Old solar tech back in limelight

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The waste, yeah.: Our nuclear waste storage problem is entirely self-inflicted. Jimmy Carter, our good ole boy from Georgia, decreed in 1977 that Thou Shalt Not Reprocess Nuclear Waste No More. What used to be a closed-cycle system turned into a straight line - out of the ground, through the reactor and into some form of storage for 200,000 years. Carter was afraid somebody might steal some waste and make a bomb, or there might be an accident. Guess what bub, there's far more chance of either one today with fuel rods stored in 170 places, most of them barely monitored.

Our second problem is that we're still using the same reactor design we put in the USS Nautilus back in 1952. We built one, it worked, and we just copied it for 30 years. EVERY ONE of our nuclear power plants is built around a slightly modified submarine reactor. The Russian RBMK design is much better for commercial power plants. Yes, I know about Chernobyl. The fact that a bunch of idiot bureaucrats managed to blow one up after f!cking with it for 3 hours is not a fault in the design. Read Fred Pohl's "Chernobyl" for the whole story.

We have to start reprocessing nuclear waste again. From every ton of spent fuel pellets we can recover about 1800 pounds of fuel that can go right back in the reactor. What's left contains over 100 pounds of inert waste material, mostly lead, that poses minimal hazard; a few pounds of valuable radioisotopes with numerous industrial and medical uses; and some 60 pounds of really nasty high-level radioactive waste. IF we were using RBMK-type reactors, disposal of this waste would be a simple matter - load it in fuel rods and stick 'em in the reactor core. The radiation is contained, the waste heat is put to use, and the neutron flux will cut its already short half-life to a few months.; Posted by: Imaginos1892 Posted on: 05/05/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use