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Archive for August 20th, 2010

Nuclear Waste Recycling: A Nightmare Scenario

Posted by feww on August 20, 2010

Thought for the Day:

Can we trust GE Hitachi, Duke Energy, Areva … like we did BP?

ABOUT  100,000 tons of nuclear waste (aka High Level Waste, HLW) sit in radioactive dumps across the U.S.

Additionally, The U.S. nuclear energy industry is producing more than a third of the 12,000 metric tons of HLW piling up globally every year.

[A 1000-MWe nuclear power plant produces about 30 metric tons  of spent nuclear fuel.]

There are also “millions of gallons of radioactive waste, thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material [as well as] huge quantities of contaminated soil and water,” the Department of Energy (DOE) has reported.

Nuke energy companies say they can recycle the waste squeezing more energy from the spent nuclear fuel thus reducing the waste behind [sic.]

“When it comes to energy, America is strong on technology but weak on policy,” says the high-rolling GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy Chairman John Fuller. “And it’s a critical handicap.” [Remember BP CEO?]

Incidentally, since its inception in 1878, GE hasn’t produced a single environment-friendly product.

As for Hitachi, they can’t even produce a household appliance that stands upright [a colleague who lives in Japan is about to receive a third fridge-freezer unit in just over a week because the first two were defective lemons.

GE Hitachi says they could build a new generation of fast reactors that can extract up to 99 percent of energy contained in the uranium fuel rods. The question is can the nation trust GE Hitachi, like they did BP?

Defective Hitachi fridges don’t kill many people, but a GE Hitachi reactor could.

At the end of the day, of course, all of these concerns are academic …

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