On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 01:57:44AM -0400, W. Jacobs wrote:
> 
> 
> Byron Jeff wrote:
> > Apples and gorillas. Hanford was a US military project designed to produce
> > plutonium. The US miltary deliberately dumped and contained radioactive waste in
> > the environment.
> >
> > BAJ
> >

> Gorillas and oranges.  Commercial nuclear plants sent their spent fuel
> rods to US DOD plants like Hanford to reprocess the fuel.

Not from my reading they don't. I see now that this is past tense. Right
now spent US nuclear fuel is stored in cooling ponds onsite. There is a
once through fuel cycle with no reprocessing.

To quote the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle#Reprocessing

"The recovered uranium and plutonium can, if economic and institutional
conditions permit, be recycled for use as nuclear fuel. This is currently
not done for civilian spent nuclear fuel in the US."

>  The Gov wanted
> the plutonium and did not want anyone else to have it.

While the second part is certainly true, with breeder reactors at Hanford
producing tons of plutonium, the US military certainly didn't need
plutonium from commercial reactor cores to make bombs.

Commercial reactors are poor breeders for plutonium. If you want to make
bombs, it's much better to actually build a breeder reactor.

>  This is part of
> the cost of nuclear power that does not show up in the cost of electric.
> It is subsidized by the government.

Reference please? Is this supposed subsidy, along with the sprialing
regulatory costs, the reason that no more new commercial reactors have come
online in over a decade:

http://www.southernstudies.org/facingsouth/2007/08/tva-green-lights-watts-bar-2.asp

Watts Bar in Tennesee took $8 billion and 23 years to come to fruition.

Who subsidized that?

> President Carter placed a moratorium on reprocessing and very little has
> been done since then.  Most nuclear plants have a swimming pool that is
> filled with spent fuel and water.  It boils the water 24/7.  Heaven help
> you if it ever boils dry.  It will need maintained for the foreseeable
> future
> It is now under control of Dept of Energy

Just continuous roadblocks. And that's what I keep complaining about. The
NRC should safely restart the US commercial nuclear program:

1) They need to preapprove a simple safe reactor design. Test the hell out
of it and approve it. Anyone who builds a plant with that design is
streamlined to build.

2) Start reprocessing the spent nuclear fuel. You get 97% of the volume to
put right back into the plants.

3) Take the final 3%, distill the hell out of the actinides (which are the
longest term radioactive products), and take rest and stick it Yucca
Mountain.


BTW I know it sounds like I'm talking about an exclusively nuclear
infrastructure. I really don't have a problem with solar, wind, or hydro.
But at the end of the day each present significant limitations in their
ability to provide wide scale power in a variety of different situations.
Sometimes the sun don't shine, the wind don't blow, and the water don't
flow. Use it where it's appropriate. But nuclear needs to be a part of the
mix.

BAJ
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