On an NPR show I heard the idea of using nuclear power was suggested and one of the guests is this Google founder who 'allegedly' sai something to the effect that there isn't enough uranium to sustain what is needed...WHAT RUBBISH!  In the first 6 feet of the earths crust is MILLIONS of tons of uranium!!!  And try ASKING scientists in this field, they can tell him straight out  how France has been able to keep the system working even using other components to utilize uranium...

TRY GOOGLING IT SIR!!! 

On an NPR show I heard the idea of using nuclear power was suggested and one of the guests is this Google founder who 'allegedly' sai something to the effect that there isn't enough uranium to sustain what is needed...WHAT RUBBISH!  In the first 6 feet of the earths crust is MILLIONS of tons of uranium!!!  And try ASKING scientists in this field, they can tell him straight out  how France has been able to keep the system working even using other components to utilize uranium...

TRY GOOGLING IT SIR!!! 


If that is what he said then he is completely full of crapola.

In addition to the plentiful supply of uranium ore, it is a not-widely-known fact that today's spent nuclear fuel actually contains about 96% of its original energy content. That is why the French reprocess all spent fuel.  Not only does it reduce nuclear waste (because most of the material is recycled into usable fuel), but it also conserves the uranium ore deposits.

Note that the long-delayed "Yucca Mountain Waste Site" will basically be storing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of spent fuel, all of which retains 19 times as much energy as was originally extracted from it. 

We need to begin reprocessing spent fuel!

hmm, well, if there are ARE millions of tons of uranium reserves, it kinda begs the question of what one does with millions of tons of nuclear waste. but if this guy got a fact wrong, you know, shame on him.

nuclear energy makes me a little queasy but i suppose it's better than having a peak oil crisis and being plunged into mad max land. although as it is now, there are certain things only petroleum can do. my understanding is that nuke plants are great for generating electricity (so long as the waste being generated gets buried under my neighbor's house, not mine!) but it aint so good for running heavy machinery or providing raw material for plastics.

to solve the looming energy shortage we're gonna have to rely on a variety of options. i'm willing to consider nuclear power and cleaner coal if folks on the right are willing to seriously consider solar, wind, and biofuels. trouble is so many people who wanna make a partisan issue out of it. i like arguing with conservatives, but i'd rather see civilization survive than win an argument about nukes vs. windmills.

Even so, you're not going to have atomic SUVs!  I suppose you could develop electric cars and and charge the batteries with nuclear-generated electricity, but that brings us back to the electric car, which the auto companies killed off in the 1990s behest of petroleum interests.
::)

Anyway, I use Google every single day, and I have a gmail account, but I certainly don't give a rat's ass what Google Head thinks about the uranium supply.
:P

If France and Canada can successfully use nuclear power, why can't we?  Then again, I guess the same could be asked of socialized healthcare....

For the NIMB people afraid of the release of radiation, they don't realize they are exposed to more unhealthful prooduct from the trucks that drive down their roads past their houses already and you get RADIATION from the partner you sleep next to in bed that is more worrisome.

The topic has been debated quite a bit on this site so I'm going back to posting other chats....

This was brought up just to mention what was heard on a recent radio talk panel show...no one is going to google for advice and he just happened to be on it giving this opinion.
It just shows how some people were propagandized to repeat the old arguements.

On an NPR show I heard the idea of using nuclear power was suggested and one of the guests is this Google founder who 'allegedly' sai something to the effect that there isn't enough uranium to sustain what is needed...


He's half-right.  Under present law (thanks, Jimmah Cahtuh!), the US is legally prohibited from reprocessing used fuel bundles. That's where the Google guy was getting his facts from.
Jimmy was a nuclear engineer on a sub -- which meant he was smart enough to realize the proliferation risk associated with fast breeder reactors -- and utterly, flat-dead, stupid enough to think that the proliferation risks outweighed the rewards of being able to tell the entire Middle East to go take a long hard suck on...

...but anyways.  If we continue to cling to that stupid, obsolete, ignorant, strategic failure of a law, we'll continue to bury 95% of the energy content of our uranium in the general vicinity of Nevada.  Our children will eventually dig it up and make use of it.  Failing that, our economy will collapse and our great-(insert a few dozen greats)-grandchildren will dig it up after the New Dark Ages, some time in the 2300-2500s.

Yes, I'm one of the guys who clicked Jimmy Carter as the Worst President of All Time.  He was so bad that he only got demoted to second place in my books last year.  Habitat for Humanity is a wonderful idea -- and Jimmah shoulda stuck to charity and stayed the hell out of politics.  A Nobel Peace Prize for what?  Wage/price controls and gas rationing in the 70s?  Destroying our nascent nuclear industry and holding us in thrall to OPEC?  Giving legitimacy to Yasser Arafat?  "Negotiating" the agreement between the US and North Korea that resulted in North Korea's nuclear test of late 2006?  For endorsing the "election" of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez?  Carter's done more damage to US interests and the credibility of the Nobel Peace Prize than Bush II and Clinton II ever dreamed of.

He's half-right.  Under present law (thanks, Jimmah Cahtuh!), the US is legally prohibited from reprocessing used fuel bundles. That's where the Google guy was getting his facts from.
Jimmy was a nuclear engineer on a sub -- which meant he was smart enough to realize the proliferation risk associated with fast breeder reactors -- and utterly, flat-dead, stupid enough to think that the proliferation risks outweighed the rewards of being able to tell the entire Middle East to go take a long hard suck on...



