Skip to main content

Nuclear Energy Debate at Daily Kos

News from Australia of a potential breakthrough in uranium enrichment, has set off an interesting discussion on the merits of nuclear energy over at the Daily Kos. Take a look when you get a chance, as nuclear energy gets more support than you might think.

Technorati tags: , , , , , , , ,

Comments

Anonymous said…
A few years ago I came across an article written in the 1970s on what was then going on in laser isotope enrichment. The author made the good point that making deuterium enrichment cheaper would be more beneficial than making uranium enrichment cheaper.

Cheaper U enrichment makes bombs easier to make. Cheaper heavy water makes CANDU variants cheaper, including variants than can breed U233 from thorium.

I hope this advance is applicable to other isotope separation problems.
Anonymous said…
It is possible to use it for other isotope separation problems, but I don't believe it's better than the current methods for making heavy water.

If you go to Silex's website, they propose to use it to do isotopic separation for silicon and carbon, for use in semiconductors.

Heavy water behaves differently enough in chemical reactions (the reaction rates are quite different in some cases, apparently) that you don't need the mass-related tricks used for uranium.

As to the proliferation risks, it doesn't appear to be easy technology to master; centrifuges are hard enough, this seems on first glance to be even tougher.

One possibility for weapons development that laser enrichment may offer advanced weapons states, however, is making almost perfectly pure Pu-239. Amongst other things, this would allow the development of a "gun bomb" (like the Hiroshima bomb) made from plutonium, but more importantly to a country like the US would apparently allow them to build physically smaller nuclear weapons (which makes sense; if predetonation isn't a problem your implosion mechanism could probably be a lot smaller and simpler).

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should