Quote:
Originally Posted by BeerGeek40
Good plan. Where do you propose to put all of the NUCLEAR WASTE? Let me guess -- not in your state....
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if we would reverse the Carter era law that says we can NOT recycle the nuclear rods
unfortunately due to the liberal idiot President
Carter we just store them, not recycle/reprocess them
From its inception in the 1940's,
nuclear power as conceived by the United States had a closed fuel cycle. Uranium would be mined and milled, enriched in its fissionable isotope U-235 from the 0.7% found in nature, manufactured into fuel and burned in reactors to generate electricity. As it burned, some of the uranium would be converted to plutonium. Then the spent fuel would be removed and shipped to a central plant where it would be dissolved and reprocessed chemically. The unburned uranium and plutonium would be separated and could be recycled in new fuel. The radioactive fission products would be buried as waste.
Ideally, the plutonium would be saved to use as fuel for breeder reactors, which could burn it more efficiently and also make more new plutonium fuel than they would consume. Recycling of fuel containing plutonium in conventional reactors was regarded as an essential steppingstone before commercial breeder reactors.
On April 7, 1977, the liberal idiot President Jimmy
Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent
nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of
nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead. (which it did not(
France has almost as many
nuclear power plants as the USA(although smaller ones) and recycles/reprocesses almost all of the "spent" fuel)) In fact, other nations wanted their fuel reprocessed in order to use, save or barter their plutonium, and so that they could dispose of their
nuclear waste and thereby satisfy environmental concerns
and not one POTUS since has changed it.......
U. S. policy is solidly in opposition to reprocessing. The phrase used is that "reprocessing is inconsistent with the Government's nonproliferation policies." The Clinton administration has accepted the reasoning of the
Carter years. This rigidity wasted several years and undermined our ability to work effectively with other nations toward disposition of excess
nuclear weapons. If we were reprocessing commercially, and had MOX fabrication plants in routine operation, burning the excess weapons plutonium could be almost half completed by now.
But more important, our policy against reprocessing also holds hostage the rebirth of
nuclear energy.
source: Dr. A. David Rossin
nuclear is safe
in fact there are less mishaps with
nuclear than with steam, coal, liquid fuel, or even the production of solar/wind equipment
France is the size of
Texas, yet has almost as many
nuclear power plants as the usa (not counting the floating military reactors)
Sweden is one twentieth the size of the usa (1/20) yet has TWICE the
nuclear power plants per sq km
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