Pebbles Making Waves (Pebble Bed Reactors

It’s splitting words, but renewable generally means energy drawn from the sun over the past couple of decades (solar, wind, biomass, hydro). Nuclear comes from earthbound elements. But I agree, it’s a minor and unimportant distinction.

Actually, I was a carrier sailor. They offered me sub duty, but those things are built by the lowest bidder.

I’m glad my half-assed explanations helped. (Keep in mind that I flunked out of nuke school!) I just hope a real engineer will chime in soon and correct my mistakes.

At least you know what a cross section is, how many know that?

Now, what’s a shed?

And I bet carrier reactors had no use for a “shake”.

A “shed” is some insanely small unit of measure. If I remember right, it’s a measure of cross-section, and is somehow related to the “barn”, which is another insanely small unit of measure.

So sorry for the ignorance. My education in nuclear physics was limited to the extremely practical!

“...caved on its entire nuclear power program because of politics related to high-level waste disposal.”

I read somewhere recently that ALL nuclear waste generated by everybody in the world would take space of a school gym, as of now. We are kicking many today's problems into the future. This one is the smallest one, and one that has actually a good chance to be successfully solved in the future. IMHO.

Nuclear waste must be properly handled, of course, but hysteria around it is just that - hysteria.

There’s a large quantity of it, more all the time, and it’s not a pooh-pooh-able problem. There has been (so far) a 30 year delay in the construction of a permanent waste storage facility (site is in Nevada), due to lawsuits and other B.S. It will become practical as a way to generate electricity again if that site opens, but I’m not optimistic.

A recent Scientific American mag had an article (more of an op-ed, good enough nonetheless) which notes that reprocessing waste is worse than storing it in concrete silos near the plants which generate the waste, because in unprocessed form it’s not that useful to terrorists. I’d of course point out that the waste can be used with conventional explosive to spread radioactive waste over cities; it could be dropped in the water tower; etc, a perfect terrorist weapon regardless of the actual safety concerns, because it would be great propaganda. But the idea the writer expressed was, the processed waste could be used to make nuclear weapons, and would require much higher security in that form, so leave it as it is.

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