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
NEI's position must be that nuclear power is unequivocally superior to diffuse power, such as wind or solar. Nuclear power has no weakness that wind power can address. Nuclear power is just as safe and environmentally friendly as diffuse power (actually more so), yet emphatically superior in terms of reliability, capacity factor and scalability.
Whenever I hear that wind power and nuclear power can work together, I think of Stacy King. Who is Stacy King? Stacy King was a teammate of Michael Jordan's. One night, MJ dropped 69 points. When asked about MJ's performance, Stacy King said, "I'll always remember this as the night MJ and I combined to score 70 points." So yeah, wind power and nuclear power work together, just like Stacy King and Michael Jordan.
Wind is indeed free. If wind turbines were free, one could make a lot of money selling electricity when the wind blows. In actuality, wind turbines are expensive because it takes a lot of steel and concrete to build a machine that can harvest power from a low-energy density source.
Given the 3 candidates now remaining in the race, we will have carbon controls in place in the next couple of years. As long as we keep the government from mandating energy technology via a national "renewable energy portfolio standard," we will then see how the economics of low-carbon wind, nuclear, and carbon capture and sequestration really compare. Should be interesting.