If Isaiah had been a nuclear engineer, he’d have loved this project. And the Trump Administration should too, despite the proposal to eliminate it in the FY 2018 budget.
The project is a
massive factory near Aiken, S.C., that will take plutonium from the government’s arsenal and turn it into fuel for civilian power reactors. The plutonium, made by the United States during the Cold War in a competition with the Soviet Union, is now surplus, and the United States and the Russian Federation jointly agreed to reduce their stocks, to reduce the chance of its use in weapons. Over two thousand construction workers, technicians and engineers are at work to enable the transformation.
Carrying Isaiah’s “swords into plowshares” vision into the nuclear field did not originate with plutonium. In 1993, the United States and Russia began a 20-year program to take weapons-grade uranium out of the Russian inventory, dilute it to levels appropriate for civilian power plants, and then use it to produce…
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gunter
gunter
You just lose credibility when you issue such statements as ‘tear-able’. You ruin every good thing you are trying to accomplish. An example is the following statement that you made in your June 19th testimony before the House subcommittee on NRC oversight which I basically agree with (but perhaps I am wrong again):
“The public became acutely aware with the discovery of the severely corroded hole-in-the-head of the Davis-Besse reactor pressure vessel that a lack of-greater-than-Green finding under the new Reactor Oversight Process does not necessarily equate to an assurance of safety. In fact, disturbing photographic evidence of extensive corrosion was available to the NRC oversight process when the reactor was allowed to restart in April 2000, the same month that the new ROP was initiated.… In view of such public safety concerns, an effective Reactor Oversight Process should not set the bar so high for the burden of proof of a safety problem to be beyond the reach of timely regulatory action so as to first consider the financial interests of an operator. The tendency for NRC to overlook significant safety warnings signs under the current ROP remains a concern to the public interest community today.”
Com’on, Paul, WORK for the public interest, NOT against nuclear power. Yes, be a thorn in the side of the utilities and prick the consciences of the business executives, but do NOT damn the future of American energy self-sufficiency by blanket, propagandistic condemnation of all things nuclear (or all things NEI).