O/T: Food for thought

[Robatoy]

No he isn't.. he's no cheetah

[Mark & Juanita]

However, politicians are most certainly not free. Some are cheap, but still not inexpensive.

[Larry Jaques]

On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:21:30 -0800 (PST), the infamous Robatoy scrawled the following:

Other dogs that don't hunt: Thompson's WaterSeal, Minwhacked finishes, Maytag products, Crapsman products, Wagner sprayers.

They simply have "better" advertising.

-- It's a great life...once you weaken. --author James Hogan

[Larry Jaques]

On Sat, 13 Feb 2010 06:03:48 GMT, the infamous [e-mail] (Derek Lyons) scrawled the following:

Yes, but since raw ore transformed into fuel is a few dollars cheaper than reprocessing, it is being used instead of reprocessing. We'd have a lot less high-level waste if we reprocessed, as most of the world is doing.

-- It's a great life...once you weaken. --author James Hogan

[Larry Jaques]

On Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:44:16 -0800 (PST), the infamous Robatoy scrawled the following:

5 grand worth of imported (from DeSoto, Iowa) solar panels, maybe?

-- It's a great life...once you weaken. --author James Hogan

[Morris Dovey]

Don't I wish! Reduce that by half - twice - to get in the ballpark. :)

[Robatoy]

Naa.. just swapped him for some metal.

[dpb]

Larry Jaques wrote: ...

Actually, there's very little commercial nuclear fuel being reprocessed anywhere at the moment anywhere in the world not just the US.

The difference is it is virtually all economics elsewhere while it's the remnants of the Carter edict against it in the US (although it's highly likely it would have followed the path of the rest of the world as not continuing even if started owing to economics here as well).

There really wouldn't be any significant less HLW except in that it might consume less physical volume as most of the highly radioactive components are the byproducts not the retrieved fuel.

The prime reason against it any time _real_soon_now_ is the volume of HEU available to be blended down from the agreement w/ Russia on dismantling a sizable fraction of their warheads and returning the HEU to the US as LEU. With the stagnant demand for commercial fuel over the last 40 years owing to no growth in installed capacity and this already processed material there's actually considerable disincentive to reprocess spent fuel at the present.

One use that's never been made use of in any extent is the spent fuel waste heat that is fairly significant for a while after discharge. Like other sources of lower-grade energy, it's never been sufficiently cost-effective to bother with even though there may be as much as 10% of full power output in a spent fuel bundle at discharge which for a typical PWR would be about 500 kW/bundle initially. If had a third-reactor discharge per fuel cycle that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 MWt. That could be quite a lot of process or space heating.

--

[Larry Jaques]

On Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:40:58 -0600, the infamous Morris Dovey scrawled the following:

Oh, I thought you had to have mass quantities of solar in the blizzardy GWN.

-- It's a great life...once you weaken. --author James Hogan

[Morris Dovey]

Not until you begin to approach either the Arctic or Antarctic Circle. In the Temperate Zones there's a trade-off between insulation and solar panel area. Simply put: heat that you don't lose doesn't need to be replaced.