surplus to peaceful ends. Blended with uranium, the usual reactor fuel, the plutonium would be transformed into a new fuel called mixed oxide, or mox.
“We are literally turning swords into plowshares,” one of the project’s biggest boosters, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said at a hearing on Capitol Hill last week.
But 11 years after the government awarded a construction contract, the cost of the project has soared to nearly $5 billion. The vast concrete and steel structure is a half-finished hulk, and the government has yet to find a single customer, despite offers of lucrative subsidies.
Now, the nuclear crisis in Japan has intensified a long-running conflict over the project’s rationale.
One of the stricken Japanese reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant uses the mox fuel. And while there has been no evidence of dangerous radiation from plutonium in Japan, the situation there is volatile, and nuclear experts worry that a widespread release of radioactive material could increase cancer deaths.
Against that backdrop, the South Carolina project has been thrown on the defensive, with would-be buyers distancing themselves and critics questioning its health risks and its ability to keep the plutonium out of terrorists’ hands.
The most likely customer, the Tennessee Valley Authority, has been in discussions with the federal Department of Energy about using mox to replace a third of the regular uranium fuel in several reactors — a far greater concentration than at the stricken Japanese reactor, Fukushima Daiichi’s Unit No. 3, where 6 percent of the core is made out of mox. But the T.V.A. now says it will delay any decision until officials can see how the mox performed at Fukushima Daiichi, including how hot the fuel became and how badly it was damaged.
“We are studying the ongoing events in Japan very closely,” said Ray Golden, a spokesman for the utility.
At the same time, opponents of the South Carolina project scored a regulatory victory this month when a federal atomic licensing panel, citing “significant public safety and national security issues,” ordered new hearings on the plans for tracking and safeguarding the plutonium used at the plant.
Obama administration officials say that mox is safe, and they remain confident that the project will attract customers once it is further along and can guarantee a steady fuel supply. Anne Harrington, who oversees nuclear nonproliferation programs for the Energy Department, noted that six countries besides Japan had licensed the routine use of mox fuel. She accused critics of “an opportunistic attempt” to score political points by seizing on Japan’s crisis.
“Mox is nothing new,” she said.
Even so, the critics say there is an increasing likelihood that the South Carolina project will fail to go forward and will become what a leading opponent, Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, calls a “plant to nowhere.” That would leave the United States without a clear path for the disposal of its surplus plutonium.
A cheaper alternative, encasing it in glass, was canceled in 2002 by President George W. Bush’s administration. The energy secretary at the time, Spencer Abraham, is now the non-executive chairman of the American arm of Areva, a French company that is the world’s largest mox producer and is primarily responsible for building the South Carolina plant.
After the cold war, the United States and Russia were left with stockpiles of plutonium, and the fear was that one or the other would reverse course and use the plutonium to make new weapons, or that, in what the National Academies of Science called a “clear and present danger,” thieves could make off with it.
Plutonium is easy to handle because the radiation it gives off is persistent but relatively weak. The type used in weapons, plutonium 239, has a half-life of 24,000 years and emits alpha rays. They make the plutonium feel warm to the touch but are so feeble that skin easily stops the radiation. If trapped inside the body, though, alpha rays can cause cancer.
At the same time, plutonium is preferred over uranium as nuclear bomb fuel because much less is needed to make a blast of equal size. And while it is difficult to work with, it does not need to undergo the complex process of purification required for uranium.
The 43 tons of surplus plutonium in the American stockpile could fuel up to 10,000 nuclear weapons and even more “dirty bombs” — ordinary explosives that spew radioactive debris. Alternatively, they could fuel 43 large reactors for about a year.
After studying a range of options, the Clinton administration decided to build a mox fuel plant to dispose of a portion of the plutonium, awarding a contract to a consortium now called Shaw Areva Mox Services.
The rest of the plutonium was to be mixed with highly radioactive nuclear waste and immobilized in glass or ceramic blocks, making it difficult and dangerous for any thief to extract. The government judged the mox route to be more expensive, but the dual-track approach was seen as insurance should either fail.
That strategy also helped persuade Jim Hodges, the Democratic governor of South Carolina from 1999 to 2003, to sign off on plutonium shipments to the Savannah River Site. When the Bush administration canceled the glass-block disposal program, Mr. Hodges was furious.
