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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.
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.
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.
But not 82 year old nuns apparently
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.
"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."
Ahh, the old "double standard/hypocrisy" argument. You know what, I've got absolutely no problem with that argument, because the United States and Iran are not the same thing.
The United States is a Republic where the people can vote and change government. No, it's not perfect, but it basically respects human rights, free speech, freedom of religion, equal protection under the law (yes, you can find abuses and scandals where the US hasn't perfectly upheld its ideals, but overall, it's been pretty good).
Iran is a religious and military dictatorship which routinely ignores elections, suppresses free speech, imprisons and kills dissenters, kidnaps foreign nationals near (but not within) their borders, mistreats minorities, etc.
I like that the police/military have different rules than criminals, and at an international level, I like that strong Republics and Democracies have nuclear weapons to defend themselves, and have no problem with having a double standard of not letting dictators and the like have nuclear weapons. Got no problem with that at all.