OFF TOPIC< SPEECH BY ONE OF MY HEROS>

It's a "keeper"... access to a PDF version is at the bottom of the page.

Thanks, Steve! ...Jim Thompson

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A seriously smart gentleman. Would not tolerate a prevaricator or bullshit artist. Only met him once, during my nuc interview. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) he didn't visit anywhere I was stationed while I was there. Too damned bad he's not still around today.

Was your interview "interesting", care to share?

Steve

Had to do with some... "youthful transgressions." I was honest about the fsck-ups and didn't try to make excuses. Guess that was what he was looking for.

His comments on Christianity's eradication of slavery for a millennium and the re-emergence of that custom in the New World are something Americans too easily overlook.

No mention of geothermal, which is now a large component of e.g. Iceland's energy infrastructure. No mention of the Desert Southwest as a giant solar field. He didn't anticipate the concept of growing biomass as scrub on crappy land or growing brine-tolerant biomass plants in e.g. Eritrea.

As he was a Pacific sailor, I would have expected him to have noted Easter Island as a stark example of depleted resources.

He projected the USA's population growth about right. His algorithm seriously underestimated the worldwide ability to make babies.

He mentions "automotive" as inefficient when compared to railroads but doesn't specifically mention trucking. Now I'm wondering what proportion was shipped by rail in 1957.

...and, as always, the elephant in the room never seems to get mentioned: When "depleted" nuclear fuel is removed from a reactor, only 1 percent of its energy has been extracted. That "spent" fuel now sits for decades within a half-mile of where it was used, "guarded" by lowest-bidder guys who sleep on the job.

This is exactly what so many "greenies" have been saying for many years, and so often the "conservative" factions choose to belittle their observations and insist on "business as usual" while denying what to me is an obvious reality. I have been concerned about environmental issues since at least 1970, when I attended a conference on ecology and stewardship of the earth at a Lutheran camp called Holden Village in the beautiful Cascade mountains of WA state. I joined the Sierra Club in 1975, initially because I enjoyed hiking, backpacking, and other outings, but also because I believed in their concerns about the future and the reckless destruction of natural resources in the name of progress and profit.

There are many ostriches who refuse to see the reality and instead choose to gouge a few more years of making money from a doomed economy based on lifestyles of conspicuous and wasteful consumption. It is not about whether or not humans are responsible for global warming and catastrophic climate change, but the efforts to reduce our contribution to this phenomenon will at the same time forestall the inevitable reversal of the standard of living for the majority of the population. And a dwindling minority who continue to embrace their lavish lifestyles will eventually be deprived of their power to continue.

Eventually, and probably in the lifetimes of most of us, we will see either a voluntary shift to a cooperative way of life that is sustainable and fair for the majority, or else suffer a cataclysmic event such as war among nations or within nations among their people who will have become polarized and frustrated to the point of violence.

Paul

Being 1957, they didn't know what to do with it. The hope was that, by the

Tim

Well, he suckceeded in becoming a nuke, or as he called it, a 'nuc'.

ONLY if you include its entire half life. The part we use as a controlled, high output source is spent. The remainder, though it could still produce work, does not keep our reactor designs running optimally, and the change out of media is a scheduled thing.

Not always. Some of it is very deep in a vault.

So much total horseshit.

Wrong as usual. What causes the fuel to get "spent" is neutron-absorbing waste. After reprocessing, 99% of the fuel is once again available for use, with an extraordinary reduction in waste volume (i.e. 100x).

This assumes that all the fuel is burnable, which is true for 100% U235 (HEU) reactors (military), plutonium (I don't think anyone burns pure Pu), or Th232/U238 breeder reactors, but not true of the far more important PWR (3% enriched, doesn't burn U238) or CANDU (ca. 0.7%, i.e. natural U) types, which can only burn the stuff once without enrichment.

Tim