How to Build a Nuclear Reactor, Vintage 1941

The British government was given documents in 1941 describing how to build a nuclear reactor.

And they sat on them.

Until Thursday, May 31.

The Manhattan Project scientists had a plutonium bomb design ready in 1944 and had to wait for a specialized weapons-production reactor to be completed in order to actually build it. If they had known the plutonium was going to be available before 1945, they could have started work on the implosion mechanism--the most difficult part--and had it ready by mid-1943.

I'm sure the families of every person killed on both sides in 1944 and 1945 will say, "Thanks, guys."

More from We Support Lee.

On the International Fuel Bank

$50 million has been approved by a House committee for an IAEA program to guarantee nuclear fuel to countries that waive their right to fuel cycle facilities. There are a number of things wrong with the concept, however:

1. There's nothing wrong with fuel cycle facilties, and there are ways to determine whether a dual-use facility (one that can theoretically be used for civilian or military applications) is being used for peaceful purposes. The problem is not the presence of the facilities; it is excess capacity at those facilities. Giving them long-term customers--nuclear power plants--is the only reliable way to ensure that they aren't used by the military. They can also be designed to not be able to handle weapons-grade material, or more advanced fuel cycles can be used that don't require enrichment or plutonium recovery. This program codifies the idea that reprocessing is plutonium recovery, which it usually is, but doesn't have to be. It does not in any way weaken nonproliferation efforts to draw a distinction between them, and actually strengthens them by removing an excuse to have a dual-use facility.
2. Taking existing military facilities and using them for peaceful purposes is a good thing. This program would ask countries to entirely dismantle them.
3. Countries opt for nuclear power largely for security reasons. Gas can be cut off and start causing blackouts within a few hours--but nuclear reactors can be run for up to two years without refueling, so there is no point to cutting off nuclear fuel shipments as a political negotiating tactic. Requiring countries to give up their "stash" of unused fuel and mandating that they maintain a "good record" with an international community dominated by radiophobe politicians or lose their fuel shipments erodes the independence provided by nuclear power. More here.

Link.

Iran Update

They haven't stopped enriching uranium, even under international pressure that seeks to violate their rights under international law; good for them.

According to the IAEA (a real international body, as opposed to the "coalition of the willing":

1. They haven't diverted any nuclear material.
2. 2,132 centrifuges are running.
3. If they don't implement the Additional Protocol to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, it will be more difficult for the IAEA to find all the information they want. (Not mentioned is the fact that the Iranians were implementing it before we started to threaten them.)

Link.

GNEP's International Prospects

The US, Russia, China, France, and Japan have endorsed the concept.

Notice how that doesn't include any potential customers. While the reprocessing part of GNEP is an excellent step, the overall assumption that Third World countries can't be trusted with nuclear technology is absolutely wrong. The laws of physics still apply to the Third World, and an inherently-safe reactor built in the United States would be just as inherently safe if it were built in Ethiopia.

Link.

Iran Update

First, it has started to appear around the media that the Non-Aligned Movement (essentially, Third World countries who were not thrilled with taking crap off either the United States or the Soviets) supports Iran's nuclear power program. This is true, and has been for a while, but as yet had only appeared in the Iranian state media, which nobody pays any attention to (and shouldn't).

Second, Mohamed ElBaradei has suggested that the Iranian enrichment program be capped instead of stopped. Finally, we have someone with a little bit of sense in this debate; unfortunately, he wants to try to slow down their program, which won't work. We would suggest that they be assured of some customers--probably domestic ones--so that the enrichment facility would be in use and could't be diverted.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Reportedly, Dr. Charles Bowman has warned that plutonium stored at Yucca Mountain would remain long after the steel casks holding it dissolve. At that point, the plutonium could migrate and concentrate, while the rock in the mountain could actually accelerate a chain reaction and subsequent explosion."

-World Information Service on Energy

Now, it is true that, over time and if not used, the plutonium in spent fuel will become weapons-grade (it currently is not). That is one of the biggest arguments against geologic storage on a policy level; a nuclear waste repository that contains reactor-grade plutonium will become a plutonium mine.
However, spent fuel is about 1% plutonium. By the time it would become weapons-grade if left alone that proportion will be even lower. Nuclear weapons are made of essentially pure plutonium, and even then, they don't go off all the time. A plutonium bomb is extremely finicky, and any suggestion that the flow of groundwater would cause a sphere of pure plutonium metal to assemble, followed by an enormously complicated and precise detonation mechanism appearing from nowhere, is ludicrous.
"Groundwater" brings us to something else: the quote says it will dissolve, but in what? And I've never heard of a rock acting to accelerate a chain reaction; methinks pure graphite is pretty rare in nature.

