One of the most successful ways to conserve valuable raw materials is to pay careful attention to manufacturing and use processes so that less of the material is wasted. There is ample opportunity for process type improvements in the nuclear power industry, even though many improvements have already been made. There are also institutional hurdles…
One of the reasons this letter focuses on the issue of recycling and waste minimization is that there has been a recent full court press in the opinion sections of major newspapers and in Congressional hearing rooms to stiffen the U. S. government’s already extreme policy limiting the use of plutonium in energy generating plants….
Although the United States has chosen to focus on a throw-away fuel cycle, many of our allies have decided that recycling nuclear fuel fits their national interests. France and Great Britain, have built large, modern, and very expensive facilities to extract useful metals from used fuel rods to provide raw material for new fuel assemblies….
In the 1980s, many municipalities built facilities to convert garbage into energy. Some of those plants, in order to keep the garbage burning at a high temperature, also burned natural gas or oil. The machines were designed to solve a problem in providing adequate facilities for garbage disposal by burning it to produce electricity. The…
Recycle, reuse, reduce. These are the watchwords of people who are concerned about reducing the impact that man and his activities have on the world’s natural resources. The ideas that the words embody are logical and can be reasonably applied to making the world a more prosperous place to live. I was introduced to the…
