Re: DOE plans to "burn-up" nuclear waste

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 09:01 AM 3/14/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Can one assume that the politics in the use of plutonium will be a "hurdle?"

>Los Alamos would like to 
>create a prototype facility in the next five years, if cost and other 
>hurdles can be overcome.

Since this project has the potential to succeed at dealing with the problem
of long term storage of radioactive waste, I think that the project staff
should expect a fullscale assault on the proposal by anti's that have used
the government failure in the radwaste area as the justification for
eliminating everything nuclear. The lack of a storage solution has long
been the basis for claims that reactors and other facilities should be shut
down. The development of a transmutation process that is highly successful
at making the worst components simply go away would let all the air out of
such arguments. So we should expect it to be characterized as one of the
most evil activities attempted by mankind and probably a government
conspiracy. :)

Bob Flood
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu
(650) 926-3793

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