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energy, fission reactor, fusion, fusion reactor, Lockheed, Lockheed Martin, long-lived nuclear waste, military industrial complex, no solution to nuclear waste, nuclear fusion, Nuclear Proliferation, nuclear reactor, nuclear reactors, plutonium production, radioactive waste, solar energy, solar fusion, Solar Power, tritium
500 years of radioactive waste generated by fusion nuclear reactors is still a very long time to live with deadly radioactive waste! And, fusion waste is said to be even more radioactive than fission waste for the first 50 years. The nuclear industry has not yet found a way to deal safely with the current waste for 50 years and they want us to believe that 500 years is short! It is also a nuclear proliferation risk. The only safe fusion energy is solar energy. Solar energy is the only fusion Holy Grail. It’s been there all along! People just needed to look up and not down!
500 years ago was a long, long time ago:
King Henry VIII was a 23 yr old King of England.
505 years ago King Henry was a new 18 year old King of England.
472 years ago King Henry VIII was 51 years old
Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1537-1547 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII_of_England
My (inorganic) chemistry professors portrayed nuclear fusion as a sort of miracle “holy grail”. They didn’t mean solar power! They meant fusion nuclear reactors.
One chemistry professor even assured me that the Russian graphite reactors were the safest. This was pre-Chernobyl!
Of course he did, as he had worked on the X-10 Graphite Reactor:
“The X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, formerly known as the Clinton Pile and X-10 Pile, was the world’s second artificial nuclear reactor (after Enrico Fermi’s Chicago Pile) and was the first reactor designed and built for continuous operation.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-10_Graphite_Reactor
But, was he sleeping during Windscale? It was graphite moderated.
He and other nuclear advocates prove the adage:
THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE!
THERE ARE NONE SO DEAF AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT HEAR!
And, as Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair
Pro-nuclear people: Basta! Enough! Give up! Nuclear is Over OR We are Over.
The Future is in Solar, Wind, Hydro, and kitchen and farm waste biofuel!
But, no, the military industrial complex just won’t give up with nuclear:
“Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project
Posted:Wed, 15 Oct 2014 17:09:55 GMT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade.” http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/environment/~3/m_V3DdLZzHQ/story01.htm
Does Lockheed Martin’s interest lie in the production of plutonium for weapons? Fahihi et. al. (2008) found the that uranium was more efficiently converted to fissile plutonium by fusion, than by a PWR reactor, though less than the LMFBR reactors. “Plutonium-239 production rate study using a typical fusion reactor“, F. Faghihi, H. Havasi, M. Amin-Mozafari, Annals of Nuclear Energy, May 2008, Vol.35(5):759–766
Tritium and Deuterium are also components for thermonuclear weapons: http://fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/heavy.htm
Tritium, mentioned in the Reuters article, has a half-life of 12.32 years, meaning it will be radioactive and bind to make radioactive tritiated water for almost 200 years! The following wikipedia article informs us that the waste will be radioactive for “only” 500 years, when it will be “only” as radioactive as coal ash. Isn’t the nuclear lobby always going on about how radioactive coal ash is?
Fusion “Waste Management
The large flux of high-energy neutrons in a reactor will make the structural materials radioactive. The radioactive inventory at shut-down may be comparable to that of a fission reactor, but there are important differences.
The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tends to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly. Unlike fission reactors, whose waste remains radioactive for thousands of years, most of the radioactive material in a fusion reactor would be the reactor core itself, which would be dangerous for about 50 years, and low-level waste another 100. Although this waste will be considerably more radioactive during those 50 years than fission waste, the very short half-life makes the process very attractive, as the waste management is fairly straightforward. By 500 years the material would have the same radiotoxicity as coal ash.” (Emphasis our own). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Waste_management
50 Years is also a long time. 50 years ago, in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed in the USA. See the late Martin Luther King’s eyes smiling:
“President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, look on.”, 2 July 1964, Cecil Stoughton, White House Press Office (WHPO) It was not until 46 years ago that black and white children went to public schools together from First Grade throughout the USA.
“There have been several major accidents in graphite moderated reactors, with the Windscale fire and the Chernobyl disaster probably the best known.
In the Windscale fire, an untested annealing process for the graphite was used, and that contributed to the accident – however it was the uranium fuel rather than the graphite in the reactor that caught fire. The only graphite moderator damage was found to be localized around burning fuel elements.
In the Chernobyl disaster the graphite was not a contributing factor to the cause of the accident, however a graphite fire after the main event contributed to the spread of radioactive material. A massive power excursion in Chernobyl during a mishandled test had led to the rupture of the reactor vessel and a series of steam explosions, which destroyed the reactor building. Now exposed to both air and the heat from the reactor core, the graphite moderator in the reactor core caught fire, and this fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area.
In addition, the French Saint-Laurent Nuclear Power Plant and the Spanish Vandellòs Nuclear Power Plant – both UNGG graphite-moderated natural uranium reactors – suffered major accidents. Particularly noteworthy are an partial core meltdown on 17. October 1969 and an heat excursion during graphite annealing on 13. March 1980 in Saint-Laurent, which were both classified as INES 4. The Vandellòs NPP was damaged on 19. October 1989, and an repair was considered not economic.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite-moderated_reactor
SOLAR POWER IS THE HOLY GRAIL. EARTH-BOUND FUSION IS NOT!
How at the Castle of Corbin a Maiden Bare in the Sangreal and Foretold the Achievements of Galahad: illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1917” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Grail
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