That Manhattan Project Document on Aerosolized Uranium

Once every few weeks, people who want to portray depleted uranium as the most dangerous substance on the face of the Earth trot out a document from the Manhattan Project stating that uranium could be aerosolized and used as a radiological weapon.

This happened recently, and doesn't have anything to do with what we know about uranium's radiotoxicity today. It doesn't prove any conspiracy theories and doesn't make uranium magically increase its radioactivity when aerosolized.

For the record.

Depleted Uranium and the Precautionary Principle

The author of this article posted to Know_Nukes admits that their conspiracy theories about depleted uranium are probably wrong.

But what if they weren't?

That boils down to an extremely conservative attitude. It is formally known as the Precautionary Principle: don't do anything unless all the possible problems to future generations are known and solved. Since humans aren't infalliable and can't predict everything, don't do anything--even if you know the problems you'll cause are less severe than what you're currently experiencing.

How can you know that it's a net gain if you can't know everything that will happen in the future? Easy. Today's problems, if unsolved, will continue unabated into the future, indefinitely. Thus, whatever problem is eliminated, whatever net gain is made, will be projected into the future from this day forward.
I'm all for precaution--eliminating, reducing, and optimizing risks; establishing a coherent system by taking problems that will always be there and letting them work against each other. Given two two-by-fours, I'll lean them against each other instead of trying to balance them on their ends and complaining that doing so requires perfection and is inherently unstable, and mere humans cannot be trusted with two-by-fours as a result. However, I am not in favor of swinging in trees.

The Precautionary Principle has nothing to do with precaution. It is simply a reactionary philosophy that has been with humanity since our first consciousness, and is keeping humans who have the bad luck to be born in the Third World barefoot and sick when solutions are well-known and available.

Give me the real left wing. Not the left wing of Amory Lovins, but the left wing of FDR. Give every person everywhere an American standard of living, and watch their environmental impact go down as they rely less on nature for their needs. Telling a man who is up to his waist in a rice paddy in Bangladesh that he needs to use less energy is not the answer. A radical overhaul of the poverty lifestyle forced upon him by reactionaries is the answer, and doing so is our moral obligation.

House of Lords on CoRWM Report

They say it's "incoherent." And it is; that's the sad part.

The report does not make any concrete proposals. It recommends that more committees be set up and the issue discussed, saying that the British government is moving too fast.
That's right: telling the British government to slow down. It's difficult to think of a recommendation that lacks initiative to a greater degree.

They also are fixed on geologic disposal and do not seem to be interested in processing beyond the existing PUREX-and-storage instead of recycling or beneficial use of fission products. That's a terrible mistake; these materials can be useful and shouldn't be dumped.

RTGs for Mars

The Mars Science Laboratory will carry a device known as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) that converts the heat given off when radiation is absorbed by metal into electricity, with no moving parts.
All that's required is a piece of radioactive material, sealed up inside metal or ceramic, and a thermocouple. The result is a lot of electricity from a small device that takes care of itself, for as long as the material is radioactive (a slight problem being the fact that the longer the material is radioactive, the less radioactive it actually is--materials that are chosen are the best combinations of time and activity, like plutonium-238 or the "nuclear waste" substance strontium-90). See a post from July 2005 for more.

It apparently wasn't discussed very loudly until recently for political reasons, given the Moon-hoax-theorist level of ignorance surrounding the last major RTG mission, Cassini.

Nuclear Navy Update

The USS Kitty Hawk--a conventional ship--is being prepared for decommissioning. It will be replaced by a nuclear-powered one.

How about a few more like this, to significantly reduce the Navy's oil use?

Link.

Japanese Town Votes Out Pro-Repository Mayor

Guess it's not receiving the reception that it did in South Korea, eh?

That's probably good in the long run, though: they're not going to need one for at least a couple of hundred years, and by then, the stable fission product daughters could be extracted and sold as e.g. industrial catalysts. Most of the research on how to do that is happening in Japan, and it really needs to continue.

