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The previous chapter discussed the nightmare caused by the continuation of reprocessing despite the failure of the fast-breeder dream: accumulation of plutonium that could make tens of thousands of bombs.
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The previous chapters have described the history of reprocessing, starting with its role in the US World War II effort that produced the plutonium-based nuclear bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.
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Release of Cs-137, with its 30-year half-life, from spent fuel pool fires would be potentially much larger than from reactor accidents, such as occurred during the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents. The reason is that spent fuel pools... more
Release of Cs-137, with its 30-year half-life, from spent fuel pool fires would be potentially much larger than from reactor accidents, such as occurred during the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents. The reason is that spent fuel pools adjacent to most power reactors but located outside of the reactor containment hold much larger inventories of Cs-137. Cs-137 is the gamma-emitting fission product that forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people from the area surrounding Chernobyl in 1986 and more than 160,000 residents from the area surrounding Fukushima in 2011 to areas of lower contamination. A spent fuel pool fire almost happened in Fukushima unit 4 although it was avoided due to inadvertent leakage of water into the pool from the adjacent reactor pit during the weeks after a hydrogen explosion destroyed the reactor building above the pool. If a spent fuel pool fire had happened on March 19, 2011 with winds towards Tokyo, approximately thirty-five million people within an ar...
Because of their high costs and technical problems, liquid-sodium-cooled fast-neutron breeder reactors (FBRs) did not come into widespread use as power reactors. The US Atomic Energy Commission’s vision of a plutonium economy with... more
Because of their high costs and technical problems, liquid-sodium-cooled fast-neutron breeder reactors (FBRs) did not come into widespread use as power reactors. The US Atomic Energy Commission’s vision of a plutonium economy with hundreds of thousands of weapon-equivalents of plutonium flowing annually over highways in the United States and other countries therefore did not come to pass.
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North Korea needs energy. But can the parties negotiating a solution to the nuclear crisis come up with a viable way to plug in the North?
Research Interests: East Asia and Pacific Rim
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Journal of NUCLEAR SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY, Vol. 37, No. 8, p. 691-696 (August 2000) TECHNICAL REPORT Spent Fuel Standard as a Baseline for Proliferation Resistance in Excess Plutonium Disposition Options Jungmin KANG*'t, Tatsujiro... more
Journal of NUCLEAR SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY, Vol. 37, No. 8, p. 691-696 (August 2000) TECHNICAL REPORT Spent Fuel Standard as a Baseline for Proliferation Resistance in Excess Plutonium Disposition Options Jungmin KANG*'t, Tatsujiro SUZUKI", Susan ...