Posted on 03/04/2019 1:26:10 PM PST by yesthatjallen
What if I told you that we have at least 10,000 years of power available to us at this very moment and we just aren’t using it. Instead it sits in fields aging away doing nothing.
I am not joking! What we call Nuclear Waste is really a lie. Here is it really is: Fuel or the building block of fuel. The legacy plants used in the US use Uranium 235 at around 3% enrichment as a fuel source. After the Uranium 235 fuel is consumed the rest is considered waste.
What is left of the 97% is 96% Uranium 238 and 1% Plutonium 239. Plutonium 239 is really just a form nuclear fuel that was created when Uranium 238 absorbed excess neutrons from the reactor operating.
We can design (these plants have existed in the past and still do today) and build a plant that uses this Plutonium as fuel. It can also use the excess neutrons from fission to generate more plutonium from the leftover Uranium 238.
The average fission yield is 2.88 neutrons per fission of Plutonium 239. A critical reactor will consume 1 of the 2.88 neutrons. The remaining can be used to convert Uranium 238 into Plutonium 239. This is the principle behind a breeder reactor.
Literally breeder reactors generate power at the same time they generate fuel for future use. The power plants can literally consume what is incorrectly referred to Nuclear Waste. It is literally fuel.
If we built a Breeder reactor at 40 year old power plant that is the same size as the existing legacy plant it would take 1300 years to consume the spent Nuclear fuel from the legacy plant.
All over the US we have inactive and decommissioned legacy plants with spent fuel sitting idly by that we could consume as well. The leftover Uranium 238 from enrichment is literally wasted in the form of ammunition for high caliber rounds.
Plutonium is used as the primary stage for our nuclear weapons program. We use Plutonium in an uncontrolled fission reaction with tritium to cause a fusion explosion.
Instead I propose that we use these weapons from all over the world to power the world in a safe and environmentally friendly manner. Imagine this:
Chairman Kim sits down with President Trump and President Moon to use his nuclear stockpile to create power for North Korea instead of fear of weapons. He has not only used his nuclear weapons program to get access to world leaders but...
...He literally could use his stockpile to power his nation for rest of his life and his great great great grandchildren’s lives. This could be the realization of the video Trump sent to Kim watch at 2:20 after reading this.
Carter stopped The breeder reactor program and the Thorium program as well. The chicoms and indians are using all of our public information successful program information to fast track their own efforts.
We don’t even need to reprocess the fuel. The “waste” can still heat water, which can be used to heat buildings. Downtown Minneapolis for example, can be heated from waste.
“Yes but the fuel rods are heavily used thus they have a great deal of Pu240 which is impossible to chemically separate from the Pu239 and also makes the plutonium unsuitable for bombs.”
Unsuitable but not impossible. We did it back in WWII.
See Presidents Ford and Carter and their non-proliferation rules that included the prohibition against using spent fuel in breeder reactors.
http://www.123seminarsonly.com/Seminar-Reports/034/22542-Nuclear-Fuel-Reprocessing.pdf
Molten salt thorium reactors! Go baby go!
Well technically any source of neutrons can breed plutonium. The thorium cycle breeds U233 from thorium. Mix in some natural uranium and it could also breed plutonium, which could be recovered chemically. Also U233 could make a warhead, a very easily detectable one, but it could work as well. Never say never....
U233 is actually a very poor bomb material, if at all.
Seeing as how it's actually been used in working fission devices with yields exceeding 20 KT, "if at all" is mooted. The thing that makes U-233 a substandard weapon material is the neutron absorption, it's not as reactive as U-235, so the critical mass must be higher and thusly the confinement is not as effective. It's a bad idea to work with it because it's way more radioactive than U-235 or Pu-239 and is not glovebox safe. The theory is the U-232 contamination from the thorium cycle would render bomb-making fatally hazardous and easily detectable. The problem with that theory is the world has already shown us plenty of folks willing to die in order to share their point of view with everyone around them...
I'll buy reduced risk of proliferation but the non-proliferation claim is a little dubious.
ROTFLMAO!!!!!
The fast critical mass is almost identical.
Additionally, U-233 can be used in the simpler ‘gun’ initiator.
In 12 years..../s
yeah, thus decreasing the time it would take to build and assemble a device. The bad guys just have to avoid detection long enough - and live long enough...
* Sec Rick Perry has greenlighted the following:
* Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has been all over the story.
* This one stuns me Murkowski of all people:
* The Author of this article in this posting is now Trumping no pun intended "The Green Nuclear Deal"
* And then, I am no fan of his, but Bill Gates is all over this like a bum on a baloney sandwich:
No pun intended, but has this subject reached critical mass and when will the WH get out in front of it considering the jobs in the skilled trades this would generate.
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