Re: Can hydrogen deliver?

From: G. R. L. Cowan (gcowan_at_eagle.ca)
Date: 11/02/04 

Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 13:32:39 -0500

Dan Bloomquist included:
>
> Tim O'Flaherty included:
> > No problemo for the moment. Wait until someone like Osama steals or
> > buys/bribes a small portion of this separated Pu stockpile. Will we put
> > those costs on our utility bills, another 5 or 10 mills per kWh, for losing
> > downtown Cleveland or Philly or Times Square? No big deal at all.
>
> So we should outlaw the airline industry because some nut case could
> commander a plane and crash it into a building? I don't understand your
> logic.

O'Flaherty seems to be chugging down the Kool-aid
in an attack on *reprocessing*, as if the historical Purex process
were somehow essential, or even likely to figure,
in nuclear energy's replacing fossil fuels and giving two billion Asians
nuclear-powered muscle cars and McMansions. It's not.
(Perhaps the houses and cars aren't essential either, but
will be demanded by people who think ours are the inessential ones.)
There is plenty of uranium in, for example, the Chattanooga shale
to enable once-through burner reactors to provide power equivalent
to billions of barrels of petroleum per day for centuries.

Those who fantasize that a sneak nuclear attack on Times square
would be attempted, if it were attempted, in a way that would
please fossil fuel interests and displease reprocessing advocates
are counting on terrorists to do things in ways that are unnecessarily
hard and uncertain.

The large fraction of spent fuel plutonium that is the 240 isotope
has so far kept such plutonium's usability for bombs -- by anyone --
theoretical, but uncertainties related to this isotope are *not*
the ones I'm talking about. For that, see Dr. Jeremy Whitlock's
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionF.htm#x2

The *essential* plutonium isotope, 239, emits characteristic gamma rays.
The stupid attacker would have to gamble that no detectors are
watching for these, or make his bomb very heavy in an attempt to muffle
them.
Both difficulties would be neatly avoided by clandestinely producing
highly enriched uranium, but that could be happening almost anywhere
*except* at civilian nuclear fuel plants and power plants,
so mentioning the possibility is of no use to the petrodollar panderer.

 "Take a deep breath. Now: by 31 December 1974 there were fifty-three
  nuclear power reactors within the USA licensed to operate,
  with a capacity of nearly 39 000 MWe.
  ... power reactors in operation also within Canada, Czechoslovakia,
  East Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan,
  Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and West Germany. In all, there were 149
  operable power reactors with a total capacity of some 58 000 MWe."
  (Chapter 10, "The Nuclear Horizon", "Nuclear Power", Walter C.
Patterson,
  Penguin 1978 ISBN 0 14 02.1930 7

Somehow the two countries from that group that in the intervening 30
years have joined the nuclear club have none of them seen fit to
use plutonium from power reactors. Also there have been several
terrorist attacks using liquid hydrocarbons, and apparently none
using any kind of nuclear power station byproduct.

The 30-year absence of this kind of attack has not been a matter of
luck,
and its future occurrence is not a matter of time --
or anyway, no more than attacks using a V8 engine converted into
an eight-barrel cannon are.

--- Graham Cowan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.doc --
How individual mobility gains nuclear cachet.
Link if you want it to happen

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