Any technology -- *any*
Any technology -- *any* technology, nuclear being just one -- which must keept its dealings, waste management, etc. secret because its profiteers/beneficiaries are attempting to export its lethality to the periphery while reserving its benefits for the core, is an antidemocratic technology. With filthy, potentially lethal technologies this secrecy and dumping is almost guaranteed to happen. Cleaner technologies are inherently more democratic as there is no dirty secret to keep and no multigenerational cleanup burden to slough off onto "someone else somewhere else": they can be deployed and maintained openly, with democratic rather than authoritarian process.
The kinds of energy generation we choose define the social organisation we want to live under, and vice versa. Nuclear power is deeply tied to authoritarian and autocratic (military) structures and traditions, and requires same traditions in order to remain profitable.
"We want to end the use of
"We want to end the use of nuclear energy and reach the age of renewable energy as fast as possible," Merkel said.
Mixed-Oxide fuel has been
Mixed-Oxide fuel has been around for some time now and it a major strategic objective for a number of nuclear-based issues. First, MOX fuel provides an economic justification for down-blending weapons-grade plutonium and as pressure for the US and Russia to disarm, the market for MOX fuel will allow for an easier transition. Second, MOX fuel provides an way to close the loop in nuclear fuel reprocessing which will reduce nuclear waste and toxicity by "burning" heavy metals from spent nuclear fuel. Technical solutions to nuclear weapons disarmament and nuclear waste are two of the most important issues in the world right now.
The market for MOX won´t
The market for MOX won´t allow for an easier transition...
The market for MOX will allow for an easier extintion...
Extintion of the human being transfering our legacy to the insects...
Let the nuclear power plants
Let the nuclear power plants purchase their insurance on the free market. They can't, can they? Too much risk. Insurance companies understand risk. Stupid technology for a stupid stage of man.
The nuclear power industry
The nuclear power industry in the US is self insured, by law. They have been paying into a fund for 50 years now and have a $12.6 billion policy. See Price-Anderson Act
The radioactivity from the
The radioactivity from the Fukushima disaster is hardly going to be limited neatly to Japanese borders. Already it has impacted populations speaking other languages. No agreement was reached on this nor is there any quid pro quo. The cost of the decision to gamble heavily on a highly lethal technology -- relying on almighty human ingenuity and perfect probity to manage it safely -- is being widely shared in a way that the benefits were not. The contamination, as with many reckless technologies, cannot be neatly contained. Containment is imaginary; hence "trust" (or helpless victimhood) is being imposed on neighbours.
All the choices we make at this scale of energy use have cross-border impacts and involve either trust and negotiation, or force and fraud.
By choosing nuclear, we impose consequences and risks on populations distant from us both in space and time. Same is of course true of choosing to expand fossil fuel use -- or choosing to expand, period.
A democratic/equitable approach would be to make choices whose consequences fall first and foremost on those doing the choosing (execs should live on or near the facilities they manage, generals should lead charges in battle); next on those benefitting directly from the endeavour (if nuke plants mostly support dense high-tech urban populations then they should be situated in the heart of urban areas, not out in the countryside where the brunt of failure will be borne by peasants and fishermen); and last but least -- or not at all -- on innocent bystanders who neither decided nor benefitted. (Obviously this is not the way that things are done, but the degree to which things are not done this way is symptomatic of injustice or lack of democracy or whatever you want to call hierarchical human social dysfunction, abuse of power, etc.)
Whenever the group making the decisions is not the group bearing the risk *and* the group mostly (by the numbers) benefitting from the decisions is not the group bearing the risk, the decisions are more likely to be risky, reckless, and deeply selfish. (I believe the insurance industry calls the connection between recklessness and perceived immunity "moral hazard.") Shoving off the risks onto our descendants may be most selfish of all (aren't we supposed to care for our kids, not use them as clean-up crew for our many errors?).
Power generation by minimally harmful means, as local as possible, so that risks and benefits are borne by the same population that is making the choices and decisions, is the only equitable or democratic model. Unfortunately even a nuke plant scaled down to power a village would contain enough lethality to poison the village plus several neighbouring villages, so the inherent potential lethality keeps violating the radius of benefit. Chernobyl continues to impact non-Russian-speaking populations all over Europe, who never used even one mW of power from that plant. If a wind farm succeeds or fails, if a tidal turbine is poorly installed and comes loose and is lost, the radius of impact of that event should not exceed the community who benefitted from the electricity generated.
