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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By 2017 another 8GW could be added. This is 90 billion kwh total. A 12% increase from the current 790 billion kwh.
wind in 2006 was 32 billion kwh.
the Watts Bar plant should be finished in 2014. Adding another 9 billion kwh.
Other new power uprating technology could further enhance existing nuclear capacity.
50% power uprates from donut shaped fuel and coolant additives
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2007/jan/tech/kb_nuclear.html
It is not just global warming and climate change, it is 30,000/year dead in america from air pollution from coal. that is why we need wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear moving as fast as possible. Save real lives now. Plus while the coal plants are running stick better scrubbers and gas bags no them.
(are you going to post this, or only comments you agree with?)