Sometimes the stuff that people DO talk about gets in the way of things that people SHOULD be talking about. Now, all my energy saving ideas keep getting crapped on by ‘the man’ (why don’t they put windmills next to the interstate so the cars going by can make them spin and and least provide power for the streetlights?) but maybe since this one came from a regular source people will pay more attention.
Then again, the source is Popular Mechanics, so it is only being read by me and people who found a box of them when they had to clean out their grandfather’s house 🙁 Anyway – here is the deal (emphasis added by me):
…Researchers at the University of Texas recently unveiled a design for a hybrid fission–fusion reactor, a best-of-both-worlds device that would dispose of the deadliest waste from traditional nuclear power plants while generating power along the way. Most nuclear waste can be reprocessed for use as fuel in standard fission reactors, although that’s not currently the practice in the United States. The hybrid reactor would be a next step. It would employ fusion reactions to flood the remaining, highly dangerous transuranic waste with neutrons, allowing it to be burned in a fission process. One-third of the resulting energy would be fed back into the fusion process and the remaining 700 megawatts would be fed into the grid. According to senior research scientist Swadesh Mahajan, at the end of the process, about 99 percent of all nuclear waste could be eliminated. “What we really want to do is to tell the world, Please allow the expansion of nuclear energy, through standard light-water reactors,” Mahajan says. “It’s the only thing that can be ramped up quickly enough to replace coal. Do not worry about the waste. Because we’re going to give you the solution in 20 years. We will make it in time.”
Now, this may all be a bunch of hooey. And if they figure the soonest they can do it is in 20 years then they have plenty of room to adjust their estimates. Pretty much the only things I can predict for 20 years from now are my age and the ages of people whose ages I currently know. But that doesn’t mean that all this money that’s being spent for this and that shouldn’t be spent on nuclear power plants. Stop crying about all the ‘danger’ and ‘radioactive waste’. You can put that shit in my backyard. Think how many fewer solicitors you would get if your yard was full of nuclear waste!
Anyway – what do you think about nuclear power? I say, if it’s good enough for Springfield, it’s good enough for us!
Nucleare is the future. Long deuterium.