Very well said
This is very well stated and should be obvious to everyone.
We all understand that there are trade-offs that need to be made in life, and they are usually reached by evaluating the downside risks relative to the upside gains.
But, please note that with nuclear energy, the downside risk is bottomless and unfathomable destruction. So, isn't this obvious on it's very face that there is literally NO amount of upside gains that could rationally serve as a counterbalance to the potential risk?
Could any sane and rational person dispute this? How could a rational argument be made for agreeing to a trade-off between energy versus potential destruction.
Not everything in life is "relative" and open for interpretation. Some things ARE absolute in their clarity.
This is one of them.
Dc
Yes but you must know that's not much money.example Japan.
The government did not provide details, but lawmakers told reporters earlier this week that the government plans to inject about 5 trillion yen ($62 billion) worth of special-purpose bonds into the compensation fund
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/13/us-japan-nuclear-tepco-idUSTRE...
The earthquake/tsunami
The earthquake/tsunami recovery in total will dominate that cost. Yes, Fukushima cleanup will be substantial but there is a lot of other infrastructure that will require major funds. This will dwarf Katrina cleanup costs. A 9.0 earthquake is a low probability event and actually the reactors survived it. If the diesels were mounted in an elevated facility we would not be talking about Fukushima. In grad school, I performed probability risk assessment (PRA) on these types of facilities and we always came up with the weakest link as the diesel backup power. The problem is that common mode failure (e.g. a tsunami) always dominates in natural disasters. We will learn from this event and plants will be made even safer over time.
No... We never will
No... We never will learn...
In 2004 there was another incident by an earthquake in Japan...
The words we said was: We will learn from this event and plants will be made even safer over time...
We haven´t learnt anything... 2011 Fukushima happened...
The lesson is not if only a tsunami-earthquake could knock nuclear energy then nuclear energy is very safe.
The lesson what we must learn is if human being was so stupid of build nuclear plants at a powerful sismic zone then human being is too stupid to manage nuclear plants.
I'm sorry, but we have
I'm sorry, but we have learned a great deal from these incidents, and the NRC re-evaluates safety standards after every incident. Is there zero risk, no, but this is the way we evolve dangerous systems to extremely safe systems. Just look at the evolution of the aviation industry and the way every incident and crash updates safety standards. The auto industry is the same. Engineers design safety into their designs the best they can, they perform risk assessment on these designs based on best estimates on failure rates of components during unplanned events and via random failures and iterate on the design until the risk is lowered to an "acceptable" level. This compromise is done in every industry where the health and safety of the public may be effected, and it is mandated by our government. There are normally uncertainties contained within the models engineers use to perform this analysis, especially in failure modes that are very infrequent, because we just don't have the hard data. The data that will flow from Fukushima will inform many of these models for years to come and the NRC will update risk assessments and then provide more solid safety regulations US nuclear plants to make them safer.
The lesson we learn is each
The lesson we learn is each nuclear ACCIDENT is diferent than others.
I would argue with that
I would argue with that statement. Everything we do in life comes with risk to health and life. Some of this risk is controllable directly and other risks are only controllable via proxy. We, as a people have delagated control of risk from industry to our elected representatives. Who, in turn, delegate to regulatory agencies. Risk to health and life is the same whether it originates from a car accident, a chemical plant leak, chromium in ground water, household electrocution, natural gas explosion, or nuclear fallout. The only difference is HOW your health is effected. What I notice quite often is that there is a huge difference in risk PERCEPTION (pardon the caps for emphasis, I'm not yelling) when it comes to anything related to nuclear or radiation. There is a considerable dred factor in the way the general population perceives the risk to anything nuclear that tends to magnify risk away from reality. This stems from many factors to the fact that radiation is invisible, materials permiate the entire food chain so one really can't escape it, and most of all the lack of knowledge of the real health effects.
Bottom line: risk is risk. Perception is a different matter.
