On Thursday, the LDS Church announced its opposition to a planned temporary nuclear waste storage facility in the west desert of Utah. Furthermore, they called on “the federal government to harness the technological and creative power of the country to develop options for the disposal of nuclear waste.” This is significant because due to delays […]
Another semi-recent story concerns the use of thorium as a “fuel” in typical, light-water reactors. I put “fuel” in quotations because the only way to truly utilize the thorium resources of the world is to follow the three-step process I have outlined. First, convert the thorium to protactinium-233, isolate the protactinium until it decays to […]
In 2003, an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Between MOX and a Hard Place, described the difficulty of disposing of the vast amounts of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium left over from the Cold War. “Weapons-grade” material generally means plutonium that consists predominantly of the isotope plutonium-239, and uranium that consists predominantly of […]