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10% of US Energy Derived From Old Soviet Nukes
Nrbelex writes "The New York Times reports that about 10 percent of electricity generated in the United States comes from fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, mostly Russian. 'It's a great, easy source' of fuel, said Marina V. Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Bank and an expert in the Russian nuclear industry that has profited from the arrangement since the end of the cold war. But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry, with ramifications for consumers, as well as some American utilities and their Russian suppliers.'"
... oh my goodness, I can't bring myself to do it. Go on without me! For great justice!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Nuclear weapon powers USA!
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
So the solution to the energy problems we face, is to stockpile more nukes so we can use them for fuel when they get past their "best used by" date?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
before we run out of uranium!!
For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it's fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, INCLUDING Russian ones.
10% from all not all from Russia . Dammit it is the first sentence.
But if more diluted weapons-grade uranium isn't secured soon, the pipeline could run dry . . .
. . . new, old Soviet nukes . . .
I'm sure there must be profit for someone in there somewhere . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Time to reprocess. The reasons the US doesn't are not really valid.
Think of all the countries they could have incinerated with those nukes!
So the most likely thing to happen will be that instead of a bunch of US government-connected fatcats reaping a windfall, some Russian government-connected fatcats will reap a windfall (or at least the balance shifts their way), but the fuel keeps flowing.
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Right up until now I thought US foreign policy was extremely poor. I feel I must apologise for thinking that, in fact US foreign policy is an act of unparalleled genius! North Korea is being largely ignored by the US as is Iran, not because they are not dangerous (they are) but you are simply employing them to gather enough nulear armaments together that you will later use to generate power, whilst silmutaneously reducing your dependency on fossil fuel and also creating world stabalisation. Outstanding work, forward thinking and downright cunning. I salute you!
This sounds similar to what was done with Saddam Hussein's yellowcake uranium a year ago. It was shipped from Iraq to Canada and used as fuel for the Bruce nuclear plant.
The real waste is the dismantling of the launch vehicles (from both countries). We all spent billions developing reliable launch technologies and it breaks my heart to see them crushing perfectly good missiles.
Tisha Hayes
Highly enriched nuclear bomb materials are like the old surface oil wells, or gold nuggets lying in the Australian desert, way too easy to pass up. Doesn't mean there aren't stupendous reserves yet to be mined.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Rather than trying to secure more weapon grade uranium why don't they consider either licensing the design or designing their own reactors that do not need the enriched uranium. Off the top of my head there are the 2nd generation CANDU reactors.
So much for the argument that nukes are better than oil because the fuel is less limited.
And how cheap is this ex-Soviet fuel, while it lasts? Shouldn't we count the cost to get them, which includes $TRILLIONS on the Cold War?
--
make install -not war
If anything we should increase the amount of energy created by using nuclear fuel in this country. Every form of 'green' power has some kind of drawback that makes it less than ideal, hyrdo affects fish, solar requires nasty chemicals, geothermal is accused of causing earthquakes, wind power kills birds and so on. Point being if we're going to have widespread energy production it needs to be done on a feasible basis that responds to economy of scale. I'd love to have solar panels for my house (and will probably have them within a couple years), but that doesn't mean where I live is a good location for building solar power plants.
The biggest obstacle keeping us from using the greenest energy source we have is the pushback from groups like greenpeace. Ever notice that greenpeace never actually does research or other work to make the world a greener place? The research they do is politically motivated and centered around preventing others from doing things they are politically intolerant of. When's the last time you read a press release from greenpeace about a new technological development they made? If groups such as greenpeace were actually serious about the environment they would be all over themselves in doing everything they could in order to increase the use of nuclear energy.
The fact that the government feels it had to keep this story below the radar in the first place shows how much damage these groups have done to nuclear power. It's time for greenpeace to stand up, do the right thing, and make amends for decades of harm to the environment they have caused. They are no better than some of the old factories that dumped chemicals into rivers.
China is quietly engaging in it. Sadly, Obama and the dems are trying hard to ignore it, but.....
But what? "Obama and the dems" aren't trying hard to ignore anything. What "Rush and the repubs" are trying hard to ignore is the fact that they lost because America is sick of their shit.
Eff politics... just play nice and be nice and everything will come out in the nuclear rain.
Electricity is just one part of our energy supply, but by no means all of it. Far too often the terms energy and electricity get used as if they are interchangeable, when they are not. The summary is correct, the title is not. 10% of our electricity is not the same as 10% of out total energy.
