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Re: [Tigers] Nuclear Energy Interest

To: Tod Brown <todbrown@roadrunner.com>
Subject: Re: [Tigers] Nuclear Energy Interest
From: Tom Hall <modtiger@comcast.net>
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:34:51 -0700
At 05:30 PM 6/16/2008, you wrote:
>http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12801015
>
>Using nuclear to generate electricity which then, in turn, can be used
>to produce hydrogen or charge batteries is a way of avoiding the use of
>fossil fuels for transportation.  Yeah, I know it is expensive and that
>there is a conspiracy against it and that there is the waste issue, but
>someone IS paying attention.
>Tod

Once upon a time, in my former life, I was a Nuke Engineer with 
GE.  Some of the work I was involved with pertained to a process know 
as Plutonium Recycle.  This was a process that disassembled spent 
(used) nuclear fuel bundles and reclaimed  the remaining fissile 
uranium and the plutonium that was created during the period the fuel 
was in the power reactor making steam and eventually 
electricity.  This process was well beyond theory and plants were 
designed and built to accomplish this task.  The process reduced the 
volume of the high level nuclear waste and as a byproduct, was able 
to separate out the reusable nuclear fuel known as mixed oxide, 
uranium and plutonium.  It was especially fortuitous because the 
energy in the recovered fuel had more energy remaining than the 
original fuel it was recovered from, a net gain in available energy.

Alas, the people of the US of A elected a Peanut Farmer, ex-Nuclear 
Navy Engineer to be President.  He was staunchly against this Program 
basing his decisions on the "potential" risk of the dreaded 
Plutonium.  So the whole US commercial industry and DOE research 
plans were shelved and essentially forgotten.  Only France went ahead 
with significant research on this and high level radioactive waste 
processing.  The nuclear business environment was so toxic from my 
perspective that I walked away from the industry mid career and 
opened my own non nuclear business.

Tom Hall
ModTiger Engineering LLC
www.tigerengineering.net
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