{"id":463,"date":"2010-02-23T09:02:51","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T09:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/?p=463"},"modified":"2018-05-04T23:03:52","modified_gmt":"2018-05-05T05:03:52","slug":"nuclear-waste-doesnt-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/2010\/02\/nuclear-waste-doesnt-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear Waste Doesn’t Exist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There is no such thing as nuclear waste \u2014 and that\u2019s just one of the many beautiful things about nuclear energy.<\/p>\n

A nuclear reactor is refueled by its waste.<\/p>\n

Quoting Dr. Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of France\u2019s main nuclear facility, in an interview he gave with William Tucker, author of an excellent book called Terrestrial Energy<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Pierre Guelfe:<\/b> When the depleted fuel rods are removed, the reactors are shipped to La Hague for reprocessing. They let it cool down for a few years and then remove the uranium and plutonium. They ship the plutonium here. We take it and mix it with another stream of material, which is the scrap that is left over from uranium enrichment. The U235 content of this is very low \u2026 U235 is the fissionable isotope. But the plutonium is much more fissionable than the depleted uranium. So when we mix them together, you get a fuel that is very close to enriched uranium. It\u2019s called \u2018Mixed Oxide Fuel\u2019(MOX). We have 20 reactors here in France running on MOX and there are ten more in Germany and two in Switzerland. So we\u2019re pure plutonium, and we scrap uranium together. We use everything. We don\u2019t leave any waste.<\/p>\n

William Tucker:<\/b> I\u2019ve read this several times but I want to make absolutely sure: The plutonium that comes out of a commercial reactor, that you separate from the fuel rod, that cannot be used to make a bomb, right?<\/p>\n

Pierre Guelfe:<\/b> That\u2019s right. You have four plutonium isotopes: Pu239, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242. Of the four, only Pu239 can sustain a chain reaction. The others are contaminants. The PU241 is too highly radioactive. It fissiles too fast so you can\u2019t control it to make a bomb. But you can use all of them to sustain fission in a MOX reactor (source<\/a>).<\/p>\n

And yet on the basis of some colossal misinformation, the United States now has fifty thousand tons of nuclear \u201cwaste,\u201d because our government won\u2019t allow nuclear plants to reuse it.<\/p>\n

The stated policy of the Department of Energy (DOE) is \u201cnot to reprocess\u201d a perfectly reusable by-product \u2014 and all for absolutely no good reason.<\/p>\n

That, as I discuss in Chapter 12 of my book<\/a>, is why Yucca Mountain is unnecessarily, and at great cost, being built in southwestern Nevada: to store a nuclear \u201cwaste\u201d that could instead be simply and efficiently reused.<\/p>\n

Nuclear \u201cwaste,\u201d incidentally, is also used for medical isotopes. In fact, over 40 percent of medicine now is nuclear medicine. Currently, we must import all our nuclear isotopes because we\u2019re not allowed to use any of our own.<\/p>\n

This is not only profligate.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a kind of lunacy.<\/p>\n

Just for the record: Barack Obama was opposed to nuclear energy before he was for it<\/a>, presumably because, unlike wind and solar, nuclear energy actually works, and is more efficient by far than any other alternative.<\/p>\n

It seems well worth mentioning also that as a direct result of environmentalism’s pathological antipathy toward nuclear energy, these same environmentalists have thereby brought the world 400 million more<\/i> tons of coals used per year, ever since 1976, when the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island melted down. Naturally, because environmentalists<\/a> can’t be bothered by facts, it went completely unnoticed that the containment vessel at Three Mile Island had done its job and prevented any significant release of radioactivity.
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