There is a precedent for this: the natural nuclear reactors in the Oklo uranium deposit, which started up about 1.6 billion years ago and ran for about 500 million years. Water flowed constantly through this deposit, yet the plutonium and waste produced by this reactor moved less than ten feet until the reactors were discovered in 1972. And no, the plutonium did not go critical, or react, or explode. It just sat there, for a billion years.

University of California Anti-Weapons Hunger Strike

Link.

All I'm saying is "watch out." These groups have a tendency to suffer from mission creep. What we really need is a few good, articulate, credible students on traditional lefty campuses; UW-Madison has a nuclear engineering program and could be a good place to start.

EU Sanctions Iran; Russians Sign Agreement to Complete Bushehr Unit 1

That's totally the wrong approach to take on the EU's part, which I've said over and over.

So I guess the Russians have got the contract for the next two, as well, although this is about the third time they've signed an agreement to complete Bushehr Unit 1.

Link.

North Korea to Conduct More Tests If Talks Fail

Hey, that's one more that's not pointed at us, South Korea, or Japan. While you're at it, why don't you test them all?

Link.

Israeli PM on Iranian Nuclear Program

While it may be possible to "stop it peacefully," it is also possible to keep this prestige project (which is very important to the national pride of Iran and thus unlikely to be simply abandoned) going peacefully.

It is however good to hear that cooler heads might prevail; at least their voices are being heard. Bombing Iran is not the answer for anyone but right-wing nuts.

Iran's Reactor Announcement

They've announced an international tender for two light-water reactors.

Light-water reactors are simply tanks of ordinary water with uranium rods suspended in them. They are fairly safe; the water increases the reaction rate and is also the coolant, so if you drain the coolant, the reactor physically doesn't work any more. Three Mile Island was a light-water reactor; Chernobyl was not (it was in fact a bomb factory), and that is the reason why TMI didn't become Chernobyl.
Light-water reactors are also very proliferation-resistant, and that is why I call on people to support allowing their country's manufacturers to bid on these plants. Light-water reactors, far from being a proliferation risk, have negative proliferation value. They do this by requiring the services of enrichment plants. An enrichment plant can theoretically produce weapons-grade uranium if constructed and configured correctly (basically, highly-enriched uranium can go critical in some plants that were not designed to produce it), but if that same enrichment plant is entirely occupied with enough low-enriched uranium orders from light-water reactors, it cannot produce any highly-enriched uranium even if it were theoretically capable of doing so. Iran is currently accused of using an enrichment plant for those purposes; enough light-water reactors, with a mandate for the Iranians to provide the fuel, would give the Natanz enrichment facility the proliferation value of a steel foundry.
A common objection to the "negative proliferation value" thesis is plutonium reprocessing. Plutonium reprocessing is similar to an outdated fuel recycling method developed in the 1950s, and is a chemical process used to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel for use in nuclear weapons. Attempts to manufacture nuclear weapons out of material from light-water reactors failed, however, since the fuel is left in too long for the plutonium to be useful (the reactor converts the lightest common type of plutonium, which works in bombs, to a slightly heavier type, which does not). There are two other problems with plutonium reprocessing of light-water reactors' spent fuel:
1. It may be theoretically possible to enrich the plutonium in the lighter weapons-grade material using a uranium enrichment facility. This has never been tried, for a good reason: weapons-grade plutonium has a dramatically lower critical mass than weapons-grade uranium, so introducing it into an enrichment facility could cause a criticality accident, depending on the design, and uranium enrichment facilities are not designed to handle reactor-grade plutonium's weight distribution. There might be a uranium enrichment plant design where this works, but it's not likely. If that's not good enough:
2. The other problem with enriching plutonium from light-water reactors is that light-water reactors use more fissile material than they produce. In other words, the light-water reactor has less plutonium in it than the type of uranium that a uranium enrichment facility concentrates. Thus, it's just not worth it to try--you might as well make a uranium weapon, and they're easier to build, too. Be reminded that the plutonium-enrichment scenario also requires that the Natanz plant be taken out of service for an extended length of time to be reconfigured, and would be unavailable to produce low-enriched uranium to feed the light-water reactors while it was doing both the reconfiguring and the plutonium enrichment. So it flunks both tests--the availability requirement, and the physics requirement.
To answer another common objection, no, they could not simply shut down the light-water reactors afterward and reconfigure the facility. The lights would go out--the Iranian grid is too small to absorb the loss of the five to six gigawatts of power that would be generated by enough light-water reactors to use Natanz's enrichment capacity.
And yes, Israel built its atomic bombs from a light-water research reactor's plutonium--because they didn't have an enrichment facility, and the research reactor provides access to the fuel rods while the reactor is running, so that they can be taken out without shutting the reactor down. A light-water power reactor--what the Iranians want to buy--does not allow access to the fuel rods while the reactor is running; in order to take them out before the plutonium inside them is useless for bombs, they would have to shut the reactors down frequently, which they cannot do without causing internationally obvious power outages. And if they did shut them down frequently, they would require more fuel--which Natanz is not capable of providing.

