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NRC Issues License For Laser Uranium Enrichment Plant
Six years after being conceived, and after three years of regulatory review, the NRC has issued the operating license for the first commercial SILEX facility. This is just the final step in the multi-year approval process. There is still, however, a chance that the tech won't make it far: concerns over proliferation (due to the much smaller waste stream vs other enrichment processes) may lead to the NRC exercising its right to mothball further commercialization of the technology. Anyone interested in the long approval process should check out the NRC licensing page.
If they are that worried about proliferation from nuclear fuel reprocessing, they could just require the same levels of security on any material that might be usable for a weapon of some sort as they currently do on the 1000s of nuclear warheads that already exist in the USA.
America has been making weapons-grade nuclear material for somewhere near 70 years now so I am sure they know how to keep it safe and out of the hands of the bad guys.
Nuclear power is incredibly important... in 1000 years, do you really think we're going to power the world with windmills? And while we need a body like the NRC as a safety watchdog, they need to be a lot more efficient. Keeping 60 year old nuclear plants open because new designs take eons to approve is callous and stupid.
And honestly, proliferation should be a NRC concern. Give that to the DHS, they have nothing better to do.
Just in case you somehow don't know every Acronym on the planet.
It must be one of those days I was thinking National Republican Congress.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Bring in the sharks!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
National Republican Congress
Jeezus, I hope not. They'd never get anything done!
The Patent Trolls would see to that.
"You've been served!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You mean they DON'T want a more efficient system because it might replace all the systems they already have? Since when was nuclear power about being anti-progress. You carry on with a that stupidity while I figure out how to make my cost effective anti-matter generator. Then we'll see who's so worried about making weapons grade uranium.
Remember the WW2 days when every single factory deployed was refitted to be a factory making weapons, supplies or some other sort of war aid. Didn't we repeat the fact time and time again that this was vital for us lasting in a longer, drawn out war. Why would the NRC not want to embrace the capability of a nuclear power station to produce weapons grade uranium in the event of war, I mean, if we built these things to last 100 years, by then ICBMs may well stop being MAD-class deployments and we may well resort to tactical and smaller nuclear bombs due to the inevitable improvement of Anti-ICBMs, GMD and other anti-missile capability.
America has been making weapons-grade nuclear material for somewhere near 70 years now so I am sure they know how to keep it safe and out of the hands of the bad guys.
we've given nuclear warheads and material to a country that uses state sponsored terrorism and has attacked united states warships in the past. it has not, nor will it ever sign the nuclear non proliferation treaty.
the only difference to recognize here is that at no point is the IAEA going to inspect any US facility.
every INFCIRC entered for the united states basically confirms that despite our running 'new war every four' policy, we get basically the same rubber-stamp report year after year. The same status is not enjoyed by Iran, whom if the US had their way would be tracking roentgens in the colon of every persian on earth.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It's been over 60 years since the first A-bomb. Why doesn't everyone have one? Even third-rate powers have jet fighters.
Building a bomb isn't that hard a job if you have enriched uranium. It's comparable to building an automobile engine - not easy, but a good racing shop could do it. Machining uranium can be done in a standard machine shop with some extra precautions. (Plutonium is much worse.) Machining beryllium is probably more dangerous. Casting and X-raying the explosive lenses is tough, but it doesn't take a big shop. Generating the 1ns rise time power pulse to fire the explosives is a lot easier than it was in the tube era. Between what the US and the USSR have published, there are few secrets left about low-end bomb design.
Gaseous diffusion plants are huge. Oak Ridge Novouralsk. Drome, France. Those things are the size of big steel mills. Entire "nuclear cities" were built around them. Only major countries could afford them.
Then came centrifuge plants. Here's one in the US. URENCO USA. It looks like a big data center, just some big commercial buildings and a parking lot. It's on the outskirts of a town in New Mexico, along with some other unrelated industries. Any reasonably successful country, or even a big company, can afford a centrifuge plant. URENCO is on their third generation of centrifuges, and price/performance improves with each generation. Now countries like India and Pakistan were able to get into the game.
Laser enrichment will reduce the scale even further. Lawerence Livermore had laser enrichment working in the 1990s, but it wasn't cost-effective. Now it is. A laser enrichment plant is a modest operation, perhaps a quarter of the size of a centrifuge plant of the same capacity.
All these processes are multi-stage, with each stage doing some separation and feeding a slightly more concentrated product into the next state. The minimum plant size before you get anything is still reasonably big.
There's work going on towards single-stage laser separation systems. That's a worry, because a very small plant, over time, could enrich enough uranium for a bomb. So far, if anyone knows how to make that work, they're not saying much. But eventually it will be figured out.