Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Behind the scenes motivations


The new policy of accepting highly enriched uranium material on the surface looks like a way of getting bomb making material out of the hands of a terror group, but I just discovered what they plan to do with all that material. But before I get to that I must say this was an interesting plan on the part of this administration. Now I'm no fan of atomic plants. They cost between 6 to 8 billion dollars to build. It can take 10 years to get them online and when their life has ended they must be torn apart at great expense. And then there's the storage of the waste for 1000 years at great cost.
Here's the plan though. The U.S. accepts the high grade material and what country doesn't want to get rid of something they have to pay dearly just to store? So we take the material and reprocess it into material that can be used in a nuclear reactor and sell it to the power companies world wide if we wanted to. Nothing like getting something for free and making a nice profit on it.
And it wouldn't surprise me that sometime in 10 or 20 years this material could be reprocessed in Iran. You laugh? Consider the fact that we do quite a bit of business with Russia and who would have thought that would have happened 30 years ago? Now they are assisting us in getting Iran to comply with the Atomic Energy Commission.
Oh and for all those wingnuts out there who fear this would put us in some weak position, it only takes a couple of dozen nukes to end life on this planet as we know it. I like the analogy - it's like we're all sitting in a giant tub of gasoline. Whoever lights a match ends it all for all of us.

3 comments:

jmsjoin said...

I worked around nukes when in the service. We were taught they had an indeterminable life span. If thye are here they are here forever.

It is very disconcerting realizing there is millions of pounds floating around. I wonder if they thought of flying it into the sun? Try a little bit at first.

Tim said...

Demeur

fascinating stuff.
I'm not sure I like it, gut I want to learn more.

Tim

Tim said...

Demeur

I didn't have any luck with a definitive answer to what there going to do with the HEU waste. As far as I can find just Canada and Mexico have agreed to send us their waste.
Gibbs when asked said they've not made up their minds as to what to do with it. I'm told it's cost prohibitive to break down the components and reuse.
A headache later....