Details, details.

People want to believe that the Iranians, because they are Iranians, will do something bad with these reactors. But done right, they will slow down any speculated Iranian bomb program and quite possibly stop it. The light-water reactor, used in a nuclear power plant (as the Iranians propose), has less than zero military value. Selling the Iranians as many as they want helps everyone involved, including the American, French, Japanese, or Russian companies that get construction experience. There is currently a trade ban that would prevent American companies from selling the Iranians light-water reactors, but I believe that this is an exception that needs to be made; it would enhance American security by killing or dramatically handicapping the Iranians' capacity to make an atomic bomb. I am of course under no illusions that this will happen; George Bush isn't thinking that far ahead.

Building an atomic bomb of any type is just a little bit trickier than the political hacks will have you think. Transparently false uranium enrichment allegations led us to the Iraq war. I sure hope it doesn't lead us to another one.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"On this Tax Day, we ask you to think about this: just four days of Iraq war spending equals the Bush administration's entire renewable energy and energy efficiency annual budget! Meaning that just another four days of war spending could double that budget.
This Tax Day, we ask you to Call Congress and urge the new Congress to shift funding away from nuclear power and fossil fuels and toward the renewable and efficient energy sources that offer real solutions to the climate crisis."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

Not to shift funding from the Iraq war?

I guess that's OK because it was started largely over radiophobia--the aluminum tubes allegation that I, as someone with a passing knowledge of the Apollo program and its Lunar Module's stress corrosion problems (which the Iraqis sought to remedy in their own artillery rockets through the use of the exact same material), saw through immediately.

"On Thermonuclear War"

A recent discussion of a book by that title reminded me of a realistic treatment of the consequences of a massive attack with nuclear weapons (read: what would happen; a description that wasn't simply "I don't know, but it will be the end of humanity and the Earth and everything and it'll split the planet in half and make everybody and every living thing in the universe die instantly") from the comments a while back (hat tip: DV8 2XL).

Here it is: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Go read it. 98% of the American public needs this information before they start discussing proliferation.

Bill Maher on Nuclear Power

Some anti-nuclear activists are starting an email campaign to pepper Bill Maher with complaints about his outrageously radical statements about nuclear power last Friday. They give the email address billmaherfanmail@safesearching.com as a point of contact; if you wish to write and voice your support for his comments, here are some things that they're talking about and that we should probably include:

