Re: GAO Challenges Yucca Plans

[AndrewsJP@AOL.COM]

Jerry Cohen, you are not alone.  I, for one, tend to agree with your positions.  My reasons are that in the very long run, we cannot depend on natural gas and oil for electric power production.  There is an enourmous amount of coal, but much of it is pretty hard to access.  There is a reasonable amount of uranium and U-235, but that is limited also.  The only long term solution to the energy problems of the earth are nuclear power breeders and those require plutonium or the thorium cycle and U-233, a real nasty nuclide.  I believe these solutions are inevitable aside from the local politics of the USA.  The world may well be smarter than any one of its countries.  


The reason that this is necessary is that we must have fuel for fast reactors, not thermal reactors and this means that Pu works and U-235 does not.  In my opinion, we need to move fairly quickly to uranium/thorium fueled HTGR type reactors such as the unfortunate Fort St. Vrain reactor or the very small Peach Bottom reactor design.  We also need to research the fuel recovery and separation processes for these reactors.  This is massivly difficult chemistry, by the way.


This means to me that the spent fuel strategy should be to recycle fuel, then dispose of the more long lived fission products.  These should be disposed in deep ocean burial where they will be moved into the sub-tectonic plate areas essentially forever.


Best wishes to all on Radsafe, even Norman.


John Andrews

Knoxville, Tennessee