Japan
Japan is not helping with that perception.
for tepco claims cap unlimited
Japan approves Tepco nuclear claims plan
62 billion to start compensation from Tepco this is separate of reconstruction costs.\
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/13/us-japan-nuclear-tepco-idUSTRE...
In your view, why were the
In your view, why were the backup diesel generators located where they were?
In addition to elevated
In addition to elevated backup generators, an additional set should have been located in Tokyo and wired underground to Fukushima. The international community had 40 years to do something about this, but did nothing. Even still, what would happen in a more exceptional situation like the 1850's solar flare?
Nasa warns solar flares from ‘huge space storm’ will cause devastation
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/17/nasa-warns-solar-flares-from-huge-...
The problem in my opinion is
The problem in my opinion is a technology that requires active cooling to keep it from melting down. It requires electricity to turn it off. In catastrophes, there is no electricity.
No clue. Maybe they thought
No clue. Maybe they thought the sea walls was enough to protect against a tsunami. I know the US west coast reactors place their generators well above tsunami levels for this very purpose.
If we, the US, knew better
If we, the US, knew better and took these additional precautions of elevating our backup generators, we should have advised the Japanese to do so as well. Nuclear reactors gone awry as well we know are international matters deserving the scrutiny, oversight, and assistance of the global world.
Honestly, it boggles my mind
Honestly, it boggles my mind that these reactors could be allowed as they were for 40 years without anything being done about them. Even UC Berkeley's nuclear engineering department could have and should have implored TEPCO to make even the most basic of adjustments, such as relocating the generators, and not 10 years ago but 30 or much preferably 40 years ago.
Too much focus on academics and not enough on action in our world.
"Too much focus on academics
"Too much focus on academics and not enough on action in our world"
That's a pretty bold statement. The work we do informs policy-makers and we work tirelessly to ensure the people in charge have as close to the truth as they can get it. Without an independent academic sector, all information would come from special interests. We can choose to live our lives emotionally with a picket sign in our hands yelling at the front step of a big corporation, which gets us no where, or we can work in the lab to find the real truths, publish our findings, and inform the public and allow the regulations to integrate this work. We, as scientists, choose the latter. This is action, in my opinion, that is very effective.
However, all decisions at the governmental levels are risk/benefit calculations. We develop the risk/consequence models so that these decisions are properly contextualized, but unfortunately, we have some officials in government that place corporate benefit over public risk.
If you want to see this in action, see Prof. Peterson's testimony in the Hearing on Nuclear Power Plant Safety Panel on “Seismic and secondary seismic risks near nuclear power plants and spent fuel rod storage facilities in California”
Dchivers Well first plant mox meltdown not good start
It was a shocking revelation for a majority of the people in Japan, but maybe not so for major media organizations.
Cozy club: Tokyo Electric Power Co. Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata speaks during a news conference at the company's headquarters in Tokyo on April 17. AP PHOTO
Tsunehisa Katsumata, chairman of Tokyo Electric Power Co., admitted in a news conference on March 30 that on the 11th, the day the twin disasters hit the Tohoku region and crippled Tepco's Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, he was traveling to Beijing with retired Japanese journalists, expenses for which were partially paid by the utility.
"We probably paid more than our share" of the travel fee, Katsumata said.
Internet reporter Ryusaku Tanaka was shouted down by other journalists as he tried to question the Tepco executive.
The incident laid bare the oft-assumed cozy relationship between Tepco and major Japanese media organizations — members of the exclusive "kisha" (press) club that critics claim are preventing reporters from asking the utility tough questions about the nuclear accident. Similar complicity has long been assumed at other press clubs attached to the nation's various bureaucratic bodies.
Freelance journalist Takashi Uesugi, a former reporter for The New York Times in Tokyo, said he was astonished that no one had asked Tepco about whether a plutonium leak from the stricken plant was detected until he raised the question on March 27.
Experts have warned that plutonium may have been released from the No. 3 reactor, where MOX fuel is stored, due to a hydrogen explosion on March, 14 in addition to radioactive iodine and cesium. MOX fuel is a mix of uranium and plutonium oxide.
"For two weeks, not one reporter asked about plutonium in the press conference," said Uesugi. "When I raised the question, Tepco said it didn't have a detector to check it."
A day after the unthinkable revelation, Tepco announced it detected a small amount of plutonium from the soil on the plant's premises after it sent soil samples to an outside organization for analysis a week earlier.
