USA taxpayers again forking out money for dodgy new nuclear reprocessing

Department of Energy moves forward with controversial test reactor, Science, By Adrian ChoFeb. 28, 2019 ,The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today that it will go forward with plans to build a controversial new nuclear reactor that some critics have called a boondoggle. If all goes as planned, the Versatile Test Reactor (VTR) will be built at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL) near Idaho Falls and will generate copious high-energy neutrons to test new material and technologies for nuclear reactors. That would fill a key gap in the United States’s nuclear capabilities, proponents say. However, some critics have argued that the project is just an excuse to build a reactor of the general type that can generate more fuel than it consumes by “breeding” plutonium…….

The VTR—also known as the Versatile Fast Neutron Source—would be the first reactor DOE has built since the 1970s. It would differ in one key respect from the typical commercial power reactors. Power reactors use a uranium fuel that contains just a few percent of the fissile isotope uranium-235 and is made to be used once and discarded. In contrast, the VTR would use a fuel richer in uranium-235 that would generate more high-energy neutrons as it “burned.” Those neutrons could be used to test how new materials and components age within the core of a conventional nuclear reactor, a key factor in reactor design.

In principle, such a “fast reactor” could also convert nonfissile uranium-238 to plutonium-239, which could be extracted by reprocessing the fuel……https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/department-energy-moves-forward-controversial-test-reactor

1.This Month

United Nations: demasking the Torture of Julian Assange. Rico Brouwer and Nils Melzer

Three Mile Island (& Fukushima) Lies & Cover-Ups w/ Gundersen & Wasserman

Energy efficiency – theme for July 2019

Energy efficiency represents the single largest potential contributor to global emissions reduction, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2017). It should be a key part of the global energy strategy, for several reasons:

It could reduce global electric demand by more than 20 per cent, based on current rates in the U.S. power sector, while maintaining high levels of services such as heating and lighting.
It avoids the need for increased energy, capacity and grid services, making it the least expensive way to decarbonise at scale.
It can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by billions of tonnes.

A dramatic example of the power of energy efficiency is lighting. In 2017 the United States passed the milestone of 1 billion LED and CFL lights installed, avoiding 142 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide emissions, at a cost of about $7 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide. In contrast, the cumulative installed capacity of rooftop solar reached 8,000 MW in 2017, saving 8 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, at a cost of $360 per ton. Lighting efficiency thus yielded almost 18 times the avoided carbon dioxide, at about 2 per cent the cost per ton of rooftop solar.

Google provides another example of the power of energy efficiency. Its data centers now use 50 per cent less energy than the average data center, according to the company. Google also developed an improved chip, the TPU, which performs 83 times better than standard CPUs. The new chip allowed Google to reduce power consumption at its data centers by a factor of 30—far exceeding the effect on Google’s carbon footprint of all of the company’s renewable energy purchases. ” – John Woolard, Eco Business, 10 June 2019

nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope