Two years ago, Steve Kirsch, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist, was sure that the US did not need nuclear power. Now he thinks it can save the planet. Find out what changed his mind. More and more people who are sincerely concerned about the impact that human activity is making on the planet are […]
Fuel Recycling
The Atomic Show #106 – NNadir discusses ruthenium, rhodium, palladium plus other valuable “nuclear wastes”
NNadir is a diarist at Daily Kos. He is a Democrat who encourages support for clean, safe nuclear power. He is also a chemist who is enthusiastic about materials found in used nuclear fuel. I recently posted a blog on Atomic Insights about nuclear fuel recycling that broke a record for the number of comments […]
Recalling the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) passive safety experiments
I got notified via a Google Alert on “small nuclear power plants” about a post on a blog that I had not previously visited. The post was titled The Environmentalists Nuclear Debate (2) Mark Lynas. The post provided a link to a very interesting article by Mark Lynas in the New Republic titled How nuclear […]
The Atomic Show #003 – Nuclear fuel recycling
Shane and Rod talk about nuclear fuel recycling and ways to reduce the amount of waste that nuclear reactors produce. We also talk about the fact that there are rare materials with unique physical properties locked inside the fuel assemblies that have been removed from nuclear fission reactors. With a proper eye towards converting trash […]
Ask Atomic: Can fission by-products make steam?
On occasion, people write to Atomic Insights with questions whose answers might be beneficial to a number of other people. We will be sharing some of those questions and responses with you in the Ask Atomic section of the publication.John Mahler holds an almost invisible, but extremely important job. He is in charge of the […]
Plutonium: Valuable Fuel or Costly Waste?
For more than forty years, the United States and the Soviet Union built nuclear weapons and aimed them at each other’s heartlands. The process of building those weapons was expensive in strict monetary terms and in terms of sacrificing investments in more productive enterprises. Now, however, the confrontational attitude between the two countries has been […]
Minimize Waste: Focus on Recycling
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 […]
Opposition to Reprocessing Are the Reports Always True?
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. […]
Nuclear Fuel Recycling: Getting Down to Business
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. […]
Waste to Energy: Learning to Recognize Waste as Value
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 […]
Letter from the Editor: Recycling: Practice What You Preach
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 […]