"Press club members don't want to damage the cozy relationship with Tepco," Uesugi said. "This kind of mind-set makes them become soft on Tepco unwittingly."
A strong advocate of abolishing kisha clubs nationwide, Uesugi is one of the 22 members who founded the nonprofit organization Free Press Association of Japan in January aimed at pushing the clubs to allow nonmembers to attend news conferences.
Kisha clubs are mainly attached to government ministries and industries, and their members generally belong to major newspapers, broadcasters and wire services.
In many cases, however, their membership is limited to major domestic news organizations, triggering criticism for screening out foreign press, magazine reporters and freelance journalists.
But since March 11, the exclusive clubs have been forced to open up to nonmembers.
Nonmembers have only been allowed to attend the press conferences held by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano once a week even after March 11.
But feeling the need to allow as many media as possible amid the disaster, the kisha club covering Edano allowed an Internet media organization to broadcast his news conference live from March 17, albeit on a temporary basis.
Still, the exclusivity of the clubs is notorious among foreign reporters in Japan.
David McNeill, a Tokyo correspondent for the Independent, recalled how nonpress club reporters were shut out when the Tokyo Detention House opened its execution chamber for the first time to the media last August.
Despite numerous inquiries with the Justice Ministry, which oversees the detention house, ministry officials as well as its kisha club claimed the date was not set yet, and went ahead with the press tour without informing the foreign press, magazines and freelance journalists, he said.
McNeill later learned the kisha club members were told by the ministry to keep the tour date secret to nonmembers. "It's a symbiotic relationship," said McNeill.
The Justice Ministry was able to control the information to a large extent by allowing only members of the press club onto the tour, just as kisha club journalists are granted information nonmembers don't have, he said.
But it is not the nonmember journalists losing out in this game, he said.
"The losers are ordinary Japanese people because they don't hear all the information that they need to make rational political choices," McNeill said.
He indicated that the reason the support rate for the death penalty is unusually high in Japan may be because people are not well informed about what goes on in the chamber, including the fact that people in wheelchairs are executed or that prisoners on death row wait decades not knowing when the execution will take place.
"So you wonder, would it be as high if ordinary people knew everything about what goes on in the system," McNeill said.
Though often a target of criticism, the kisha club system has played a key role in forcing the government and authorities to disclose information to the public, supporters claim.
Formed in 1890, it started out with a small number of reporters who formed a group demanding the Imperial Diet to allow them to sit in on sessions.
Since then, kisha clubs have become key channels for media organizations in making collective demands against the authorities and vice versa.
Nobuaki Hanaoka, former head of the daily Sankei Shimbun's politics division and a kisha club advocate, claims magazine and freelance journalists are more focused on getting flashy quotes in news conferences that may interfere with the reporting of newspapers and other press club members.
"When you report on politics, it's not like there is a press officer in the Diet telling you what would happen. Nearly 100 reporters gather information day and night and write stories on what is likely to happen," Hanaoka said.
"But if magazine and freelance reporters start firing (hostile) questions at press conferences without that kind of background information, politicians may simply clam up," he said. "Political stories are not written only through information we get from press conferences."
The situation, however, changed drastically after the Democratic Party of Japan, which promised to open up news conferences to nonmembers of kisha clubs, ousted the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party in September 2009.
To keep the promise they made during the campaign, newly appointed ministers of the DPJ-led government started to open up news conference to nonpress club members as well.
But video journalist Tetsuo Jimbo, one of the founding members of the FPAJ, said the organization was established to make sure the DPJ's move of opening up press conferences will not threaten the basic premise that the media should hold the news conferences.
If authorities host press conferences, there is always a risk that those in power will try to manipulate information, including ending news conferences whenever they wish.
Because press clubs were reluctant to allow nonmembers to attend news conferences, the DPJ-led government must have thought it would be quicker and easier if the government hosted the news conferences instead of press clubs, he said.
"We had to create a cross-sectional organization of journalists that can host press conferences," Jimbo said.
Thanks to the DPJ, some kisha clubs have opened up to nonmembers. But Jimbo claims his fight is not over until nonmembers have equal rights, including the number of people allowed in venues, and have a say in how press conferences proceed.
