[PAA-Discuss] Fwd: New Capital Show, July 27: article on nukes

[Randy Scott]

--- The New Capital Show <leogold at newcapitalshow.com> wrote:
> From: "The New Capital Show" <leogold at newcapitalshow.com>
> To: "Scott" <rscott77070 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: New Capital Show, July 27: Walmart's Makeover for Real?
> Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 17:30:28 -0700
> 
>  
The New Capital Show 10:00 am this morning KPFT 90.1fm

A Walmart green makeover has been in the news lately.  I was frankly unaware of the depth of the
commitment the company is making until I sat down with some articles appearing this week. 
Apparently, CEO Lee Scott has taken green to heart and intends to drive it throughout the company.
 Is this for real?  You decide: here are documents for July 27 NCS.

Green Machine
How Walmart Went Organic
Can Walmart Save Seafood?
Other items of interest, time permitting, are the booming private equity business, Texas now
leading the nation in wind energy produced, mercury levels in songbirds, the Texas utility TXU and
how it wants to build more coal plants in our state - a LOT more, one man's argument in favor of
nuclear power, a new book on the Iraq Fiasco, men and their foolish investment decisions, and a
Harvard psychologist on why we humans engage in tit-for-tat.

The New Capital Show airs Thursdays at 10am on Houston 90.1 KPFT and on the Web at www.kpft.org. 
Re-broadcasts and podcasts can be found afterwards at www.newcapitalshow.com.

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The part of this I just had to check out ahead of time is about this argument in favor of nukes:

http://newcapital.squarespace.com/storage/articles/wsj_com%20-%20cross%20country.htm

"In the first place, the whole idea that there is such a thing as "nuclear waste" is a bit of a
misconception. More than 98% of the material in a spent nuclear fuel rod is being recycled in
other parts of the world. About 97% of spent fuel is uranium: 2% is fissionable U-235 isotope, the
fuel that powers the reactor and the other 95% is good old U-238, the same non-fissionable isotope
that comes out of the ground. It can't be used for bombs. Sure, it has a half-life of four billion
years (that's why environmentalists think they have to sit and watch it for a million years) but
this is the same stuff that's in granite.

No, the isotope everybody really worries about is plutonium-239, which is formed when small
amounts of U-238 absorb neutrons during the three-year cycle. It makes up 1% of spent fuel.
Separating it and putting it back in a reactor as "mixed oxide fuel" (uranium plus plutonium) is
no problem.

Unfortunately, back in 1976, Jimmy Carter decided that if we extracted the plutonium, somebody
might run off with it and make a bomb. Therefore he cancelled fuel recycling. That created the
problem of "nuclear waste." France recycles all its fuel rods and has never had any plutonium
stolen. As for the remaining 2% of the fuel rod -- the highly radioactive transuranic elements and
fission byproducts -- it is all stored in a single room in Le Havre."

Unfortunately, you have to wade thru 2/3 of the long boring narrative about Yucca Mountain before
you get to anything meaningful, but this was rather intriguing. In all of my attempts to learn
about Thorium reactors, I had not previously seen anything about the "other" fuel potential for
plutonium. Also unfortunate is that this author doesn't go into any detail about the processes
involved in using the plutonium as a fuel - i.e. he doesn't say whether he's talking about using
it in a thorium-type reactor.

It's also worth pointing out that France seems to get away with doing things that Americans don't
want to do and we have to think about why this may be. Personally, I'm inclined to think that, as
an allegedly or  nominally "socialist" society, France seems to actually give a damn about doing
things right, as opposed to the American way which includes allowing the nuke industry to focus on
short-term gains instead of safety.