The fallacy of Carter's law is that spent fuel ALREADY poses a proliferation risk, as it contains abot 1% plutonium, and hundreds of tonnes of plutonium are generated each year in this manner.  And you don;t need a breeder reactor to extract the plutionium, as there are chemical means to do this too.  The plutonium piling up in nuclear waste pools will be around for tens of thousands of years.  Recycle it NOW and you'll burn it up much faster.

England, France, Russia, India, and Japan already recycle spet uranium fuel to create "MOX Fuel", which is a 9% plutonium fuel, which can be used to refuel "most" conventional uranium reactors.

I would explain yet again why Reaganomics was far worse for the country than anything Jimmeh Cawtah did, but I want avoid the hose-down with Jim Cramer-style funny-nomics bafflelgab!
:D

The fallacy of Carter's law is that spent fuel ALREADY poses a proliferation risk, as it contains abot 1% plutonium, and hundreds of tonnes of plutonium are generated each year in this manner.  And you don;t need a breeder reactor to extract the plutionium, as there are chemical means to do this too.  The plutonium piling up in nuclear waste pools will be around for tens of thousands of years.  Recycle it NOW and you'll burn it up much faster.

England, France, Russia, India, and Japan already recycle spet uranium fuel to create "MOX Fuel", which is a 9% plutonium fuel, which can be used to refuel "most" conventional uranium reactors.


If I'm not mistaken, Canada also has a method of recycling fuel for their reactors.

poor jimmy. you can take comfort in the fact that even if the nuclear industry were allowed to pollute our entire nation's groundwater with spent and re-spent nuclear waste, the petroleum multi-nationals would still not let us divest ourselves of OPEC. there's just too much money to be made in the status quo, and again, there's just a lot of things petroleum does that nuclear power would not replace. plus even if the US economy switched to nuclear overnight, the government would still have a stake in maintaining influence in the middle east and fighting ludicrous wars in iraq and so forth, because a. they're quite lucrative in their own right and 2. control the oil and you control the economies of some of the US's most prominent competitors, e.g., china.

and yes, now we're gonna hear lots more trickle-down bafflegab. it only works if youre rich, man.

poor jimmy. you can take comfort in the fact that even if the nuclear industry were allowed to pollute our entire nation's groundwater with spent and re-spent nuclear waste, the petroleum multi-nationals would still not let us divest ourselves of OPEC. there's just too much money to be made in the status quo, and again, there's just a lot of things petroleum does that nuclear power would not replace. plus even if the US economy switched to nuclear overnight, the government would still have a stake in maintaining influence in the middle east and fighting ludicrous wars in iraq and so forth, because a. they're quite lucrative in their own right and 2. control the oil and you control the economies of some of the US's most prominent competitors, e.g., china.

and yes, now we're gonna hear lots more trickle-down bafflegab. it only works if youre rich, man.

Bedtime-for-Ronzo's first act of treason was cutting a deal with the Iranians to keep American citizens held hostage until the Ronster's inauguration.  If Reagan & co. hadn't stabbed the American people in the back by deception, Carter/Mondale would have won in '80 and perhaps our country would have been spared from fascism. 

But, hey, you can't have everything now, can you?  Reagan made us feel good about ourselves again.  If it feels good, do it!
:D

The fallacy of Carter's law is that spent fuel ALREADY poses a proliferation risk, as it contains abot 1% plutonium,


Negative.  It's very easy to separate Pu from U by chemical means, but if you run a power-generating reactor for long enough, "enough" of the Pu-239 will have captured enough stray neutrons to become Pu-240.  Your chemical method will give you a heap of Pu-239 contaminated with sufficient amounts of Pu-240 to render it impractical to use in implosion devices.  If you have the tech to separate Pu-239 from a mix of -240 and -239, you'd be better off using that same tech (at much higher efficiency) to separate U-235 from U-238.  (And if you're Iran and don't care about mounting it on a missile, you build a gun-type device based on uranium that's so simple it doesn't even need testing, rather than an implosion-type device that would be required by the use of plutonium.) 

The only way to get enough un-contaminated Pu-239 out of a power-generating reactor is to run it for short intervals - shutting it down, extracting the fuel bundles, and putting in "fresh" fuel while you extract the Pu-239 from the "barely-used" fuel. This is probably what the North Koreans did, and it's an open question as to how big their stockpile is.  (What the Syrians were up to a few months ago when the Israelis may or may not have overflown their territory, and the structure they may or may not have buried in the following days, and the relationship between that and a North Korean freighter carrying concrete, we'll probably never know.  Nobody on the Syrian, NK, US, nor Israeli sides are talking, and that probably tells us all that we civilians need to know -- someone got caught red-handed doing something naughty, but that everyone had plausible deniability, and more importantly, everyone agreed it was a matter best forgotten.)

One point on which you may be correct -- it might be possible to abuse a CANDU reactor in this way, because I've forgotten how the Indians came by their device, but the timing would be about right.  Canucks give the Indians a reactor that isn't a proliferation risk when operated by the book... and the Indians disregard a few sections of the book.

"Luxembourg is next to go,
And (who knows?) maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm...
...when Alabama gets the bomb!"
- Tom Lehrer, Who's Next