Re: The Future Navy Will Be Nuclear

richardcasady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Richard Casady) wrote:

:On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:09:23 GMT, fairwater@xxxxxxxxx (Derek Lyons)
:wrote:
:
:>fission reactors - which use
:>highly radioactive fuel which produces radioactive waste at every step
:>of the chain,
:
:What is that supposed to mean?
:

Pretty much what it says.

Mining the stuff out produces tip piles that are radioactive (argon
and such).

Enriching the stuff to make it into reactor fuel leaves behind DU,
which isn't exactly highly radioactive but you probably don't want to
sprinkle it on your Wheaties in the morning, either.

Run the rods in a reactor until they start to 'poison' themselves.

Process Pu produced during reactor operation out of those, leaving
some fairly nasty stuff behind.

There are ways around some of that stuff.

1) Reactors can be (and have been) designed which can run on 'natural'
uranium with no enrichment.

2) Thorium cycle reactors can burn up a lot of the 'trash'.

3) Some reactors can just burn up the used fuel from other reactors.

The Canadian CANDU reactors are lovely beasts, actually. They can do
all of the above. The down side is that they tend to be somewhat less
efficient power producers than other reactors, have a higher initial
capital cost, and the core design makes diversion of fuel into weapons
programs VERY easy (which is why Canada gets so much scrutiny from the
IAEA).

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

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