I realize this is a largely anti-nuclear forum, so I'll say all this quickly and only once, and only because somebody else brought it up.
The low-dose rate danger is a myth based on junk science, carefully fostered by the anti-nuke movement over decades. If it were true, it would be impossible for nuclear workers to get life or health insurance without subsidy and aviators (who get cosmic-ray exposure that is significantly higher than the dose rate allowed by NRC regulations) would be dying like flies of radiation-related diseases. It just ain't so. Re long-lived nuclear waste - the longer the life, THE LOWER THE LEVEL OF RADIOACTIVITY. It's the short-lived stuff that is dangerous - and if the nuclear industry were allowed to reprocess "spent" fuel (which for safety reasons is only allowed to go to 5% burnup), the low volume, high flux waste would be segregated and stored for the several half-lives required to drop to background at very low cost, because it decays VERY FAST. The remaining low level waste would be stored in long term facilities, but with a hazard protection level commensurate with the much lower risk. The anti-nuclear crowd demonstrates either dishonesty or ignorance by quoting radiation fluxes taken from the highly radioactive waste and lifetimes that pertain to the low-rad waste. And they're the same people who are responsible for eliminating reprocessing, thus guaranteeing that 90% of the fuel value, plus all the high-level waste, plus all the low-level waste, ALL HAVE TO BE DISPOSED OF TOGETHER, thus ensuring that nuclear power is "unsafe" and uneconomical. Talk about self-fulfilling prophesies! As for reactor safety, it is possible to make reactors that are inherently safe against core meltdown - that is reactors that will do no damage outside of their containment structure even in the worst case - total primary coolant loss, total failure of all redundant engineered backups and total failure of control-rod and safety-rod actuation mechanisms in the full-open position. One example is the Modular High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor advocated by General Atomics. There are disadvantages to inherently safe reactors, however - typically they are size limited (MHTGR grosses 40 MWth, I think) so large outputs mean several reactors in a rather large complex - one that allows each reactor the heat dissipation radius it needs to fulfill the promise of inherent safety. The real estate required may not be a problem, but to achieve economies of scale requires true mass production of reactor modules, not custom jobs like most current nuclear reactors. Another difficulty of the MHTGR is that it requires enriched fuel - about 30% - and very demanding fuel pellet processing, which complicates reprocessing. On the other hand, burnup is higher... Marc de Piolenc Philippines Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Please do NOT send "unsubscribe" messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