1. If a nuclear power plant is clean, there's no problem with it being near drinking water or people's houses. I would gladly live next to one.
2. If they really think that nuclear power is so expensive that any utility that starts will end up in a financial morass, why are they trying to stop those utilities from starting construction?
3. It would take decades to build enough nukes to replace cokes--but only if they stand in the way, as they boast of doing. You can't have it both ways--complaining about ineffectiveness at the same time as boasting of your accomplishments in stopping these projects.
4. While it would certainly take about a decade at the earliest to replace coal power with nuclear power, it is not possible to replace coal power with back-to-the-land solar energy, windmills, burning crop waste, and wood. Those technologies have all been available for hundreds to thousands of years, and were abandoned in the 17th Century because they simply didn't work. Unlike the anti-nuclear activists, we're confident in our projections and don't seek to ban them--but we would also greatly appreciate not banning other things that will actually work.
5. Energy efficiency, paradoxically, results in the entrenching of old fossil fuel systems--it reduces demand, which lowers prices, and makes depleting fossil fuels more economically viable. Pushing energy efficiency and conservation instead of increased demand for clean energy does nothing but entrench the status quo.
6. Foreign oil dependence in and of itself has little to do with global warming and nothing to do with nuclear power. The problem of foreign oil dependence can be solved without reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the problem of greenhouse gas emissions can be greatly reduced without solving foreign oil dependence. Nuclear power can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by replacing coal, but can't reduce foreign oil dependence simply because we don't burn oil for electricity.
7. Some might ask why there isn't a law that requires all future coal plants to sequester their waste, if nuclear power is to replace coal. We ask why there isn't a total ban on new coal plants and a phaseout starting.
8. Nuclear power plants release exactly two radiaoctive materials, both of which are inert noble gases and decay within a short period. Examples from e.g. the Indian Point reactor find equal amounts upstream of other materials that anti-nukes say leak from the plant; they have been traced to an old research reactor and fallout from atomic bomb testing. That said, the NRC should require all nuclear power plants to sequester those gases.
9. Every example that they can give of carbon dioxide production from fuel cycle facilities is from a situation in which nuclear power is not used to run them. Apparently, nuclear power isn't nuclear enough.
10. Tritium is of no more value to an atomic bomb than copper or steel. While it is used in atomic bombs, it's not what makes them atomic.
11. Nuclear power plants produce the wrong kind of plutonium to be used in a bomb. This type of plutonium melts instead of exploding. There was one exception to this rule--Chernobyl's unique design was an attempt to fuse these two incompatible aims.
12. The type of reprocessing that they're referring to (that used at West Valley) is a military-surplus process used to extract plutonium. Since nuclear power plants don't run on pure plutonium of any type, they don't need this process. However, more modern technology has been developed to make recycling used fuel practical; these methods include using it directly in more-efficient Canadian reactors and simply distilling the used fuel to separate heavy fuel from light waste. Incidentally, the French and British (which also use the old method) do not in fact "pipe their waste into the ocean" but carefully separate it from the water used in the process, which is then piped back into the ocean from whence it came.
13. Joseph Mangano's method is not recognized by any professional scientific or public health organization. It consists of asking people to ship in baby teeth for "analysis," with no regard for where they actually came from or any control subjects.
14. George Bush's IQ or lack thereof and intentions to design new atomic bombs is irrelevant. We hope that an intelligent person can see past the anti-nuclear misinformation that was used to co-opt even some liberals to support the war in Iraq and is currently being used to drive them away from the world's cleanest energy source: nuclear.

New York Times on Proliferation in the Middle East

The Newspaper of Record has a pretty long track record of completely ignoring any suggestions that nuclear technology can be peaceful, which almost certainly contributed to the initial public support for the Iraq war, and which is being used once again by the neo-cons to push another war agenda--this time with Iran. When something appears in the New York Times, it must surely be credible, right?

This time, the idea of generating electricity from the heat given off by splitting uranium, plutonium, and/or thorium atoms--or "nuclear power," if you will--is cheerfully ignored, as the article's phrasing doesn't even allow the possibility of this idea to be conceived. Anything nuclear must now be part of a political strategy instead of a mere attempt to use the technology in question. Apparently, the only nuclear technology that ever has existed is the atomic bomb, and trying to convince people that it is in fact possible to have a civilian nuclear program and that such a program's status is based on physics instead of the protagonists' good intentions resembles the sensation of repeatedly ramming one's head into a brick wall.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Although depleted uranium is not categorized as a strategic nuclear material, it is an essential ingredient in the construction of H-bombs."

-Canadian Coalition for Anti-Nuclear Irresponsibility

So are steel and copper.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"No More Chernobyls"

-Greenpeace Canada, via the Campaign for Nuclear Phaseout

OK.

The only reason that anybody would build a nuclear reactor like Chernobyl is the production of weapons-grade plutonium. It is far more expensive and complex than a civilian reactor; none were built into American nuclear power plants, partly for that reason.

The other reason? The Chernobyl design was banned in the United States in 1950 for safety reasons.

May 2007 Popular Science Runs Article on GNEP

They confuse it a bit with PUREX and don't explain the advanced fast reactors or pyroprocessing components, but it's a decent treatment. And they don't mention that the plutonium even if extracted, wouldn't work in bombs, or that the proposed facility (while not really eliminating any risks) doesn't get you any closer to separated plutonium; you'd still need a military plutonium-extraction facility.

A link isn't online yet, but I'll post it when it's available.

Hanford EIS Process Starts for GNEP

That's gonna be a doozy--part of it is of course figuring out what the background conditions are (i.e., what World War II and Cold War plutonium production did to the environment).

Link.

SRS MOX Plant Stays Alive

They're planning to start construction in August, which is on schedule; that's about the only thing in the whole project that is on schedule.