Still, critics agree the DPJ's push to pressure the press clubs to open up the news conference was a big first step.
McNeill of the Independent vividly remembers when then Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada held the first news conference open to all members of the media, including nonpress club members, in September 2009.
"That was one of the most interesting press conferences I've ever been to in Japan," he said.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110503f1.html
?Is there to much secrecy for mox to ever be viable?
Another problem for mox.
Physicist Peter Zimmerman, following up a suggestion by Ted Taylor, demonstrated that a low-yield (1-kiloton) nuclear bomb could be made relatively easily from plutonium oxide.[3]
Crap this was the relevant part I was wanting to share
Freelance journalist Takashi Uesugi, a former reporter for The New York Times in Tokyo, said he was astonished that no one had asked Tepco about whether a plutonium leak from the stricken plant was detected until he raised the question on March 27.
Experts have warned that plutonium may have been released from the No. 3 reactor, where MOX fuel is stored, due to a hydrogen explosion on March, 14 in addition to radioactive iodine and cesium. MOX fuel is a mix of uranium and plutonium oxide.
"For two weeks, not one reporter asked about plutonium in the press conference," said Uesugi. "When I raised the question, Tepco said it didn't have a detector to check it."
A day after the unthinkable revelation, Tepco announced it detected a small amount of plutonium from the soil on the plant's premises after it sent soil samples to an outside organization for analysis a week earlier.
"Press club members don't want to damage the cozy relationship with Tepco," Uesugi said. "This kind of mind-set makes them become soft on Tepco unwittingly."
Dchivers, I agree living
Dchivers, I agree living emotionally and waving a "no-nukes" sign and alienating ourselves from society isn't the way to affect progress, what course of action do you suggest for an average someone who is not a nuclear physicist?
The answer is in educating
The answer is in educating yourself and others on the topics and the methods for interpreting science and engineering. You do not need to be a nuclear physicist to understand the basics and put them into perspective within the larger world we live in. An editorial, or letter to a congressman, or speaking at a town-hall meeting where you use a balanced and educated tone with peer-reviewed studies to back up any claims will have much more power than the picket sign. I believe anyone can do this, not just the college physics students.
A side note: When someone in your immediate family gets cancer, normally you would go out on the internet, medical libraries, etc, to educate yourself on the type of cancer, published studies, on-going trials, and the like. You can make very educated decisions based on this information. If you care about a subject enough, you normally find the energy and desire to learn the issues, risks, etc. This is no different.
Very sound advice. Thank
Very sound advice. Thank you. This is the Everest of critical thinking for someone such as myself. Would you suggest any reading material for a "dummy" like me...anything that could help myself and others "acclimate"...
I would start with
I would start with Wikipedia. Just check the quality of the references that are being used.
Good advice I love wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium#Toxicity
Toxicity
A commonly cited quote by Ralph Nader, states that a pound of plutonium dust spread into the atmosphere would be enough to kill 8 billion people. However, the math shows that no more than 2 million people can be killed by inhaling plutonium. This makes the toxicity of plutonium roughly equivalent with that of nerve gas.[96]
[edit]Criticality potential
A sphere of simulated plutonium surrounded by neutron-reflecting tungsten carbide blocks in a re-enactment of Harry Daghlian's 1945 experiment
Toxicity issues aside, care must be taken to avoid the accumulation of amounts of plutonium which approach critical mass, particularly because plutonium's critical mass is only a third of that of uranium-235.[8] A critical mass of plutonium emits lethal amounts of neutrons and gamma rays.[100] Plutonium in solution is more likely to form a critical mass than the solid form due to moderation by the hydrogen in water.[14]
cont: Also I'm very curious
cont: Also I'm very curious what, in your opinion, we should be doing to move toward a safer and cleaner energy... I would rather spread the word of progress and change rather than fear and doom.
Agreed!
Agreed!
that won't be enough to
that won't be enough to cover it when these things pull a Fukushima and destroy huge swaths of the American heartland. $12.6 billion will be gone in a heart-beat. It will once again be the taxpayer who has to bail out the corporate blood-suckers
It all comes down to money,
It all comes down to money, sonny.
MOX it is.
What a pitiful point in the
What a pitiful point in the history of man. SHAME on us all.