There were nukes built by Soviets. And there were nukes built for delivery to Soviets. (Intercontinental ballistic missiles: When it absolutely, positively has to be there in twenty minutes.) Whether most of that material would belong to Soviets or Americans depends on who launched first.
Use it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I don't know about Russia, but the US military frequently uses it's old launch vehicles (or at least the engines) for suborbital weapons tests and satellite launches. For example, the Minotaur series of rockets by Orbital Sciences use old Minuteman and Peacekeeper engines. I'm sure there are many other examples.
"China is quietly engaging in it. Sadly, Obama and the dems are trying hard to ignore it, but....."
Those executives who are outsourcing all those jobs to China - are they mostly Democrats, or Republicans? And, what exactly did Herr Bush do about China's undeclared cold war against the US?
I might agree with you if you had simply stated that "American politicans are ignoring the threat of the Asassin's Mace". But, you have to politicize something that both parties are guilty of.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Why are there so many articles about how we are running out of something? Are old soviet nukes the only method of supplying power now?
"Reprocessing can last us for a time but it requires more infrastructure and time to put in place."
The various estimates I've seen indicate that Reprocessing can last us a *very long* time (hundreds of years, possibly thousands of years). In the meantime, we should be working on solar (both terrestrial and space), wind, etc, and Fusion. Once we can make the leap to fusion, we don't really need any more Uranium (or only relatively small quantities) - fusion just needs water, and most countries on Earth have access to large supplies of water (of course, there are some land-locked semi-arid nations without access to much water, but you don't even really need *much* water for fusion, just some). The water doesn't even need to be fresh water, I believe - places like Israel, Palestine, Southern California, where fresh water is in short supply, still have access to lots of salt water from the Mediterranean (or other Seas/Oceans, for other countries in similar situations).
Heck, once we've unlocked fusion, you could potentially create Fusion-powered desalination plants that could solve the fresh water crises in lots of places like that - instead of using the energy to create electricity, use it to desalinate ocean water; or maybe do both simultaneously (could you create an efficient electric plant, I wonder, which uses the heat energy to boil off water from salt water, generating fresh steam, run the fresh steam through your electric turbines, condense the steam into fresh water, and pump that fresh water out of the electric plant into a water treatment plant for clorination, softening, etc)?
The New York Times reports that about 10 percent of electricity generated in the United States comes from fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, mostly Russian.
Wow, that Bono really has a global impact!
#DeleteChrome
The power from old Russian nukes we use today does not offset the loss of energy we still suffer from as a result of the Cold War-era tapping of our precious bodily fluids!
...get more from Iran and North Korea, right? Oh, wait...
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
http://www.google.com/finance?q=TSE:UF.UN
Just buy a few hundred shares of UF.UN and you make money if the price of the stuff goes up. And you can tell chicks that you own uranium!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Quietly engaging in what? Buying up all of our debt so that our government can continue to spend like crazy? Fixing their currency to ours so that their goods are even cheaper for US consumers? Spending 100-150 billion dollars per year on defense while the US spends something on the order of $1 trillion per year (includes general military budget + wars)?
Call me crazy, but I don't think this is a new cold war. And even if it were, the US (and others) has the capability of killing every last man, woman, and child on the planet with nuclear weapons. I'm more concerned with local gangs than with China.
SSC
it's going to be 30 years before there viable breeder reactor producing power. It's going to take 50+ years before there's a possibility of a viable fusion reactor.
There are significant engineering problems with both now. We're stuck for the next couple of decades with the highly inefficient ones we have now.
There's an excellent post on theoildrum on exactly this issue right now. Basically, the next couple of decades are going to be bad...
Deleted
But what about all that helium? Won't that cause global warming or cooling or some other disastrous consequence for humanity?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Isn't it better to have all that energy released gradually, instead of all at once? :)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The problem is that you can't recycle nuclear fuel. There are always residual byproducts that last for long and have a potential to pollute eveything around them.
Well that's funny. France has recycled their fuel for years, and Japan is following suit.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Actually, I have in the past wondered the same thing, so I tried to see if I could find an answer. I don't really know for sure, but from what I could find, it seems like the answer is:
1) Helium is pretty inert, and basically won't react with any other elements to form any dangerous compounds (I think, not entirely sure about this, but that seems to be the answer)
2) Helium, apparently, won't generally hurt organic life (again, because it is so inert), although, of course, large quantities in a confined space could suffocate you.
