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Megatons To Megawatts Program Comes To a Close
necro81 writes "In the aftermath of the Cold War, the disintegrating Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and tons of weapons-grade fissile material. In the economic and political turmoil, many feared that it would fall into unfriendly hands. However, thanks to the doggedness of an MIT professor, Dr. Thomas Neff, 500 metric tons of weapons grade material made its way into nuclear reactors in the United States through the Megatons to Megawatts program. During the program, about 10% of all electricity generated in the U.S. came from weapons once aimed at the country. Now, after nearly 20 years, the program is coming to an end. The final shipment of Soviet-era uranium, now nuclear fuel, has arrived in Baltimore."
This is a great way to use the nuclear fuel that was aimed at us. Bravo.
Sadly, nuclear power is dying due to ignorance. Coal kills thousands (maybe 15+) in the US alone every year, and tens to hundreds of thousands worldwide every year. Yet what do we hear in the news? Fukushima. Where you can count the death toll with 0 fingers, and even in 50 years it'll be less than coal kills in the US in a single year.
You can argue that Coal is a false choice (it isn't, it's what we have now) but even natural gas kills an order of magnitude or more people yearly than nuclear power, and yes _Solar_ kills more people.
With computers, we have good and bad CPU designs, good and bad GPU designs, good and bad OS designs.
Like computers, nuclear power plants come in many designs, some good and some bad. Watch this and learn a bit more, especially about the Integral fast reactor design.
I'm all for green power, but let's not forget that right now solar panels are not terribly efficient and very resource-intensive during the manufacturing process, wind farms don't work without wind (duh) and kill birds, etc. Each choice has drawbacks and from the numbers given in this film, if they are accurate, we'd be insane not to use nuclear power plants as long as they're IFR-type.
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The warheads were only Megatons because they were fusion weapons.
We only used the fission trigger part to generate power'
Still it is a good 'swords into plowshares' story.
We need to develop controlled fusion to solve our energy problems.
The enemy disposes of your nuclear waste for you!
I wish history (books? professors? courses?) would do a better job of recognizing people like this.
Like the people (Mr. Haber?) who created the Haber process that gave the world cheap, safe (not made from human excrement!) fertilizer. Or the "father" of the Green Revolution. Or not just the creators of the life saving vaccines (Pasteur, Salk) but the ones who are getting them distributed including (Gasp!) Bill Gates.
Of course this list could get rather long. What about the inventor of the container ships that may have reduced the costs of global trade? Or the inventor of the jet engine or radar or even asphalt pavement? Too bad there a "good" politically neutral way of rating someone's contribution to mankind. (My business friends would say "money" is the way the world rewards people but, as we all know, the market is often wrong. I'm sure Kalishnikov made a lot more money selling his rifles than Dr. Neff did from his efforts.
(Then again there are those who may have been in positions of great power and respect but who have left legacies that are a bit more troubling. Like Mao, whose great leap forward may have caused tens of millions of deaths from starvation. Or the president of S. Africa (after Mandela) who's resistance to fighting AIDS caused the epidemic to go on. Or (gasp again!) perhaps the founders of the U.S. who didn't/couldn't stop the scourge of slavery from being a part of the new nation.)
That's probably a big reason why people believe in God; judging a very flawed humanity would require a truly omniscient point of view. Maybe we can ask Google to do it someday :)
Anyway, if there are any other people who have contributed so much but been recognized so little, I'd love to know about them.
retraction demands fly; http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ny-congressman-threatens-reporter-after-sotu/
And where did US ship his dismantled warheads? Oh wait...those are still pointed at the rest of the world.
You fuck'n liars duped the bad old Russia to hand over nuclear fuel.
pretty much. if all of our 'allys' stop growing export oranges we'll only need one brand of oranges. the finest (only) oranges in the world, each one as perfect as the other. what should they be called?
How do we know the US didn't just use it for their own weapons? I guess it says somewhere, perhaps the Russians did some 'inspection' things to make sure it was being used for power, along the lines of Iran?
Max.
So, does this mean nuclear reactors will be more expensive to run now that what I assume is free or subsidized fuel is gone?
Can existing commercial reactors run on weapons-grade Uranium or Plutonium?
with the bill (and risks) for disposal of this material once it has been used for power generation. what a bargain.
Sounds like Neff should have won a Nobel Peace Prize.
But I guess those are about politics, so we give them US Presidents simply for being elected.
It's very sad.
Well, it was great while it lasted. So long and thanks for the fish.
The final shipment of Soviet-era uranium, now nuclear fuel, has arrived in Baltimore.
What stops me from giving a TAX CUT for all business who get solar on their rooftops...!
Nuclear needs to commoditized itself to be relevant and sell it to the home market or lose to Solar...!
There are no rare-earth metals used in any commercial solar cells.
Do you even know what a rare-earth metal is?
The people in the Nuclear Industry can not run a business even if their lives depended on it...!
Nice time to hoard a basket of uranium miner stocks.
Wouldn't the Russians also have PU-239?