Re: The Future Navy Will Be Nuclear

"dott.Piergiorgio" <dott.PiergiorgioNIHON@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

:Richard Casady ha scritto:
:
:>>> Well as there isn't going to be any money for fuel that's probably a
:>>> pretty good idea.
:>> Except that nuclear power is even MORE expensive. There's a reason why
:>> the CGNs went away...
:>
:> In three words, two buck oil. Nuke's time may have come. I seem to
:> recall that when you use the Oak Ridge plant to enrich to 94%, it
:> costs more energy than the stuff contains. Domestic coal power,
:> however.
:
:Side question, is feasible to recycle nuke warheads to nuke fuel ?
:(if is a foolish question, please bear in mind that my capability to
:understand physics stops abruptly with the "mirabilus annus")
:

It depends on a lot of things. In theory, yes, certainly. In fact,
if it's an HEU warhead you would have to blend it DOWN to get the
correct enrichment for a commercial power reactor.

Plutonium is a slightly different issue. Some reactors can take some
percentage of MOX fuel. The design of the reactor may (probably will)
need to be modified for it to burn MOX. Typically they can only run
with some 30%-50% of their fuel load as MOX. There are three reactors
here in Arizona that *could* run with a 100% MOX fuel load (but
they've only ever been run on fresh uranium fuel).

CANDU will burn MOX, but then CANDU will burn just about anything.

Submarine reactors frequently use HEU for the cores and could easily
burn uranium from bombs. it's the same stuff they burn now.

--
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to
live in the real world." -- Mary Shafer, NASA Dryden
.

Relevant Pages

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