X-Message-Number: 20641 From: Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 08:22:06 EST Subject: Nuclear energy --part1_129.1dceea95.2b307efe_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit For thr reccords, I think I must clarify my position about nuclear energy: I am against the actual fission power plants using chain reaction fission, because they are: - Too costly (30 years to amortize) - Too long to build (more than 10 years) - They are too good targets for megaterrorism. - Protection against terrorism, real or assumed, turns the society into a dictatorship system - World uranium reserves can't sustain a large general use without fuel reprocessing and/or breeders. - If spent fuels are reprocessed, a small part, may be .01 percent is released in the environment. This is sufficient to form a major hazard, taking into account the biological selective concentration in the food chain (the problem is not iradiation, it is contamination). - They are energy inefficient and need to be built and operated nearly as much oil energy as they produce from fission. - This is a 19th century technology: A water boiller fitted with an exothic thermal source. I am not antinuclear by principle. - I would be interested to see at least some experimental spallation power plants. This is fission by accelerated protons without sustained neutron chain reaction. The radioactive decay products may be "burned" by more protons with the right energy, without reprocessing and so, without radio activity release. - I would like to see some NERVA-like rocket motors for interorbital travels. - More remotely, I would like to see an evaluation of nuclear energy on the Moon, where no fluid can move the radio active products. - Finally, I would be happy to see a serious R and D program about fusion: * Tokamaks (large and high field), Z-pinch, mirrors. * Inertial by heavy ion beams compression. * By massive beam acceleration in a "lasertron". * More exothic: The dynamical interferential Ulam process. Quantum teleportation concentration. This is my ticket for anti nuclear hell :-) Yvan Bozzonetti. --part1_129.1dceea95.2b307efe_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20641