[ RadSafe ] Your Editorial on Nuclear Power

[Roger Helbig]

Mr Editor,

Depleted Uranium is not nuclear waste from a nuclear reactor.  Spent fuel
assemblies are and yes they do contain some Uranium-238 (aka DU) since the
fuel is 3% enriched uranium which means that 97% of it is still U-238
(natural uranium is 99.3% U-238 and 0.7% fissionable U-235) - Spent fuel
has less than 3% U-235, but that part of the original 3% which is no longer
U-235 did not turn into U-238, it turned into fission products and those
generate decay heat.  Once the fission products with the shortest
half-lives and greatest level of decay heat (the shorter the half-life, the
more radioactive the isotope and the greater the heat from decay) are gone
(have undergone 10 half-lives) the spent fuel is now cool enough that it no
longer needs to be in a spent fuel pool and can be transferred to a dry
cask for longer term storage.  Dry casks no longer need to be cooled. U-238
decays so slowly, one half-life is the age of the Earth, 4.5 billion years,
that it generates no appreciable decay heat.  Lies about depleted uranium
abound on the internet.  Usually, though, editors do not make them in their
own writings.  You should learn a lot more about uranium and about nuclear
power before you write about it again.  I expect you are in Oswego County,
Illinois and if that is the case, the coal underneath the county is more
radioactive than the spent fuel.  Look it up; coal contains uranium and all
of its decay daughters and when coal is burned that goes out the stack in
the smoke.

Roger Helbig
born in Amboy, raised in Sublette and Mendota, but now a Californian

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Google Alerts <googlealerts-noreply at google.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 4:02 AM
Subject: Google Alert - "depleted uranium"
To: <rwhelbig at gmail.com>


[image: Google]
<https://www.google.com/alerts?source=alertsmail&hl=en&gl=US&msgid=NzA4MzM5NjY3MzI0MzE1ODAwNw>
"depleted uranium"
Daily update ⋅ April 16, 2020
NEWS

<https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=http://www.oswegocountynewsnow.com/columnists/nuclear-waste-the-problem-that-will-never-ever-go-away/article_39f2211c-7f58-11ea-9421-93cbd1c100fb.html&ct=ga&cd=CAEYACoTNzA4MzM5NjY3MzI0MzE1ODAwNzIaMjkzM2JkYTM3MmIzMDRhMjpjb206ZW46VVM&usg=AFQjCNFSatP4t5HNqqOKNaPf9u2zeH9xww>
Nuclear waste: the problem that will never, ever go away
<https://www.google.com/url?rct=j&sa=t&url=http://www.oswegocountynewsnow.com/columnists/nuclear-waste-the-problem-that-will-never-ever-go-away/article_39f2211c-7f58-11ea-9421-93cbd1c100fb.html&ct=ga&cd=CAEYACoTNzA4MzM5NjY3MzI0MzE1ODAwNzIaMjkzM2JkYTM3MmIzMDRhMjpjb206ZW46VVM&usg=AFQjCNFSatP4t5HNqqOKNaPf9u2zeH9xww>
oswegocountynewsnow.com
After several years in a cooling pool adjacent to the reactor itself, the
*depleted* *uranium* is entombed in steel and concrete silos (known as dry
cask ...