For the first time in decades, there are an abundance of new designs for nuclear power reactors -- ones that are safer, more powerful, more portable, and even ones that produce hardly any nuclear waste. From the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Dr. Richard Lester and Graduate Students Mark Massie and Leslie Dewan will talk about the evolution of nuclear power in the United States, and directions that the industry might take in the future. They will also describe new technology that solves two of the biggest problems with nuclear power -- Safety and Waste Disposal.
The Future of Nuclear Power: Getting Rid of Nuclear Waste
Posted by: iraszl on February 07, 2013
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It's great, but don't throw spent fuel away without using it to generate power -- there;s ~2% fissile and 95% fertile in the thousands of tons of 'spent' LWR fuel sitting around. Do as the French have long done -- "waste not, want not".
Ok, here's where you can find most all the research reports from the 1960s ORNL MSRE work...
www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf Read the chemistry papers by Grimes, in particular. This is the highest quality R&D our governemnt has ever done.
Also, watch: www.thoriumremixcom/2011
and read the MIT project summary: http://tinyurl.com/7o6cm3u
For general MSR with/without Thorium: http://tinyurl.com/8xmso5v
Call for more info: 650-400-3071
And, for facts from folks who were there...
MSR scientists talk -- Ball & Engel -- with Baroness Worthington & Kirk Sorenson, etc...
https://plus.google.com/109596373340495798827/posts/fk5rcwoaKBP?cfem=1 (ORNL history)
http://tinyurl.com/al5hlap
As I was reading the article, I remembered the explosion happened in a French nuclear waste treatment factory which have been left one dead and injured four others. No radioactivity was released in the incident, experts say. Moreover, France depends on nuclear power more than any other country in the world.
Shoot I'd have called that a French nuke fatality (which I read as zero on Wikipedia). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country#... ...not sure exactly what that criteria is then. I counted a uranium mining accident as a US nuke fatality.
That was an explosion in a natural-gas fired oven, I believe. Nuclear? Maybe. We counted two wind deaths in Calif. a while back -- one was climbing on a tower when a prop broke, chopping him up, the other guy simply rolled his pickup truck over the edge of a windmill access road.
One of the problems with stats like these is who's counting and reporting. Cell towers kill & injure lots of workers in the US, because they're typically itinerant workers, hired by outsourced local contractors the big companies contract with. Even OSHA thus doesn't really know all the stats they should, and Verizon, etc. are insulated legally from exposure.
Nuclear power, however, is always under a microscope.
