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…
Comments
Sorry, but I still don't see how nuclear power--or any baseload energy source--can work with soft energy (wind, solar, waterwheels, tidal power, etc., as opposed to baseload biomass and baseload-capable big hydro). Soft energy is a completely different system; it renders reliability irrelevant as long as it is possible to respond to other sources' unreliability.
2. "Three times the investment for the same production" assumes that windmills can back each other up. In practice, that doesn't work very well, and you still need backup generators--in most places, gas. Soft energy is a different way to produce power, not something that can work with the current system.