But,
3) Helium naturally rises to the very top of the atmosphere, where there is apparently a naturally occuring layer of helium, and the helium layer up there has, from what I can tell, no adverse effects like global warming, and that helium gradually leaches off into space anyhow.
And finally, and possibly most importantly,
4) Fusion power is expected to consume very small quantities of hydrogen, and produce very small quantities of helium. I found the following bit on the ITER.org website:
So, even if there are hundreds of these around the world, eventually, it sounds like combined, they'd only maybe exhaust a ton or two of helium every year? I might be wrong, but I bet much more Helium is released from other sources - I've seen it mentioned that helium is naturally released all the time from the Earth's crust due to decay of something, maybe radon(?), and it sounds like the balloon and flowers industry releases many times the amount of Helium every year than would be released by fusion plants. ;-)
The solution seems easy: Just dismantle more nukes. In fact, lets dismantle all of them. It's the promise of the nuclear age finally realized without the horrible side effects.
I read the internet for the articles.
But what about all that helium? Won't that cause global warming or cooling or some other disastrous consequence for humanity?
Oh, definitely. We'll all have high-pitched squeaky voices which is, by most metrics, very unsexy. Thus, most humans will never get laid and humanity will die out.
Obviously, we must stop this lurking helium stalker before it takes our potential children from us! Think of the future children!
The reason US cars don't burn plutonium is the green lobby.
Actually when you read about nuclear propulsion it could have powered some truly awesome things e.g.
http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html
What they came up with was SLAM, for Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. SLAM was to use a revolutionary new type of propulsion: nuclear ramjet power. The project to build the weapon's nuclear reactor was given the code name "Pluto," which also came to refer to the weapon itself.
Pluto's namesake was Roman mythology's ruler of the underworld -- seemingly an apt inspiration for a locomotive-size missile that would travel at near-treetop level at three times the speed of sound, tossing out hydrogen bombs as it roared overhead. Pluto's designers calculated that its shock wave alone might kill people on the ground. Then there was the problem of fallout. In addition to gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor, Pluto's nuclear ramjet would spew fission fragments out in its exhaust as it flew by. (One enterprising weaponeer had a plan to turn an obvious peace-time liability into a wartime asset: he suggested flying the radioactive rocket back and forth over the Soviet Union after it had dropped its bombs.)
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
... when they say all this nuke stuff are just for electricity ?
"Sure, we get nukes from North Korea, but come on, they are so bad they are only good for generating electricity, just like the Americans do with the Soviet nukes!"
Dangerously high-pitched voices?
~Idarubicin
But what about all that helium? Won't that cause global warming or cooling or some other disastrous consequence for humanity?
That's the global chipmunking phenomenon and you can already observe its effect by listening to modern urban music - the cover story is that they are just turning their autotune pitch-corrector up to 11, but in fact they just haven't been able to keep the massive amounts of helium from flooding their recording studios.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Most corporate executives - the ones with real power to make "let's move our factory to China" decisions, not midlevel managers like us - are Democrats.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
There are about 30,000 deployable nuclear warheads (strategic and tactical) on this planet. 45% of them are "in storage", mostly referring to those dismantled enough to satisfy SALT definitions but able to be rebuilt in short order should it be necessary. If the 14,000 in storage were dismantled and turned to fuel there would be no shortage. The number of warheads dismantled since 1980, whether turned to fuel or any other use, is 10,000. The "lack of funds for dismantling" is a fiction narrative that pops up regularly, probably in attempt to boost the price of the liberated fuel and/or the price of energy generated from it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Citations? It seems to me that most of the people who read things like the Wall Street Journal are 'publicans, rather than 'crats.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm afraid the alternative to that Dooms Day scenario would be that Furries would be selected for and humans would become a furry species, you know what I mean.
Dismantle a nuclear bomb, and you can light a city for a year. Drop a nuclear bomb...
No, everything will be (squeaky voice) fine.
Your assertion is about as supported as the parent's.
At least we all know how George Soros votes.
THL phish sticks
Not only is there a bunch of helium in the upper atmosphere, helium's mass means that most helium molecules end up achieving escape velocity and just leave the atmosphere completely. There were some 'omgs running out of helium' articles a bit ago on slashdot.
Reading comprehension 101. Try it.
Meanwhile, the difference between my post and parent is, he makes a statement of fact, which may or may not be true. He attempts to pass his opinion off as objective.
My statement, "it seems", is subjective.
Got links? Is there any objective data available?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The last I heard, we weren't producing even 3% of our electricity from nuclear. So where did they GET this 10% figure??