Russia Unveils Detailed Plans To Build 21 New Nuclear Power Units By 2030

[PamW]

68. I cant understand why this is being questioned!!

I can't understand why this is being questioned.

It's not as if this is someone's proposal to do something that has never been done before.

This is something that HAS ALREADY been done!!!!

Nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till led a group of scientists ( including me ) in actually doing this some 30 years ago; starting in the 1980s and going for more than a decade into the early 1990s. Dr. Till was interviewed by Richard Rhodes for PBS's Frontline program:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Q: The fission products.

A: Fission products. But none of the long-lived toxic elements like plutonium and americium or curium, the so-called manmade elements. They're the long-lived toxic ones. And they're recycled back into the reactor ... and work every bit as well as plutonium.

Q: So they go in, and then those are broken into fission products, or some of it is. Right?

A: Yes.

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

Everyone can see where Dr. Till says that the actinides, the "long-lived toxic elements like plutonium, americium, or curium" are "recycled back to the reactor" where they "work every bit as well as plutonium"

That's a doctoral-level renown physicist saying that. Then we here have one of our local anti-nukes who is evidently not a scientist, and appears to have only an elementary school level understanding of science; and the anti-nuke is disputing the world-class physicist, and telling us that this all can't be because actinides won't sustain a chain reaction.

Argonne National Laboratory ACTUALLY DID this for over a decade; and the anti-nukes ( like those who FABRICATE NONSENSE to support their ill-considered contentions) states that it can't happen.

It's really difficult attempting to educate some people at times; there's just not the mental horsepower.

I feel like I'd have better luck attempting to teach quantum mechanics to the cat.

The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe ( or understand ) in it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

PamW