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"Megatons to Megawatts" and The Last Best Chance

By Eric McErlain
On Monday evening, HBO aired a documentary on nuclear terrorism entitled, Last Best Chance that starred former Senator Fred Dalton Thompson. In the FAQ for the documentary, you'll find a passage that our readers here at NEI Nuclear Notes would be familiar with:
For the last ten years, the U.S. and Russia have been working together to recycle weapons-grade uranium from 10,000 dismantled Russian nuclear warheads into fuel used by American power plants to produce electricity. Today just about half of America's nuclear power is generated by fuel derived from Russian nuclear warheads.
The program they're referring to of course is "Megatons to Megawatts," a subject we've dealt with from time to time here at NEI Nuclear Notes. And I guess you shouldn't be surprised that despite rendering the equivalent of 10,000 nuclear warheads inactive forever, radical environmentalists still hate the program:
The American taxpayer has paid billions in secret subsidies for U.S. reactor fuel, by buying up weapons grade materials in the former Soviet Union, and shipping it back home for commercial power stations, on the cheap. There is no accounting for all the money spent on this anti-terrorism program that just happens to benefit the largest welfare industry in America.
As we've noted before, it's too bad these folks don't offer any solutions of their own.

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