In fairness to them, first-of-a-kind facilities never have accurate cost estimates at the beginning if you accurately report the estimate, since most of the costs in a project aren't big-ticket items but little things like valves and even tape, nails and glue, etc. So if you say to Congress "let's build a MOX fabrication facility," they will ask for your current cost estimate, and if you add up the costs of all the big-ticket items and report it to Congress you've made a big mistake, because the true cost of the facility will only become apparent when you get enough money to iron out the details of the facility. But they're used to this happening, so if you report that a facility will cost $10 billion, they will assume that it will cost $30 billion and tell you that you will build that plant when the Sun turns into cream cheese. Thusly, the traditional mantra of "under-promise, over-deliver" is completely inverted.

What's the opposite of progress?

Link.

Ding-Dong, The Wicked Witch is Dead

Paul Leventhal, famous non-proliferator and conspiracy theorist, died Tuesday at the age of 69.

I'm sure we're all deeply saddened.

Link.

Bill Richardson on Nuclear Terrorism

The point that the Iraq war has consumed resources better spent on real problems is absolutely correct; however, it is important to keep in mind that the Bush Administration used radiophobia as one of their excuses to start the Iraq war--and that those scare tactics were completely unsubstantiated.

A terrorist is not going to manufacture a nuclear weapon, period. You can't make these things with materials from the hardware store, and the potential proliferators concerned are having problems with making nail bombs go off. Weapons-grade uranium is worth securing from essentially everyone, but a program to account for it should not have to compete for resources with a similar one for separated plutonium or even weapons-grade plutonium, as the chance of a terrorist making a weapon with plutonium is nil. Spent fuel from reactors, incidentally, is not worth stealing; it would probably kill the thieves if they could even get to it, which in practice would require an entire invading army--and the only way they could use it would be in a radiological dispersion device (dirty bomb), which would cause widespread panic but no real damage: highly-radioactive materials decay quickly and long-lived materials aren't very radioactive. The only reason anyone would consider it is the terror it would cause as a result of decades of anti-nuclear scaremongering.

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Cementing the argument that one thing can only lead to another (nuclear power to nuclear weapons) was the recent arrest in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia of a man trying to sell weapons-grade uranium on the black market."

-Beyond Nuclear

Nuclear power plants don't use, require, or make weapons-grade uranium. Weapons-grade uranium, furthermore, can only be made by enrichment facilities that are not occupied with the production of reactor fuel.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

The first Video Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day (and it's a doozy):

-The Birth of Europe, BBC, 1991

1. The pile of coal at the beginning is not supposed to be part of that clip.
2. Chernobyl did explode, but it was a steam explosion (the reactor's heat output spiked and boiled the water in the cooling system, which exploded and took radioactive material with it), not a nuclear explosion, which would require a nuclear weapon. Reactors are a lot easier to build than current nuclear weapons, and if they could explode, they would have been used as weapons.
3. The old technique of "close-up on damage to make it look more extensive than it actually is" features prominently; if you look at the surrounding area, there's very little physical damage beyond the building itself.
4. The point on the construction of nuclear power plants being a way to displace domestic use of oil and gas to increase export revenues is absolutely correct. Today, they're trying to use basically the same technique to turn anti-nuclear Germany into a gas- and oil-powered puppet of Moscow.
5. The narrator, dripping with contempt, pronounces nuclear power dead--neglecting the fact that Chernobyl was not developed to "provide an energy panacea" but for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The only reason to design a reactor like that is weapons-grade plutonium production; it is more complicated, more expensive, and harder to control than a normal nuclear power plant.
6. The narrator repeats the false claim that Chernobyl had anything to do with civilian nuclear power, that it was a nuclear explosion, and that it somehow vindicated decades of scaremongering by illiterates.
7. They say that public opposition caused reactor cancellations, but in a part of this documentary that I did not upload, they grant that 1986 was a world low in oil prices. Cheap oil hurts nuclear just as much (or more) as it hurts coal.
8. This is one of the first uses of the unbelievably specious Economics Argument: that laws should be passed against nuclear power because it's expensive. If it's as expensive as they say it is, they should be confident enough in their projections that they shouldn't need a law against it; all the Economics Argument demonstrated was the departure of the anti-nuclear movement from its traditional concerns--they now felt they could say anything they wanted and get away with it.
9. Nuclear power was not the first source of energy to be rejected--coal was banned in much of Europe in the Middle Ages until they started to run short of wood. Again, another part of this documentary mentions this, so they should know better.
10. The rest of the clip is fairly decent except for the complaints about EdF's debt--which has long been paid off and whose nuclear fleet is now a cash cow and the backbone of the European grid. And nationally, the US has the "biggest nuclear program"--although it's obviously not under the control of one operator.

