You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap
Former blog for NEI featuring news and commentary on the commercial nuclear energy industry. Head to NEI.org for the latest blog posts.
Comments
Their "experts" consisted of people from the National Resources Defense Council, backed by documents from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
One of the claims was that a lightly-shielded (1/16" of lead) block of HEU the size of a soda can, in a tractor-trailer rig, could be smuggled undetected past the RPMs installed at the Mexican border.
Is this true? In the story they seemed to assert that HEU would be as easy to smuggle into the US as depleted uranium.
Anyone with knowledge of the sensitivity of gamma spectrometers want to go further?
I would think they could detect it.
Interestingly, a soda-can-sized container of weapons-grade uranium isn't enough to build a bomb.