[ RadSafe ] News Coverage-- Re: HEU in Chile -

[Stewart Farber]

Hi Chris,
Thanks for your note.

A few days ago, I did send the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC an email about how rugged waste/ fuel shipping casks are, and included the link to a train locomotive  at 125 km/hr crashing into a fuel cask on a flatbed truck positioned across the train test track no effect to make the point. I also just found a test done in England where they crashed a locomotive into a fuel shipping cask at 160 km/hr [100 mph ! ] with no structural failure of the cask.

I've edited the all too lengthy post [ which ended up poorly formated  due to my having stored several drafts which messed up margins unfortunately]  I made to Radsafe yesterday about the Megatons to Megawatts program about which you wrote me, and will send it to the Maddow  MSNBC show.  It's obvious that if the US and Russia can ship 500,000 kg of HEU [ 1.1 million pounds ] related to it being converted to LEU [low enriched uranium ] for transport to the US, for fabrication into reactor fuel, the US can quite obviously ship 40 pounds of HEU from Chile.

 Stewart Farber, MSPH
Farber Medical Solutions, LLC
Linear Accelerator / Medical Imaging / and Rad Instrument Brokerage 
Bridgeport, CT 06604


[203] 441-8433 [o]
http://www.farber-medical.com
farber at farber.info





________________________________
From: "Alston, Chris" <ALSTONCJ at gunet.georgetown.edu>
To: Stewart Farber <radproject at sbcglobal.net>
Sent: Fri, April 16, 2010 5:27:26 PM
Subject: RE: [ RadSafe ] News Coverage-- Re:  HEU in Chile -

 
Stewart
 
Why
not email Ms Maddow a version of your very lucid discussion below?  I would bet
that she would be interested.  It's hard for even the best journalists to get
good info on these kinds of topics.
 
Cheers
cja
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Stewart Farber [mailto:radproject at sbcglobal.net] 
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 3:49 PM
To: radsafe at agni.phys.iit.edu; JPreisig at aol.com
Subject: [ RadSafe ] News Coverage-- Re: HEU in Chile -
 
Hello all,
 
A day or 2 ago,  I posted a Sandia video of a train
smashing into a 25 ton nuclear fuel shipping cask as an aside about the news
coverage of the cask shifting in Chile.  Clearly, there was zero chance
that the 25 ton shipping cask being loaded onto a ship in Chile, braced and blocked into an ocean going container, could not survive a 2 meter or so
drop onto the 
deck of a freighter. It was silly for Rachel Maddow of
MSNBC  to state that "disaster was 
narrowly averted"  when a loading crane
hoisting the ocean going container with the cask containing 20 to 40 pounds of HEU on to the ship
malfunctioned.
 
A good point of reference to understand the routine
nature and safety of HEU shipment is the "Megatons to Megawatts"
program which has been operating continuously since 1993. This program takes
HEU from Russia and ultimately it ends up as LEU that is made into reactor fuel
in the US,  that is then sold to utilities and burned in US NPP. 

 
Through late 2009, 375 metric tons of HEU [ equivalent
to  15,000 warheads] had been transferred by Russia to a US company,
downblended to LEU in factories in Russia, shipped to the US, and  turned
into reactor fuel, and sold to US nuclear power plant operators. <snip>..............
 
Stewart Farber, MSPH
 
Farber Medical Solutions, LLC
Linear Accelerator and Medical Imaging Equipment
Brokerage 

[203] 441-8433

farber at farber.ino


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