This clip is disturbing not only because it's indicative of the anti-nuclear movement going off the deep end while managing to retain all of their power, but because the rest of the documentary is an excellent history of energy. Did they feel pressure to trash nuclear power, when they should have treated it as they did other topics? Do they somehow feel that nuclear power is special, that it is not subject to the same market forces and business cycle that everyone else is?

Misgivings About GNEP

I'm starting to get very uncomfortable with the concept of GNEP. The underlying assumption is that nobody but the US can be trusted with fuel cycle facilities, which is not true. An enrichment facility that was in use to supply a fleet of light-water reactors never made a bomb. A PUREX facility separating non-weapons-grade plutonium never made a bomb, with the exception of one in 1962 that didn't work. An RBMK running on reprocessed uranium from light-water reactors never made a bomb. A CANDU never made a bomb; certainly, a CANDU running on DUPIC fuel will never make a bomb. A pyroprocessor never made a bomb. Fluorination and distillation never made a bomb. A light-water nuclear power plant never made a bomb. A sodium-cooled fast breeder never made a bomb. It is possible to have a full fuel cycle without proliferation of nuclear weapons; in fact, any time there is a dual-use facility, the presence of nuclear power renders it useless. Nuclear power isn't the problem; the lack of it is.

There are two major facets of GNEP: one is the aforementioned faulty logic, the other is closing the fuel cycle. I and most other pro-nuclear people support closing the fuel cycle as an alternative to the otherwise inevitable nuclear waste dumps; this is why I support GNEP. A recycling facility and fast breeders, when built, are built. It is far more difficult to shut them down than to upend an international agreement that is built on paternalism. Will GNEP ever achieve both goals? I don't think so. I'd like to see it close the fuel cycle in the US--and spend years trying to get foreign countries to cooperate (they won't). What I would not like to see it become is a program to distribute fuel and collect spent fuel, with no recycling, and a perpetuated myth of inherent proliferation risks. I hope people can also get past the fact that closing the fuel cycle is George Bush's second or third good idea in six years, to recognize that it is a good idea and should be supported.

Ideally, I'd like to see an intelligent system set up to require recycling--it is not beyond the technical capability of the fine minds of today's nuclear engineers, and a cap on spent fuel production with rules legalizing recycling would be a huge political gain with few technical issues. Then Congress can and should kill GNEP and Yucca--but not until then. The US government has certainly spent money on worse things.

Bolton Calls for War with Iran

Link. Notice how it's Fox News; this isn't some "left-wing misquotation."

Wait, you mean the Iranians have rights? Such as, perhaps, not being invaded for building civilian equipment or dual-use equipment that must be used for civilian purposes if nuclear power plants are there to use its services? You mean Iran isn't simply a billiard ball for international politics between Russia, the US, and the EU? What do these people think they are, their own country or something?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"One 1000 megawatts reactor, like the two currently operating at the Indian Point facility, possesses at the heart enough fissionable material equivalent of 1,000 nuclear bombs."

-Green Nuclear Butterfly

First, that doesn't mean anything, since the material is mixed with other things that don't work in bombs and can't be separated, and the reactor itself cannot explode even if the materials were correct (a nuclear weapon goes far out of its way to explode, when an ordinary reaction will do in a power plant--there's no reason to build a nuclear power plant like a nuclear weapon and none have been).

Second, "fissionable" does not mean "works in a nuclear weapon." That's fissile material, and while 100% of a fresh fuel rod is fissionable, only about 3%-5% is fissile. The quote's author is trying to make it look like you can build a nuclear weapon out of anything up to and including used pinball machine parts.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Plutonium is a commodity under the MOX program."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

No, plutonium is destroyed under "the MOX program," a term that can apply to a lot of things but which in this case actually means government paying a fee for the use of a nuclear power plant to consume nuclear fuel containing 5% plutonium and 95% uranium--not a French-style "plutonium economy" that involves separating plutonium at a military-surplus facility, then recombining it with uranium and selling or trading it to reactor operators. The program they're talking about does not involve changing any rules about the sale of fuel or recycling (which traditionally involves plutonium separation although it does not have to by any means and will not in future recycling programs).

And what exactly would be wrong with making it a commodity, as long as it was properly regulated commerce?