RobertEarl,
If the claim is that half of the total electricity production in the USA is fueled by Russian nukes; that can't be.
It's obvious that can't be true; because the USA's fleet of nuclear power plants provides only 20% of the USA's total electricity. In fact, the only source that provides about half the total is the fleet of coal plants.
Since the total output of nuclear power plants in the USA is 20% of the total, then it's clear that 50% of the total can't come from Russian bomb fuel.
What is true is that 50% of the fuel in nuclear plants came from Russian nukes, so 50% of the nuclear-generated electricity was from Russian nukes. Since nuclear-generated electricity is 20% of the total, then 50% of 20% is 10%, and that is the figure given by USEC - the United States Enrichment Corp.
As far as Hanford; the first thing to be clear on is that Hanford has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with commercial nuclear power. Hanford is all about nuclear weapons.
Hanford was the place where the materials for the atomic bombs that ended World War II were made. The waste at Hanford is from making nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapons program put the waste material in big underground tanks as temporary storage until a suitable permanent solution was determined.
Through the years, the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), and their current successor agency, the Department of Energy (DOE) have all been asking Congress to approve a final solution for the Hanford waste for the last SEVEN DECADES.
Thanks especially to the efforts of anti-nukes that never like spending any money on the nuclear weapons program, anti-nukes have been successful in ensuring that the nuclear weapons program has never had enough money to meets its needs for decades. What do you think the spending priorities are in the nuclear weapons program? Do you think Hanford clean-up is high up on the agenda of the managers of the nuclear weapons program? NO!
So when the money is short; what program does the nuclear weapons program stick with the deficit? Naturally, it's their low-priority program; the clean-up program. The Hanford waste was OK last year and the year before that; so why spend anything on it this year. Well, this is why.
It's as if you changed the oil in your car, and you wanted to do the environmentally-friendly thing and not pour it down the drain; you wanted to take it to a recycling center. However, the plans for your local recycling center have been held up. So you put the oil in a gas-can and put it in the backyard. You leave it there until "someday" when they get the recycling center operating, and you feel like taking the oil in. Well, years go by, and no recycling center, and you don't do anything else. Sooner or later, that old gas-can left out in the weather is going to rust and leak, and kill your flower bed.
Now whose fault is it that your flowers get killed and the ground in the beds is contaminated?
PamW
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