Al Gore's fundamental misunderstanding of nuclear power choices
Read Al Gore in WIRED, part of his media blitz for his movie An Inconvenient Truth . Then, I saw BoingBoing link to an interview in GRIST . We still have other issues. For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal -- which is the real issue: coal -- then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale. And we'd run short of uranium, unless they went to a breeder cycle or something like it, which would increase the risk of weapons-grade material being available. Ahem. Here lies a fundamental misunderstanding of nuclear power choices. ALL power stations now in service are breeders. What have been named as "breeder" reactors are optimized for making Pu-239 from U-238, Pu-239 being the best variety of Pu for reactors (and bom...