Link.

IAEA: Nuclear Technically Viable for Australia

Link.

This amazing assessment was made at a photo op for John Howard at OPAL.

Russians Lay Keel on Floating Nuke

After at least ten years of talk, it's finally happening. They're building a 70-megawatt nuclear power plant on a barge to power a small town in Siberia.

New Russian Aluminum Plant to Use VVER?

They say they're strongly considering it. I wish them the best of luck.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Nuclear reactors produce highly radioactive waste that will have to be contained for thousands of years."

-New Nuclear Power? No Thanks!

First of all, something can't be highly radioactive and long-lived at the same time. If it's highly radioactive, it gives off radiation faster and thus doesn't last as long. For example, uranium (before it is placed in a reactor) has a half-life of about four and a half billion years, but isn't even warm to the touch. The materials that combine the worst of both (moderately long-lived, moderate radioactivity) are partially-used fuel, mostly plutonium. Completing the process in a waste-eating reactor known as a fast-neutron reactor or fast breeder converts this to short-lived materials. The rest is either short-lived and highly radioactive (waste) or long-lived and not very radioactive (fuel)--and the convenient little byproduct is approximately 100 times more electricity than we originally got.

I can't emphasize this enough: Yucca Mountain is not necessary and should not be done.

And interestingly, the waste itself contains a number of very rare and useful materials. There isn't exactly a booming market for it because this type of research has been made illegal. Should we not at least legalize research into it before we throw up our hands and claim it to be an unsolvable problem?

Chechen Factory Incident

Link.

This is not related to nuclear power plants but simply radioactive materials used in industry.
1. Do you expect the source material to not get released when you bomb the facility where it's used? Whose fault is this? Are they supposed to keep it in a bomb shelter?
2. Insinuating that this could have half of the effect of Chernobyl because the radiation levels are half as high near this factory as near Chernobyl is misleading because this is much more localized. There is a time for the curie/becquerel and a time for the rem/sievert/gray; in-depth analyses usually involve both unless one cancels out.

University Nuclear Programs

Many have been contracted or eliminated lately, since, in most cases, anything with the word "nuclear" attached is zero-sum for the owners. However, the Central Virginia Community College is expanding its own small tech program.

We can always hope.

Russia Delivers Diluted Fuel to Libya

Link.

Libyan highly-enriched uranium has been exchanged for Russian low-enriched uranium in a Libyan research reactor.

Please also note that highly-enriched uranium isn't necessarily bomb-grade. Bomb-grade material is 93% or more uranium-235, and highly-enriched uranium is anything over 20%. If someone were going to make a bomb with it they would also have to construct the bomb--a very complicated step--and that assumes that the reactor has not been running on the fuel; this type of reactor degrades nuclear fuel.

Florida Today on RTGs and New Horizons

This Florida Today article spreads a number of myths on how nuclear batteries, or RTGs, work. The New Horizons mission to Pluto, to be launched in January, uses an RTG.

See my earlier post on RTGs for how an RTG works.

Faulty Logic on Necessity of Nuclear Energy

I quote the second comment on this article:

"Iran has so much oil that there is no way they need nuclear power plants. Therefore we must strongly suspect that they have other reasons for developing them."

Great idea. Let's just use each resource in the order of how easy it is to get until we run out of it. Burn wood until there are no more forests, then coal until we run out of it, then oil, then gas, then wonder what happened to the environment and people's standard of living.

And there's no other reason to develop them other than electricity--they couldn't do anything else (e.g., manufacturing of weapons-grade plutonium) if they wanted to.

Snake River Alliance and Plutonium-238

Plutonium-238 is not weapons-grade. Yet, the Snake River Alliance thinks that plutonium-238 nuclear battery processing is similar enough to nuclear weapons production that building a new battery processing plant in Idaho is going to allow the Los Alamos battery processing plant to start building nuclear weapons. Actually, they have nothing to do with each other and this is simply a conspiracy theory.