I spent 12 years in the U.S. Navy learning how to operate nuclear heated engines at sea. The most challenging and rewarding job during those years was serving as the Engineer Officer (what surface ships would call the Chief Engineer Officer) of the USS Von Steuben, SSBN 632 (GOLD). I have also spent several years…
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…
Mescalero’s reverse waste storage vote (Mar 11, 1995) The Mescalero Apache nation voted 593-372 to proceed with a lucrative project to store spent nuclear fuel for some U.S. utilities. New Mexico Attorney General Tom Udall noted that the state legislature may exercise a veto over the agreement. Mescalero leaders said that the state can “claim…
Large populations of people have been exposed to carefully measured quantities of radiation in their professional work with nuclear power plant systems. These long term exposures to low level radiation offer a unique opportunity to determine what risk, if any, this new industry has added to the general level of risk in people’s daily lives….
Following the end of World War II, an extensive study was performed on the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The study involved 91,230 people; 37,173 of whom were far enough from the explosion that they received virtually no radiation. This group served as the control group because their living environment…
The dose makes the poison. Almost anything can be a poison or health hazard if the dose is high enough. Most people are aware of this idea and use it in their daily decision making. Unfortunately, people do not often question just what constitutes a small, harmless dose and what constitutes a poisonous dose. Over…
Rarely is the word “plutonium” published in a major news source without the adjective “deadly” nearby. Ralph Nader, noted activist and lawyer, once claimed that plutonium was “the most toxic substance known to mankind.” Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent each year in the United States doing studies of the characteristics of a…
One frustration that persists in making judgements about technical matters is that it has not yet been possible to develop a consistent system of units. People are creatures of habit and tend to use those units with which they are familiar. Old and useful textbooks and reference materials use old units that are out of…